Learn about the Knowledge Ontario project by attending a CU Library information session
Carleton has gained access to an extensive collection of online databases through our participation in the Knowledge Ontario project. The resources are funded by the Ontario Government which provides access to all Ontarians through the province’s publicly funded libraries.
During the week of November 2 to 6, Carleton University Library will feature a few of these valuable resources. Faculty, students and alumni are invited to attend two information sessions on KO resources on Wednesday, November 4:
Career Cruising: A Guided Tour
10:30am – noon, 1501 CTTC Building
If you would like to learn about the functions and features of this comprehensive career exploration web tool and how it can make your career research more efficient and effective, then sign up for this interactive workshop with Career Services. The workshop will be facilitated by an experienced CDCE Career Counsellor and a former teacher (and career counselling intern) who taught the Careers Course to secondary school students in the Ottawa Carleton School Board.
Academic OneFile, CPI.Q and Virtual Reference Library – A Demonstration
2-3pm, Room 360K, MacOdrum Library
A representative from Gale Cengage will visit the Library to demonstrate Gale’s new PowerSearch 2.0. Three KO databases will be showcased:
Academic OneFile – Indexes over 60 million articles from over 11,000 journal titles with coverage in current events, general sciences, social sciences and humanities. Many of the articles are available in full-text.
CPI.Q (Canadian Periodical Index Full Text) – Contains citations to essays, articles, short stories, and book reviews in more than 1,200 English and French language journals published in, or providing, significant coverage of Canada. All topics are covered. Approximately 550 of the journals are provided in full-text.
Virtual Reference Library – KO has licensed over 30 reference library titles in ebook format.
Faculty, students and alumni who visit the Library from November 2 to 6 or attend the Career Cruising workshop will have the chance to enter a quiz contest and win one of two $25 CU Bookstore gift certificates.
For information about Knowledge Ontario, please visit their web site at www.knowledgeontario.ca. For questions about Carleton’s participation in Knowledge Ontario, please contact Anita Hui, Collection Development and Gifts or call 520-2600, ext. 8372.
Teaching with Technology Roundtable
Please join Professor Jim Davies from the Department of Cognitive Science and the EDC for this month’s Teaching Roundtable.
When: Friday, September 25, from noon to 1 p.m.
Where: 422 Dunton Tower
Every year college and graduate students across North America work on millions of assignments, and instructors and teaching assistants spend millions of hours grading them. These assignments help the students learn, but do no good for anybody else. In his talk Dr. Davies will describe several kinds of assignments he has developed that he believes 1) facilitate learning, 2) are particularly motivating, and 3) contribute to the greater educational and research communities.
Any discipline can make use of the methods Dr. Davies will describe.
A light lunch will be provided.
Please click here to register.
Teaching with Technology Roundtable: Blogging – Update
Please join Lois Frankel from the School of Industrial Design and the EDC for this month’s Teaching with Technology Roundtable, on Friday, March 20, from noon to 1 p.m. in 422 Dunton.
Professor Lois Frankel will show examples of students’ use of blogs as part of weekly assignments in a studio course. She will share the successes and the challenges that she and her students have encountered and facilitate a discussion about opportunities for improvement.
This session will be of interest to anyone who is using blogs or thinking of using blogs in their courses.
Please register to attend this event in person at http://edc.carleton.ca/teachingwithtechnolog.
If you are unable to be on Carleton’s campus at this time join us via a free live online Elluminate session. This session will also be recorded so please check back for information on how to access the recording.
Please note that you do not need a logon or password to join the online session, you just need to enter your name in the “Login Name” area and click “Log In”.
Web of Knowledge Databases at Carleton’s Library
The Carleton University Library will be holding an information session for faculty, students and staff on the ISI Web of Knowledge suite of databases. These databases can be searched separately or together and the library’s subscription includes:
- Web of Science (Science Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index)
- Zoological Record
- Journal Citation Reports
- Derwent Innovations Index (patents)
Date: Thursday March 19, 2009
Place: Room 102, MacOdrum Library
Time: 2:00 – 3:30 p.m.
