About this talk

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

About Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Inspired by Nigerian history and tragedies all but forgotten by recent generations of westerners, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels and stories are jewels in the crown of diasporan literature. Full bio and more links

From Celia: I saw part of this talk on CTV. It has much to say to us, whether we are South African, Nigerian or American. Let all our stories be heard!

From TED

Link to free download 

Abstract: Student attrition has been a perennial theme in South African higher education throughout the past decade. In its National Plan for Higher Education (2001), the Department of Education attributed high dropout rates primarily to financial and/or academic exclusions. Four years later, it reported that 30% of students dropped out in their first year of study and a further 20% during their second and third years. Against this backdrop, the erstwhile research programme on Human Resources Development initiated a research project to investigate more thoroughly why students dropped out, what led them to persist in higher education to graduation, and what made for a successful transition to the labour market. The chapters in this volume variously address these issues in relation to one or more of seven institutional case studies conducted in 2005. Although the data analysed pertain to the 2002 cohort of graduating/non-completing students and to institutional data for 2004/5, their currency is confirmed by the recent interest expressed by the new Ministry of Higher Education and Training in exploring ways for 'continuously improving the access and success, particularly of black students, at all levels of the system' (Budget Speech, Minister of Higher Education and Training, June 2009). The HSRC research programme on Education, Science and Skills Development spans three major social domains: education; science and innovation studies; and the world of work. The education domain focuses on issues of access, quality, relevance and equity at the primary, secondary and tertiary levels. Science and innovation studies explores the link between technology, innovation, and economic development. The world of work researches labour markets, skills, and human resources development. The strength of the programme resides, however, in its unique ability to harness research work at the interface of these three domains.

Peter Bromberg offers Five Tips For Successful Webinars at the ALA Learning Round Table. If you’re planning or presenting an upcoming webinar, you’ll want to check out these valuable tips:

1. Write for the medium
2. Know your platform
3. Test, Test Test
4. Practice, Practice, Practice
5. THE ACTUAL EVENT

Free Technology for Teachers rounds up Nine Tools for Collaboratively Creating Mind Maps. Each entry in this helpful list includes a discussion of the application’s best features, cost, and usability. From iLibrarian blog

Will Apple's iPad kill the textbook?

Many educators are pointing to Apple Computer's recently announced iPad as the prototype for an e-reader that will be able to hold all the textbooks a student needs. Its color touch-screen, interactive-video capability and virtual keyboard, they say, give it greater potential for textbook users than monochrome readers like Amazon's Kindle. 

While some students may be using notebooks or their more portable cousins, netbooks, to read textbooks, some experts predict that within the next 10 years, most U.S. college students -- and many high-school and elementary-school students as well -- will probably be reading course materials on an electronic device instead of in a paper book. And that will have a broad impact on students and teachers, not to mention the $9.9 billion textbook-publishing business...

Digital textbooks will need to have features students take for granted in paper books, such as the ability to highlight key passages and take notes that can be attached to pages. Digital versions also need consistent pagination so that teachers can give assignments. Even with a search function, digital books will still need tables of contents, indexes and glossaries.

Even with these limitations, digital presentation opens up a number of new possibilities for textbooks. With interactive graphs in an economics book, for example, students could try different costs to see the impact on demand or different supply levels to gauge the change in price. ScrollMotion promises publishers that its technology will let them embed video that students can watch, record lectures linked to chapters and offer self-assessment tests...

For full text of this article as pdf:

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/templates/images/tools_lg_pdfarticle.gif

Peer review: a guide for researchers

There's is an interesting resource that I found when I was digging around trying to answer a question for my CILIP update column. 'Is it possible to prove exactly what was on a particular webpage at any moment in time?' I found FreezePage which does exactly that. You can type in a web address, add your name, and save it to a folder. The resource will then provide you with a URL of the frozen page, with a date and time that you can refer other people to. It worked reasonably well - I tried it with one of my pages, but it didn't store the menu bar, some of the images, the Google adverts or the social media bar - most of that stuff (but not all) does come from 3rd party sites, but it's still a bit of disadvantage.

