OpenScholar was developed, and continues to be developed, at Harvard University’s Institution of Quantitative Social Science as an open-source project.  The system is based on the very popular Drupal content management system.

OpenScholar websites at Princeton can be requested by contacting the Educational Technologies Center . OpenScholar websites are only available for Princeton faculty and graduate studentsand for special project sites.  You must have a valid Princeton e-mail address to request a website.

Once their site has been created, editing the website is done completely through the web browser. Pages on an OpenScholar website can be edited in two ways:  in-page editing and editing pages through the ‘Control Panel’. Features are tools that can be added or removed from a website, such as blogs, publications, or feeds. These features can be enabled and configured by going into the ‘Control Panel’ of your site after logging in to the system. The layout and design of your site can also be modified in the ‘Control Panel’.  The system includes fifteen different designs to choose from, some of which offer color variations.

The Google Chrome browser seemed to peak peoples’ interests back in March 2009. At that time, Google introduced a site called Chrome Experiments. The purpose of the experiments was to test how  Chrome could handle Javascript. To view the experiments back in 2009, you needed to download Chrome and open the experiments in Chrome. You can now view the experiment page in with other browsers like Firefox. This site demonstrates how HTML5, WebGL, Canvas, SVG, and CSS are rendered and used inside a browser without having to install extra plugins to view content like 2D images and 3D models.

A big advantage to using Google Chrome over another browser is the ability to sync your browser history, apps, and extensions across multiple devices using a Google account. Chrome allows you to log into the browser. As you create bookmarks and build a browsing history, you can sync this browser customization with other Chrome browsers running on different machines and Chrome devices (like an Android phone running the Chrome browser or a Chromebook). Google warns that you should only log in to the Chrome browser on personal machines, not public machines. The reason for this is that app data gets stored on the computer or device you log into and then others may be able to access your apps and extensions and bookmarks if they are using the same machine.

Chrome allows for Apps and Extensions to be installed in the browser. The difference between the two are that Apps usually link to a web service or web page and usually do not work offline. Extensions are not specific to a certain web page or web service and can work offline. Both Apps and Extensions can be downloaded from the Chrome App Store. Depending on the app or extension, you might be charged to install it on Chrome. The Apps and Extensions that were demo-ed where:

• Anatronica 3D Interactive Anatomy

• 3D Solar System Web

• Simple Whiteboard

• OWeb Voice Input

• Print Friendly and PDF

• Google Drive

• Share LaTeX

• Audiotool

A brief overview of safety features that are built into Chrome were discussed. Sandboxing is a safety feature that tries to contain malware that was executed on one tab inside that tab so it doesn’t spread to other tabs in the browser. It makes it easier to a process by closing just the infected tab. Other features like basic malware detection on a site and auto-updating where mentioned.

Incognito Mode inside Chrome allows for a user to not have their web history tracked and it deletes any stored cookies after the Incognito Mode session is closed. Google lets users know that Incognito mode does not mean a user is browsing the web anonymously. Any files you download will stay on your computer and if site is collecting data on you, this mode may not prevent that from happening.

Given the choices you have for web browsing, Chrome offers a Google Power user many features that help them work with their Google apps and devices. Even if you’re not a Google power user, the features and extensions that Chrome has to offer for education should be explored no matter what operating system an educator runs (Chrome runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows).

Please use the slideshow viewer below to view the slides for the presentation:

To view the audio and video of the presentation, please use the video player below:

Want to know how to create transitions, add captions, clip segments from film?  Suppose you don’t need to show the entire film, only a 5 minute clip? Creating clips allows instructors to locate and present short, targeted clips of several minutes in length enabling the instructor to go directly to the main point of the film they want to discuss.  Creating and inserting video clips is easy to do, but there are some important points and options that must be considered.

Barbara also discussed the tools needed to create and import video clips into a PowerPoint Presentation, what file formats PowerPoint will accept and the difference between embedding and linking to a file from the web within Pp.

Below is a list of a few of the software programs Barbara spoke about.

