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November’s lead story discusses recent a IU staff presentation at the Digital Library Federation’s Fall Forum in Baltimore, and a talk before the Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences of the American Council of Learned Societies. Following these presentations, IU’s David Greenbaum and Raymond Yee headed to George Mason University in Arlington, Virginia for a visit with the director and staff of GMU’s Center for History and New Media. After a group discussion, Greenbaum and Yee gave a presentation to a larger audience, invited to the GMU campus, during which they talked about IU’s vision of using digital technologies to make it easier to integrate research, teaching and service, and enable faculty and students to share knowledge. The presentations and visits were part of IU’s continuing effort to build valuable partnerships that will inform and strengthen its development of Scholars’ Box tools to increase the availability and usefulness of knowledge created in university and research communities, making it more accessible and beneficial to the public through informed development and use of education and Internet technologies. To read more about IU's October presentations, and other stories from on and off campus, visit the IU Main page where the lead story begins. Stories featured in this issue are:
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IU Presentations in October
During the last week in October, the IU participated in three interesting events all held in the Washington, D.C. area. On Tuesday afternoon, October 26th, at the Digital Library Federation’s (DLF) Fall Forum in Baltimore, IU’s Raymond Yee gave a talk entitled: Interactions of Emerging Gather/Create/Share End-User Tools with Digital Libraries.
Earlier, IU Director David Greenbaum addressed the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences — a session convened in conjunction with the DLF Forum.
To complete the IU’s week of presentations and discussions, Greenbaum and Yee traveled to George Mason University, where Roy Rosenzweig, Director of GMU’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM) had invited them to share IU’s strategies and visions for how to make digital materials more readily available to scholars, students and public communities.
The presentations served to disseminate some of the IU’s work and thinking to academic and professional peers, and also to continue to identify projects, and potential partners, working in areas of research, development and implementation that overlap with IU projects and technical developments.
A theme common to the IU presentations, and one informing all aspects of IU work, is the democratization of knowledge: creating ways and means to increase the availability and usefulness of knowledge created and archived in university and research communities, making it readily accessible to all public learners.
Raymond Yee’s talk, Interactions of Emerging Gather/Create/Share End-User Tools with Digital Libraries, addressed the growing “quality, quantity, and diversity of scholarly information” and the concurrent appearance of rapidly evolving tools for end-users to access and manage this often bewildering array of new information.
Yee summarized the tools now available that enable users to effectively "gather, create, and share" digital information, among them: next generation web browser technology, such as Mozilla FireFox and its extensions; personal information managers such as Chandler; web-services enabled- and XML-aware office suites, such as Microsoft Office 2003 and OpenOffice.org; high profile open source "Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) software" such as Sakai; evolving next generation operating systems, such as Microsoft Longhorn; and academic projects such as the IU Scholar's Box, a tool under development that enables users to gather resources from multiple digital repositories in order to create personal and themed collections and other reusable materials that can be shared with others for teaching and research.
Yee’s discussion of these various end-user tools included an analysis of the implications of their introduction and use for infrastructure and technology stratagies in digital libraries.
David Greenbaum’s presentation to the Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences—a fact gathering group interested in hearing about issues related to advances in technology that are likely to help computing-enabled scholars and teachers of humanities and social sciences, as well as about technology developments that have enabled fundamental changes in the areas of teaching, research collaboration, and the communication to the general public—began with a definition of the democratization of knowledge: to broaden the availability and usefulness of knowledge created in the research community, making it more accessible and beneficial to the public through informed development and use of education and Internet technologies.
Greenbaum then posed a question: How can we build a cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences that will help members of a campus community to engage in the democratization of knowledge? And following the question, proceeded from three stated assumptions:
- The importance of public service to the university;
- The need to integrate research, teaching, service and make it easier and more valuable for faculty and students to share knowledge;
- That digital technologies present new ways to create teaching and learning materials valuable to both higher education and the public—particularly if we create a cyberinfrastructure in which it’s relatively easy to gather, create, and share digital objects of value to humanities scholarship and learning.
Greenbaum asked his audience to imagine an “ideal” environment – a Scholar’s Workspace in which a user had access to any data source, could handle any object type, and apply any service to these objects, and as a result of this was able to build collections. He offered that this kind of tool/service would be highly valuable for higher education, particularly since it enables the user to execute the “scholarly primitives” of collecting, organizing, annotating, interpreting and presenting. In addition, such a tool/service could enable the creation of digital collections, contextualized for different publics and designed for dis-aggregation and re-use.
