History Engine

The History Engine is an educational tool that gives students the opportunity to learn history by doing the work—researching, writing, and publishing—of a historian. The result is an ever-growing collection of historical articles or “episodes” that paints a wide-ranging portrait of life in the United States throughout its history and that is available to scholars, teachers, and the general public in our online database.

Source: University of Richmond

See: The Little Engine That Can (Inside Higher Ed)

Open Source Software in Education

Educational institutions have rushed to put their academic resources and services online, bringing the global community onto a common platform and awakening the interest of investors. Despite continuing technical challenges, online education shows great promise. Open source software offers one approach to addressing the technical problems in providing optimal delivery of online learning.

Source: Education Quarterly (EDUCAUSE)

Managing Archeological Collections

This online technical assistance and distance learning effort covers all aspects of caring for archeological collections — the activities dealing with all kinds of archeological collections (i.e., objects, records, reports, and digital data) in all kinds of places (i.e., the field, the archeologist’s office, the lab, and the repository.) Another word for this range of activities is “curating” or “curation”, which you will find a lot more about in the following sections.

Source: National Parks Service

SBA Economic Stimulus Package Resource Center

The U.S. Small Business Administration welcomes you to this new resource center, which connects America’s entrepreneurs with tax management tools and strategies to maximize savings from the 2008 Economic Stimulus Package.

This web page contains three resources.

• Fact sheet — Highlights of the tax benefits from the 2008 Economic Stimulus Package
• Depreciation calculator — Provides an estimate of the first year depreciation available under the provisions of the Stimulus Package
• On-line seminar — Summarizes the tax benefits from the 2008 Economic Stimulus Package. The seminar concludes with the depreciation calculator.

Source: U.S. Small Business Administration

USPTO Introduces New Intellectual Property Curriculum

The Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today announced the launch of a new, dynamic curriculum that inspires students to be creative and teaches them about the value of patents, trademarks, and copyrights, as well as the importance of respecting other’s intellectual property. The i-©®eaTM curriculum, developed by the USPTO in collaboration with i-SAFE—a leader in Internet safety education—is an interactive and age appropriate unit of instruction designed for upper-elementary, middle, and high school students.
…
The i-©®ea TM curriculum is a valuable resource for teachers to introduce students to the inventive process through cross-curricular activities, inspirational stories of young inventors, and practical hands-on patent and trademark searching on the Internet. Students apply their knowledge and skills to real life experiences and view themselves as creative individuals. In turn, young people, their parents, and their teachers gain an appreciation of the contributions inventors and artists make to our way of life.

i-SAFE trains and certifies educators to teach the i-©®eaTM curriculum through the i-LEARN Online video training modules (http://ilearn.isafe.org). The i-©®ea TM curriculum is the latest addition to the growing i-SAFE library of more than175 standards-based lesson plans offered at no charge and taught in classrooms in all 50 states. For more details on the i-©®eaTM curriculum, see: www.isafe.org/icreatm.

NOAA Debuts “Nautical Charts” As New Elementary Multimedia Educational Tool

is launching today a new multimedia elementary educational program, Nautical Charts, at the annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association in Boston.

Designed in cooperation with NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey for students at the third through fifth grade level, the media rich activity teaches young people about charting and navigation. Nautical Charts is available online at http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education/nautical_charts/.

The activity uses animation to teach chart symbols, safe boating, and why nautical charts are important. Students have access to movies, sounds, pictures, and links to other resources. This activity uses the same characters and methodology employed in a similar multimedia tool, Sea Floor Mapping, launched last year online at http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/education_new/seafloor-mapping/welcome.html.

Source: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

Congressional Research Tutorials

These tutorials show you how to find Congressional materials in the Library and on the Internet.

Find a Bill, Find a Hearing, Find Congressional Debate, How Congress Works. By Jesse Silva, Federal Documents and Political Science Librarian and Karen Munro, E-Learning Librarian

Source: University of California-Berkeley

Hat tip: Free Government Information

Via U.N. Pulse:

The United Nations University (UNU) has recently launched its OpenCourseWare Portal (press release, pdf, 40.6 KB). The portal offers open access to about a dozen courses developed by three of UNU’s Research and Training Centres and Programmes and the UNU Media Studio. The participating Departments are:

• International Institute for Software Technology
• International Network on Water, Environment and Health
• Maastricht Economic and social Research and training centre on Innovation and Technology

RSS feeds are available.