Windows Movie Maker Live: Free download from Microsoft for Windows 7 & 8.  This program is preinstalled with the Vista and XP operating system.   Multiple video formats can be inserted into the program for editing along with direct import from DV camera.  Clipping scenes and adding transitions along with captions are easy to do directly from the tool bar.

iMovie: Included in the MAC OS. Imports movie from camera or file. User can select various Project Themes and create Movie Trailers. Options allow you to add slow motion, fast forward, various transitions and creating clips.  Sharing your file is easy by exporting to different formats, Quicktime,  iTunes, YouTube, Facebook and more.

iSkysoft Video Converter:  Available for Windows and MAC, price under $50.00. This software is used primarily for converting files from one format to another. Features customize presets to fit iPad, iPod, iPhone, PSP, iMovie, YouTube, etc.  Drag and drop file from desktop or import from camera. Editing includes trimming, rotating image, and cropping.  You can also download streaming web video.

MPEG Streamclip:  Free download for Windows and MAC.  Quick, easy way to create video clips.

Any Video Converter:  Free download for Windows and Mac.  All-in-one video converter and YouTube video downloader. Converts video from multiple formats and create clips.  This software allows you to download videos from the internet and then convert to mp4 format playable on your iPod, PSP or mobile phones.

Ben Johnston

Ben Johnston, lead instructional technologist at Princeton’s Humanities Resource Center (HRC) started his session by explaining that he decided to focus on mapping in the humanities using Google mapping applications in this presentation for a few reasons. He noted that ArcGIS and many other GIS applications already have a strong following in the sciences, and a lot of good work is being done there. He says that we can provide more scholarly attention in the humanities using geolocation. There are benefits from mapping in the humanities that one can easily carry out with tools like Google Earth and Google Maps, both of which have a very low threshold of entry for their use. Many GIS tools are highly capable and advanced, but usually have a high learning curve comparative to Google Maps and Earth.

Maps were once frozen in time in paper form, simple snapshots of what existed at some specific point. Now, digital maps can show a moving history, and one can mashup data from two or more applications that all speak the same language, like HTML, JavaScript, or geolocation data. Digital maps provide the potential of a dynamic, living resource, unlike a traditional map. Mashups are a good way to begin to understand how geolocation is useful in visualizing data for scholars.

Uses for maps in the humanities could be classified in four ways, according to Johnston:

• mashups
• reference materials or resources
• research organizational tools
• collaborative note taking tools

He also said that mapping in scholarly work can:

• help to make a literary work come alive
• organize historical research by locale
• allow students to take geolocation based notes in the field

He noted that maps can be used to plot mapping locations (waypoints or placemarks) versus mapping data (color coded maps showing an event or idea associated with areas, such as a state, or a diameter around a ground zero event).

Using plugins like WP-geo, you can associate WordPress posts with place. In Representing the Queen of Sheba, students read literary sources on the topic, found references to the topic, and plotted them on the map.

Housingmaps.com is one example in a million of useful geolocation mashups. It takes Craigslist housing listings and maps them using Google Maps. It changes the maps dynamically according to new incoming data from Craigslist, and makes the map’s placemarks sortable by price, site, and so on. Though this is a more general-use example of a mashup, many academic uses of mashups exist.

Princeton’s HRC has done several maps-centric projects, and Johnston shared some of them.

The German Department collaborated with the HRC to make a student-driven research site that consisted of placemarked reports of visits by Princeton students in Munich to restaurants, bars, groceries, and gyms. It allowed a more authentic, Princeton-centric understanding of students who were new to Munich to learn from their peers’ experience.

The Princeton Pawprints project was a collaboration between a visiting journalism instructor and the HRC. Students wrote stories about sustainability efforts and issues on campus, by reporting with locations on a map. In this case, navigation is provided purely by the placemarks.

Mapping the Golden Age of Venice made use of an authentic scanned map, draped over Google Maps, and information about locations was added to each placemark on the map.

Falda’s Rome used a lithograph of Rome, overlaid on Google Maps. It allowed students to explore the map without handling the valuable, fragile map.

