Submitted by Judy Watts
Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science School has a Kindness Lab that studies human behavior in order to develop tools, techniques, and products that enrich and enable our lives.
http://www.spiritmag.com/2008_10/features/kindness-lab-1.php
Submitted by Joe Antonioli
Information Technology at Tufts University has created an integrated suite of Web 2.0 technologies, communication tools for “for teaching, learning, research, and co-curricular activities.” This is a great example of access, support and marketing all in on space.
The site gives the user a gateway to each technology. It also includes help documentation, examples and links to suggested uses. For instance, on the wiki page-
Wikis – Suggested Uses
A wiki is simply a web page or site that is fully editable from a browser using a very simple “mark-up” language. Its strength is that it allows small groups to add, revise, and edit web content, so it is a natural tool for most collaborative writing activities. Like a web site, it allows for non-linear linking of individual wiki pages. Whenever a wiki page is edited, a new version of the page is created with the old version being archived for the site editors’ reference.
- Demonstrate the evolution of thought processes through the different versions of a wiki page.
- Create a collaborative knowledge base that can be added to over time and across courses.
- Helps small groups of students develop a project, collect ideas, papers, timelines, documents, datasets, and study results into a collective digital space.
- Assists with small group problem-solving and brainstorming.
What would Middlebury’s version of this service look like?
Submitted by Mike Lynch
Another interesting post, with audio, from Wired Campus. The latest edition of Tech Therapy covers the differences and similarities between library and IT staff, and discusses why these two groups can’t get along.
Submitted by Mike Lynch
Terry Reese visited us recently (thanks to Joe Toth) on his way to the 6th annual Readex Digital Institute. He has just posted a nice summary of the event.
Submitted by Hans Raum
There will be a staff information session on Wednesday morning, October 15 at 9 am in room 105 on the U. S. Congressional Serial Set, the American State Papers and the top ten federal statistical websites. Anyone who is interested in the topics is welcome to attend.
Submitted by Alex Chapin
Sasha Woolson, a faculty member in the Spanish department, and I will be participating in workshop 2 of Project Bamboo, a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary initiative to define technology services needed to do research in arts and humanities. Faculty, librarians, computer scientists and information technologists from over 50 institutions/organizations will be attending. We will certainly talk about Segue as a resource in this area. I contributed to the project’s wiki a page on collaboration.
Adam has been refining the Segue user experience (UX) to make it easier to use and more efficient. Many of these changes are so subtle you might not notice them. For example, Segue now remembers which editing mode you prefer, the last used settings on certain features such as copy/paste and what sites you have visited recently. Special thanks to Brian Carson and Shel Sax for reporting bugs and helping us with these refinements. See the Segue changelog for more information.
Submitted by Mike Lynch
Here’s a recent article from Seven Days, written by someone who answers ChaCha questions.
For those who missed it, ChaCha was one of the tech tidbits mentioned by Mike Roy at Thursday’s lunch.