Presenter: Julia Hawkes, Thomson Reuters (publisher of the Web of Knowledge databases)
For questions about this database, please contact Anita Hui, Head of Collection Development, Carleton University Library, at anita_hui@carleton.ca.
EOSET 2009: Call for Proposals reminder
Just a reminder that the deadline for the Call for Proposals for the May 22/09 EOSET conference – the Eastern Ontario Symposium for Educational Technology – is Friday, March 13. UOIT is the host of this year’s conference.
If you not able to present, we hope you’ll be able to attend. The conference fees are very reasonable – the conference is just $30 and for those looking for accommodation, a two bedroom residence suite is $56.
For more information about the conference or submitting proposals, go to the website at http://uoit.ca/eoset or see our previous post.
Duke Digital Initiative into its fourth wireless year
As promised, I’d like to bring to your attention a few items regarding mobile learning (mLearning) and the way it’s being used in educational spheres. For the past few years, a trend has begun that has opened new possibilities for the ways in which students collaborate with the help of technologies they so fervently love to use.
Duke University was the one that set the one of the institution to set the trend in motion. (Update ) Other insitutions have followed suit, but I’d like to focus here on Duke. Its researchers were the ones who truly captivated the educational technology community with the radical experimentation they have undergone. They kick started in 2004 as the Duke iPod Project, distributing around one-thousand, six-hundred 20 GB Apple iPods to first-year students. The project was controversial, with mixed results. Student impressions were of skepticism but also welcoming of new technologies.
It has since developed into the Duke Digital Initiative, which is currently active at Duke, and explores the use of a variety of technologies that can help capture and record the educational experiences, and convert them to a portable format so that students may relive them. They provide students with the tools and means to use wireless mobile devices (WMDs) to gain greater access to course materials put out by instructors, and in various formats specific to different applications. The significance of the project was that even with a $500,000 investment backing it, no one really knew what would happen. Would students actually use their iPods for recording lectures and listening to course content on the go, or would they use it as a distraction in class? Read more
Pay “by Applause” Bonus for Faculty
Normally one can’t think of many situations where a professor would decline the chance to receive a $10,000 bonus however, as a recent post on the Inside Higher ED blog shows that this is exactly the case at Texas’ A&M university. Out of some 2000 professors only a mere 300 have submitted their names to be eligible for the bonus which requires only that they hand out a survey to students in their class.
The other professors reason for refusing has nothing to do with the money itself but instead with how it is set to be distributed. The bonus is currently arranged to be doled out based solely upon students evaluations of their professors and it is this move which has caused all the controversy. The university suggests that their reasoning for setting up the bonus this way is to make sure students have the opportunity to recognize good teachers and reward them with money for their efforts. One professor however likened the idea of distributing the bonus this way to paying professors “by applause meter” suggesting that student evaluations are not a proper way to evaluate a professor’s performance. It is then suggested that studies have shown that students are (perhaps somewhat understandably) more likely to give professors who give them good grades a better evaluation. Professors at the school suggest that tough grading, and challenging student ideas is part of their job and that this can mean that learning sometimes takes priority over student happiness. Going along with this professors say that setting up the bonus in this way also corrupts peer evaluation, diminishes the faculty role and encourages grade inflation. Some fear that this will be even more prevalent amongst newer or younger faculty who may figure that by giving out better grades they are better positioning themselves to receive this bonus.
Although here at Carleton we do use student-teacher evaluations these have no bearing whatsoever on professors pay however students do have the option to nominate their professors for various teaching awards throughout the year.
From eLearning to ‘mLearning’
There’s something in store for the way students send, receive, and exchange information off and on campus. Currently, campuses like Carleton are becoming increasing wireless, but whenever a student is on the move, there’s no telling what the university is trying to communicate to them. The laptop is transportable, but it’s more accurately labeled a ‘portable device’ than a mobile one, since students have to stop periodically and make themselves stationary, to open their laptops and receive information. On the battlefield we call campus, on which time is of the essence, this is a death wish for the average student on the run.