In Venice and the Mediterranean (Venetian Crete), students went to various locations in Crete, wrote up reports of locations, and plotted them on the map. Today, students might just take geolocated photos to capture the locations, as opposed to putting them in manually as they were here.

In closing, Johnston then shared some projects in literature using geolocation:

• Google Lit Trips includes lots of books that classes have parsed, then added placemarks from the books. For instance, James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man plots placemarks from the text.
• Captain Cook’s voyage, using a linear path and animation via the Google Earth plugin.
• Crimelit.com links Scandinavian mystery literature with geolocation for reference.
• Openbible.info uses Google Maps to plot every place in the bible.

Janet Temos

Asking your students questions and getting instant responses is a great way of assessing whether learning and understanding is taking place. Come learn how you can use clickers in the class­room to do quick assessments.

About the speaker:

Janet Temos is the Direc­tor of the Educational Technologies Center at Princeton. She is a member of the Princeton class of 1982, and received her PhD at Princeton in 2001. The ETC helps faculty use technology in teaching and research, and includes Blackboard, the New Media Center, the Humanities Resource Center. We also offer consulting, training and outreach in educational technologies.

In her session on Classroom Clickers, Temos started with a common question that many faculty have: “What are Clickers?”

iClicker’s Clicker+

For this talk, Temos focused mostly on “mechanical” or hardware based clickers, though software based response systems exist. Mechanical clickers are plastic, wireless devices with buttons for an audience to show a response. The photo (left) is an example clicker similar to the ones offered at Princeton. These interface wirelessly with a paired receiver connected to a computer. The facilitator sets this system up to track responses. You might be most familiar with the system from game shows, such as the “Lifeline” feature from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, where the audience responds with their beliefs about the best answer. Most often at Princeton, we use clickers as an immediate student response system, a way for students to give trackable, chartable responses to a given question so that a faculty member can gain understanding about student comprehension or beliefs. Temos explained that they are also sometimes used as an animal training system, a method for tracking attendance, and are sometimes also called a personal response system.

According to Temos, clickers are best suited for large classes, questions that have answers based on opinion or newly delivered information, and class sessions that allow for some time to consider the question fully.

Here is an example of in-class use by Eric Mazur at Harvard in which he asks students to respond to a question about physics, and after seeing their response results as a class, he asks them to discuss and explain their answer choice with the students next to them, then answer the question again, allowing Mazur to assess changes in understanding and focus his teaching for improved clarity and understanding.

(Harvard Magazine on YouTube)

We learned that some of the benefits of clickers include the ability to offer a pause to a challenging lecture, an opportunity for audience feedback, and an opportunity for energy release, or a way to break tension. You can use instant feedback to add levity to an otherwise serious or heavy discussion. Perhaps most importantly, clickers offer a great opportunity to check student understanding of difficult topics before moving on to other topics that need that understanding.

Temos explained that clickers are not necessarily the best way to do a survey, quiz or poll. The synchronous nature of the immediate feedback may affect a survey by having the responses influence a typically personal experience. For example, in a clicker based poll about scheduling, a student may want to have their alternate class meeting on Tuesdays, but since the clicker responses show everyone else choosing Thursdays, they may ignore their own needs. In a typical asynchronous survey using paper or an electronic form, the student would be more likely to answer as they truly feel. Immediate feedback is the most important consideration in deciding to use clickers, so in situations where the question benefits from knowing the answer right away, clickers are a great solution.

Here are some things to consider about how to get them at Princeton:

1. OIT lends them for one-time anonymous polling in a course.
2. There is no charge for borrowing, but loans are given on a first-come first-served basis.
3. Courses have priority over administrative or other use.

For long-term use, like if you’d like to use clickers for the entire semester, you might ask your academic department to purchase clickers for departmental use. You can also assign clickers as course materials, and simply ask your students to buy them at the bookstore as required materials. Note that integration with Blackboard is now better than it has been in the past, and allows for easy association between students and clickers. Also, if you are not looking for clickers for a course and you need 400 clickers for a large single event, you can even rent them.