Fulfilling the Promise of Open Content

The concept of aggregating, sharing, and collaboratively enriching free educational materials over the Internet has been emerging over the past several years. The movement has been led by faculty members and content specialists who believe that making lesson plans, training modules and full courses freely available can help improve teaching and make educational resources more dynamic through a cross-pollination of ideas and expertise. The Hewlett Foundation-funded OpenCourseWare initiative and the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education’s OER Commons offer a glimpse of the potential for open content in higher education.

Unfortunately, the movement to use open educational resources in higher education hasn’t yet realized the full impact that its founders anticipated. Open content is still in its infancy and faces some technical and cultural challenges that affect its widespread adoption.

Source: inside Higher Ed

Lexis-Nexis Coffee Break Webinar Series

Supercharge your legal research by attending LexisNexis® Coffee Break Webinars. They’re fast, effective and best of all—they’re on the house! Choose from a menu of quick 20-minute sessions and discover powerful tools and proven techniques to help make your research more efficient and cost-effective.

Bonus offer: “Get one $5 Starbucks Card for any two Webinar sessions you attend in the month of February.”

Webinar topics:

+ Strengthen Your Core (February 13 or 20)

Best practices for strengthening core legal research skills to increase efficiency, minimize research time and control billable costs on lexis.com®. See how to use Search by Topic or Headnote, Case Summaries, LexisNexis® Headnotes and other timesaving features that help you make financially responsible decisions while doing online legal research.

Insurance: It Takes a Community: Network for Insurance Law Success (February 12 or 20)

Map a path to your client’s success with the Insurance Practice Center, part of the new Lexis® Transactional Advisor solution. Anticipate emerging issues, analyze policy provisions, advise your client on risk factors, and act on your client’s behalf with a full collection of forms – all from one easy-to-use interface.

+ Corporate: Anticipate, Analyze, Advise, Act. New Tool for Corporate Practitioners (February 12 or 13)

Map a path to success for your corporate clients with a one-stop resource that combines commentary on emerging and ongoing corporate law issues, expert analysis, interactive forms, multi-jurisdictional charts that compare U.S. and state law, topical decision trees that help guide your decision logic in complex matters, and much more.

Securities: Securities Tools that Work the Way You Do (February 14 or 21)

Get single-point access to all the relevant content and tools you need at each stage of the securities workflow, including SEC rules and regulations, filings, no-action letters and releases, forms and documents, due diligence, market intelligence, news, exclusive analytical materials and more—all in one place.

Register online.

University Instructors’ Acceptance of Electronic Courseware: An Application of the Technology Acceptance Model

This study examines the factors that influence instructors’ adoption and use of an Internet-based course management system and tests the applicability of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), introduced by Davis (1986), in the context of e-learning practices in higher education. Using data from an online survey of a university’s instructors (N=191), a path analysis revealed that perceived ease of use of the system had a significant impact on perceived usefulness as the TAM suggested. In addition, a direct effect of perceived usefulness on behavioral intention to use and an indirect effect of the variable on actual system use, both of which were proposed in the TAM, were also found. Further, motivation to use the system played a significant role in affecting perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, evaluation of functions, current system use, and behavioral intention to keep using the system. This study suggests that integration of the TAM and the uses and gratification approach can be fruitful for future research on the diffusion of Internet-based technological systems.

Source: Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication

LegiStorm: Transparency’s Sidekick
From the site:

LegiStorm remains the only place on the web where you can find congressional staff salaries. Whether you’re researching who’s breaking the bank or who’s making peanuts, whether you are negotiating a pay raise or figuring out who’s buying drinks after work, LegiStorm is the only place online where you can get the answers.

Our database contains salaries from 2003 into 2007. We are constantly adding new salary data and recently added data for the 2nd quarter of 2007. We continue to add historical data.

Browse Staff Salaries By …

* Staffer
* Representative
* Senator
* Committee
* Leadership Office
* Admin Offfice
* State

Source: Legistorm (via Basefsky’s IWS Documented News Service)

About a month ago we posted that The Lincoln Memorial now allows visitors and/or Internet visitors to learn about Honest Abe and the LM via the telephone and info provided by park rangers. The service is free and comes from the National Park Service.