Of course, if you don't like that, there's always the Wayback Machine, which stores sites/pages that it chooses to, on its own time scale, but while you can't take snapshots, you do stand a fair chance of finding older pages. Alternatively, you can try the UK Web Archive, which has been going since 2004 and has a specific UK bias.

If that's not helping - try the cache of a search engine. Many search engines will provide you with access to the most recent cached version of a web page that they've got in their database. In Google simply type cache:URL to view a specific page if you want speedy access.

From Phil Bradley's weblog

Quote search engine

State of the Internet 2010

This is a fun short video jam packed with statistics on where the Internet is at the moment. Emphasis on email and social networking sites. Thanks to Jess3 for the use! JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo. Via Phil Bradley's weblog.

Greg Ferenstein at Mashable discusses How Twitter in the Classroom is Boosting Student Engagement by increasing participation and building a community of learners.

“Professors who wish to engage students during large lectures face an uphill battle. Not only is it a logistical impossibility for 200+ students to actively participate in a 90 minute lecture, but the downward sloping cone-shape of a lecture hall induces a one-to-many conversation. This problem is compounded by the recent budget cuts that have squeezed ever more students into each room.

Fortunately, educators (including myself) have found that Twitter is an effective way to broaden participation in lecture. Additionally, the ubiquity of laptops and smartphones have made the integration of Twitter a virtually bureaucracy-free endeavor. This post describes the two main benefits professors find when using Twitter in lecture.”

 

From iLibrarian blog

Personas asks the question – how does the Internet see you?

Try the Personas search, see it build up a categorisation of how the Internet sees you on the fly and see how that matches your reality.

Personas is a critique of data-mining that demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name.

Below is a short film showing a Personas search for Intute captured using Screenr – a browser based screencasting tool. A larger version can be seen via the full screen icon or by viewing it from the Screenr website...

This gives a fairly true snapshot of how Intute is described online – with plenty of good descriptions of what we do, some nice reviews from users and a few things you may not have encountered – primarily because it uses Yahoo for the search data rather than Google.

Try a personal name rather than a corporate identity and you may encounter some different results. It was gratifying to see that I was identified as the Economics Editor of Intute on the very first selection – but the categorizations seemed rather bizarre.

It certainly succeeded in getting me thinking about whether data mining is really technologically neutral or just dependent upon how creators of algorithms choose to model the world and which inputs / outputs they use, plus it is a timely reminder of the trail of data we leave online.

While academics may be more concerned about how their identity is represented in traditional academic outputs – see the Mimas / British Library Names project – their online identity may be just as important.

From Intute blog

This is the official website of the archaeological excavations at Kerma, Nubia (Sudan). The website is available in French and English (click on E or F on the logo to switch between the two), but published papers are only available in one language (some are in English and some in French). This well organised website publishes short articles, accompanied by several colour pictures, on the history of Kerma and the research carried out so far by the Swiss team working there. Similarly organised are sections "Archaeological Sites" and "Museum". Section "Publications" contains a comprehensive bibliographic list with several papers freely available in PDF format. Section "Media" lists the recent TV and radio broadcasts to which team members have participated. Although all links point to external resources, at the time of review it was possible to access the original broadcasts, all of which were in French. A simple sitemap, contacts and an internal search engine complete this commendable website.

Kerma, referred to as Kush in Egyptian texts, is a very important site consisting of a settlement and the eastern necropolis, dated between 2500 and 1500 BC, and it was the capital of the Nubian kingdom. The nearby Nubian sites of Napata and Meroe are also mentioned in the illustrated texts and papers. In addition to have been an independent kingdom, Nubia's history is inextricably intertwined with that of Egypt: throughout the long history of ancient Egypt, pharaohs invaded several times Nubia, but a few dynasties of pharaohs were also of Nubian origin. This website provides a concise and clear history of the facts, including a chronological table, and section "Publications" expands on many themes. This website also publishes the preliminary reports from the ongoing excavations. It is an essential website for anyone interested in the ancient history of Africa or Egyptology, hosting contents that should satisfy everyone, from the curious amateur archaeologist to advanced researchers.