Other methods you might consider instead of clickers for asynchronous feedback:

• Use Blackboard quizzes surveys and tests
• Course blogs with live polls. (Using Pinion or PollDaddy)
• Google Forms
• Qualtrics, Princeton’s Survey and poll tool
• Live back-channeling with social media tools, like Twitter.

Why did Princeton choose iClicker as a student response system?

iClicker offers a blended solution, and allows you to mix physical clickers with an online response system. Also, most online responses systems mandate student fees, which we try to avoid. Borrowed clickers are free for students and faculty at Princeton. We have about 200 on offer for loans.

For more information about iClicker, instant feedback solutions at Princeton, or other instructional technology issues, please contact *protected email*

A screencast of Janet’s talk is coming soon.

The Productive Scholar logo

Thursday, December 6
12:00 noon
East Pyne Room 012
Kaltura Media
Ben Johnston

Click here to sign-up for this hands-on training*

Putting up video and audio resources for your students is a great way to extend their understanding of a given topic. Come learn how to use Princeton’s Kaltura service to upload audio and video and make it available to your students.

*If you have trouble with the link, copy the following URL into your web browser: https://wass.princeton.edu/pages/viewcalendar.page.php?makeapp=1&cal_id=1325&block_id=72690

About the speaker:
Ben Johnston is Senior Instructional Technologist in the Educational Technologies Center and Manager of the Humanities Resource Center at Princeton University. He holds a Master’s degree in Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and has worked at Princeton since 2006.

Here is Ben’s presentation (PPT) on Kaltura:

Productive Scholar Kaltura Presentation

The Productive Scholar logo

Janet Temos, the director of the Educational Technologies Center at Princeton University, spoke to a Productive Scholar audience about Word 2011 to share some of its less obvious features, such as styles, templates, themes, and interoperability features in Microsoft Office applications.

Temos started by talking about Powerpoint, and demonstrated how most users are familiar with choosing themes to style their presentations. She used this familiarity to show similar features in Word. She gave the example of a user writing a report, and getting feedback on a draft that all chapter headings be centered, not right aligned. If a user applies styles to the text, such as chapter headings being styled as “Heading 1″, as they write, this change becomes a quick and easy two-click change by simply changing the settings of the “Heading 1″ style which then carries those changes to all text styled as such. By turning on “Navigation” under the View ribbon,  you can see the outlined structure of the document as you apply styles, and quickly go to those areas of your document with a click.

Themes are collections of styles, colors, fonts, sizing, and other design aspects of documents packaged as a single applicable choice. You can quickly take a well-styled document, where titles, chapters, and body content are properly tagged with styles, and quickly apply different themes in order to add new flavor and variety to documents.

Templates are starting points for documents that are always similarly styled. If you find yourself writing a lot of reports, it makes sense to either find and download an existing Word Document template for reports that you can customize, or create your own and start with it each time, so that you need not spend any time re-styling or re-theming your new reports.

Because Microsoft Office comes as a suite, many users have the benefit of more than one Office application installed such as the ability to use charted data in Excel to inform and update a chart in Word. You can also apply the theme that you are using in Word to the chart so that the visual introduction of the data becomes seamless in your document.

When you added an image to Word documents in the past, you had to open a separate image editing application to make changes to the image. Word 2011 has many powerful image editing capabilities built-in,  such as the ability to crop, re-size, and affect the brightness & contrast of an image.

Some related resources that Temos shared include:

TechSmith Jing, for creating advanced screen captures and annotations. http://www.techsmith.com/jing.html

Templates from Endnote. http://endnote.com/downloads/templates

Temos created a list of resources at http://bit.ly/stylesheets that includes a Princeton University Dissertation template.

Her presentation from this session is available here:

Using Word Effectively by Janet Temos

Here is a screencast of the session for you to watch and hear everything that she did during the session.

• Blackboard-blogging
• Princeton WordPress Quickstart Guide
• Princeton WordPress plugins

For more information about this session, please contact Ben at *protected email*