Today, we can add that The National Gallery of Art (also in DC) now allows users to learn about a small but growing selection of paintings using the telephone. Simply walk up to one of several paintings, look for a number (1-10) dial-a-telephone number and voila, knowledge follows.

The number: (1) 202-595-1857. The call is free. Of course, your local phone plan will determine any changers for the call itself.

OK, so you are not going to be able to make it do DC soon? No worries. All of these paintings are included (with an image, provenance, and more) in the NGA Online Database.

Press 1# to learn about the East Building, IM Pei, Architect
Press 2# Alexander Calder, Untitled
Press 3# Andy Goldsworthy, Roof
Press 4# David Smith, Circle 1, Circle 2, Circle 3
Press 5# Max Ernst, Capricorn
Press 6# Ellsworth Kelly, Color Panels for a Large Wall
Press 7# Richard Serra, Five Plates, Two Poles
Press 8# Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing No. 681 C
Press 9# Rachel Whiteread, Ghost
Press 10# Tony Smith, Die
Press 11# Martin Puryear, Lever Number 3

See Also: NGA Online Tours

See Also: Lincoln Memorial Phonecasting

See Also: ESPN Now Phonecasting Sports Updates 3x an Hour

See Also: Intro: From Podcast to Phonecast, So Simple

Webinar: Folksonomies & Taxonomies in the Enterprise
(Free; link takes you to registration form.)
From e-mail:

Enterprises today face a critical challenge: How to manage an abundance of increasingly complex and disparate information assets in an environment of constant change and technological complexity. How do you provide tools that your users are used to using in the commercial world in order for them to stay competitive and enable collaboration?

Results from a recent roundtable event on Folksonomies & Taxonomies that discussed these challenges will be shared as well other research work that has been focused on the topic.

Other topics to be discussed include:

• What is the business value of a taxonomy/folksonomy and how can you deploy a solution that will grow with the organization?
• What’s the impact of social networking tools on the enterprise?
• Which governance tools can or should be applied?
• How do you merge folksonomies and existing taxonomies – or should you?
• Some best practices and common obstacles

Date: Thursday, 10 January
Time: 11:00 a.m. US Eastern Time
Topic: Folksonomies & Taxonomies in the Enterprise
Presenter: Daniela Barbosa, Dow Jones Client Solutions

Source: Dow Jones InfoPro Alliance

+ CallGenie Buys PhoneSpots for $5.75 Million

+ FUMSI Citation for Mose Useful Article Awarded at Online Information 2007

Nominations were received through mid-November and named many of the eligible articles — those published in the FreePint Newsletter
between December 2006 and September 2007. FreePint editors reviewed the nominations and selected Heather Carine’s article, ‘Mentors and
Mentees: Structuring a Professional Relationship’, as the winner.

+ Modern poetry, as well as introductory courses in physics, psychology, and political science, are four of seven classes from Yale U. that the institution put online today. Not only are the courses free for anyone who is interested, but they are as close to being there as online technology allows.

“These are gavel-to-gavel presentations,” Tom Conroy, a university spokesman, told The Chronicle. “We’ve put everything online that we could, and I think that’s what makes this different.” Lectures can be downloaded and run in streaming video or in audio only. There are searchable transcripts of each lecture, as well as course syllabi, reading assignments, problem sets, and other materials.

Diana E.E. Kleiner, a professor of the history of art and classics and director of the project, which is called Open Yale Courses, said in a written statement that the project’s leaders “wanted everyone to be able to see and hear each lecture as if they were sitting in the classroom.”

The courses available are:
• Astronomy 160: Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics, with Professor Charles Bailyn.
• English 310: Modern Poetry, with Professor Langdon Hammer.
• Philosophy 176: Death, with Professor Shelly Kagan.
• Physics 200: Fundamentals of Physics, with Professor Ramamurti Shankar.
• Political Science 114: Introduction to Political Philosophy, with Professor Steven B. Smith.
• Psychology 110: Introduction to Psychology, with Professor Paul Bloom.
• Religious Studies 145: Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), with Professor Christine Hayes.

Source: Wired Campus

See Also: MIT Open Courseware (over 1800 Classes)
See Also: Open Learning Initiative, Carnegie Mellon
See Also: TuftsOpenCourseware
See Also: Harvard Medical School
See Also: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

+ Top Searches of 2007–AOL