If you’ve ever heard the term ‘eLearning’ (Electronic Learning), a technical term referring to Electronic Learning and the use of computer aids to facilitate the electronic access to learning material, this
shouldn’t surprise you much. Ten years ago, accessibility to the Internet exploded as a new apparatus for the mass distribution of information. Today, it is a Web 2.0 and media rich collaborative classroom. In the same limelight, a similar transition is occurring between eLearning and what’s now referred to as ‘mLearning‘ (Mobile Learning).
Just as we’ve seen eLearning shatter geographic boundaries with tools like WebCT and Blackboard, virtual classrooms, and off-campus email, we now have the mechanisms to further support these tools, and
expand into a realm of mLearning. Other universities have done it, and in my upcoming post I’ll provide further insight.
The meat-and-potatoes of the matter is that not only will students continue the tradition of being able to access information anywhere, listening to lecture podcasts and videocasts on the go as they do, in
addition, mLearning could offer push-notifications, changing the rate at which pertinent campus and course information is delivered to students. Read more
WebCT use this term at Carleton
We used Google Analytics to take a look at the visitors to Carleton’s WebCT login page use, and here are some interesting stats to ponder.
From the start of classes (Sept. 4th 2008) to almost the end of term (Dec. 17th 2008) there were over 2,320,000 visits to WebCT, with the average of over 22,100 visits per day.
The most visited day of the week was consistently Monday with the highest use on Monday Oct. 27 with 32,994 visits. In terms of unique visitors as opposed to total visits on the same day, that is individuals on specific computers who have not cleared their cookies, there were 18,585 of them. On the other hand, Saturdays were consistently the lowest used days.
Over 98% of the visits were from Canada with USA, Germany, China, Spain, France, Japan, Chile, UK and Saudi Arabia rounding out the top ten.
Close to 88% of the Canadian visits come for Ottawa, with Aylmer, Toronto, Montreal, Etobicoke, Kingston, North York, Scarborough, Gatineau, and Carleton Place rounding out the top ten. There are over 200 other cities from all over Canada with moderate usage of Carleton’s WebCT, and another 100 with fairly low usage.
Using the same absolute unique users as mentioned above we are able to take a look at the frequency of visits or engagement of these people with WebCT. Please note that this is based on absolute unique users and the lower numbers may be misrepresented due to cookie clearing.
On this histogram, the most loyal visitors are shown on the bottom and the new and least loyal visitors are shown at the top. As shown, about 40% of visitors returned less than 10 times and about 30% of visitors returned more than 50 times to WebCT.
Taking a look at the operating systems used to access the site we see the usual three heavy hitters Windows (88.66%), Macintosh (10.59%), and Linux (0.44%). There are also a number of phone users calling it in with different operating systems like iPhone, SymbianOS(BlackBerry), Android, and PalmOS. We also see other people jumping in the game and accessing WebCT with their Playstation 3, Playstation Portable, and Nintendo Wii.
Breaking the data down to Browsers in specific OSs, shown above, we see that Internet Explorer is still the defacto, but Firefox has a ever growing piece of the pie and Google’s Chrome is making a steady increase every week.
To see how to view statistics in your own WebCT course, visite the Tracking Student Performance section of our WebCT Support Site (Note that this is not using Google Analytics, but WebCT’s built in Tracking tools). You are able to see overall statistics on how students have used the course as well as more refined data on specific tool or individual students.
Google Earth unveils a 3-D Ancient Rome
We don’t know how you do it, Google, but you do. And you do it better than all the other guys. By the way, by that I mean taking world concepts and bringing them to life, in a virtual environment, allowing users be hundreds of miles away — and now, hundreds of years in the past.
A little over a month ago, Google let something out the bag, something big out of the bag. If you have the latest version 4.3 of Google Earth, within the “Gallery” section of the “Layers” pane on the bottom-left, you’ll notice a new item: Ancient Rome 3D. This is more than a simple layer, however, and something Google either hasn’t had the audacity, ability, or confidence, to get into until now. This is something that took the collaborative effort of half a dozen universities and computer science groups working for a decade in order to reach this achievement of epic proportions.
