Monthly Archives: June 2010

Tech Sharecase, 18 June 2010

Attendees
Saad Abulhab, Joanna Cruz, Arthur Downing, Stephen Francoeur, Harold Gee, Joseph Hartnett, Ellen Kaufman, Wilcina Longdon, Jin Ma, Louisa Moy, Christina Muniz, Peter Philips, Ryan Phillips, Ester Ramos, Michael Waldman

Baruch iPhone App
We watched a screencast from the developer of the forthcoming iPhone app that is being designed for the Office of Student Development. There are placeholders in certain sections where library services and resources can be added. This app is being designed primarily as a student recruitment tool.

Microsoft Office 2010
If you are a faculty member, you can go to the CUNY Mall within the CUNY Portal and download for free the latest version of Microsoft Office, which was just released this week. The license is for home use only and not for work PCs. It is very possible that this fall, though, our work computers will get upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2010. The 2010 version of Outlook (and the earlier 2007 version) has a built-in RSS reader, which will work once we get our Exchange server here on campus upgraded this summer.

Pew Report on Use of Social Media and Mobile Devices Among Teens
We took a quick look at the recently released report from the Pew Internet and America Life Project that about how teens use mobile devices and social media.

Online Education
This fall, the statistics department will use online course content developed by Carnegie Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative for its intro statistics course. We also discussed briefly the large library of video tutorials created by Salman Khan and published on YouTube. Over 1400 videos are available; most of the videos are about science, math, finance, economics. Here is a sample video on balance sheets:

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U of California Tells Nature Publishing Group It May Boycott

The University of California is balking at the 400 percent price increase that Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is proposing for next year. UC is telling NPG that unless the publisher is willing to negotiate a more reasonable price, UC might drop all NPG subscriptions and encourage its researchers to stop submitting new articles and reviewing others.

More details at:

Howard, Jennifer. “U. of California Tries Just Saying No to Rising Journal Costs.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 8 Jun. 2010. Web.

Salo, Dorothea. “California Throws the Gauntlet in NPG’s Face.” Book of Troogol, 8 Jun. 2010. Web.

Strong, Gary. “Possible Boycott of Nature Publishing Group Journals: an Open Letter from Gary Strong, University Librarian, to UCLA Faculty.” Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library Blog, 8 Jun. 2010. Web.

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Tech Sharecase, 4 June 2010

Attendees
Arthur Downing, Ellen Kaufman, Robert Drzewicki, Stephen Francoeur,  Ryan Phillips

Kobo
We briefly discussed Kobo, a competitor to the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook. A comparison chart provided at the Kobo web site charts Kobo’s features amongst its competitors.

Information Aesthetics
We then discussed the blog Information Aesthetics. This blog seeks out and presents projects that display information and data in creative ways. Some examples discussed were information arcs, the bible cross reference visualization project and a wheel of nutrition that displays portion sizes on dinner plates.

The conversation moved towards other ways of displaying information and the tools used to do so. Microsoft was mentioned given the fact that Excel 2010 is going to incorporate Spark Lines. We then took at look at Google Motion Charts that can be used in iGoogle and Google Docs. A few of us were introduced to motion charts through Hans Rosling’s Wealth & Health of Nations Motion Chart and his TED Talk . Also shown was the Wall Street Journal’s market sector maps for stock performance.

A couple of other web sites were mentioned: 1) Many Eyes a site for sharing data visualization and 2) InfoChimps for downloading all sorts of data sets.

Also touched upon was the Netflix prize. This was a $1 million contest for accurate predictions of movie ratings based on Netflix user movie preferences. The prize was awarded last September and a new contest was announced.

Miscellaneous
The conversation then moved to the current and future state of student printing, some of the issues and possible solutions. We also discussed the use of GoogleDocs on campus.

Lastly, we talked about the Boston, MA, public media outlet WGBH’s Open Vault–their online media archive and library.  Roy Tennant’s covered Open Vault in a recent Library Journal blog entry.

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Internet Week New York, June 7-14, 2010

There are many city-wide events happening. Check out the schedule here:
https://internetweekny.com/

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