The talk continued with a further discussion of how IU’s Scholar’s Box project is working to realize the kinds of tools imagined in the described environment, by addressing some of the challenges in opening up and connecting the various domains of: libraries and digital repositories, educational technologies, and content authoring and syndication.
In conclusion, Greenbaum spoke about the need to invest in people and recognize the variety work cultures and issues spanned by this kind of endeavour, including information and educational technologies, libraries, social software, and academic disciplines. Any tools developed must assess and design for different use cases, scholarly primitives, and types of learning collections.
Leaving Baltimore, Yee and Greenbaum traveled to George Mason University as guests of Roy Rosenzweig, Director of GMU’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM). See the story immediately below for more information about the CHNM site). The IU representatives spent an afternoon in discussion with CHNM staff, introducing many of the same topics covered in the Baltimore presentations, and “comparing notes” with members of the George Mason team.
That evening, Yee and Greenbaum gave a more formal presentation to a larger audience, invited by Director Rosenzweig for the occasion.
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Center for History and New Media: George Mason University
The IU and the Center for History and New Media were introduced to one another in June of this year when IU Director David Greenbaum and CHNM Director Roy Rosenzweig both attended a Digital Library Federation scholars' advisory panel, convened in Washington, D.C. The gathering, included more than a dozen humanities scholars from universities and archival institutions around the country. Both Greenbaum and Rosenzweig recognized some similarities in their projects' aims, and the value of further discussions about shared challenges and lessons learned. In that spirit, Rosenzweig extended an invitation to Greenbaum and IU Technology Architect Raymond Yee to visit George Mason and meet with CHNM staff and other interested participants to discuss IU's Scholar's Box work and other issues facing both projects. After making presentations in Baltimore last month, Greenbaum and Yee headed down to the Geogre Mason campus.
The CHNM is home to several current projects, including: History Matters, an online archive of materials designed for high school and college teachers of U.S. History courses; the September 11 Digital Archive; the History News Network, featuring articles and opinion pieces by historians from across the political spectrum (this week's entries are especially pertinent to presidential elections); Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, which provides an accessible introduction to the French Revolution; and there are more. To explore these projects and others, visit the CHNM site, linked below, in a paragraph excerpted from the site:
Since 1994, the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) has used digital media and computer technology to change the ways that people—scholars, students, and the general public—learn about and use the past. We do that by bringing together the most exciting and innovative digital media with the latest and best historical scholarship. We believe that serious scholarship and cutting edge multimedia can be combined to promote an inclusive and democratic understanding of the past as well as a broad historical literacy that fosters deep understanding of the most complex issues about the past and present. CHNM's work has been recognized with major awards from the American Historical Association and other national organizations, as well as with grants from the Sloan, Rockefeller, Gould, Delmas, and Kellogg foundations and the National Endowment for the Humanities . . . Many CHNM projects are undertaken in collaboration with the American Social History Project (ASHP)/Center for Media and Learning at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York (CUNY).
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Six Berkeley Programs Recognized for University/Community Partnership
By Wendy Edelstein, UC Berkeley Public Affairs | 27 October 2004
The fifth annual University/Community Partnerships recognition reception was held Monday, Oct. 25, at University House, honoring the achievements of individuals and groups from the Berkeley campus and the community whose joint efforts benefit local residents. Through unique collaborations, university and community members share information, research, and expertise as they work to address some of the day’s most pressing problems.
Hosted by Chancellor Robert Birgeneau and his wife, Mary Catherine, this year’s reception paid tribute to six programs that promote access to higher education, the application of technology to education and literacy, and a range of goals in the areas of public health, nutrition, community empowerment, and environmental stewardship.
“This has been a particular pleasure for Mary Catherine and myself,” said the chancellor, “because it gives us the opportunity to meet some of the more idealistic members of the campus and local communities.”
Read the complete Wendy Edelstein article here in the Berkeleyan.
In 2001 and 2003 projects affiliated with the IU were recipients of University/Community Partnership Recognition Awards; follow the links to read about past awards.
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Geography On-line: "A Cause for Celebration"
Over the past several years David Rumsey has digitized much of his extensive collection of maps of North and South America spanning from 1700-1900, and has worked to help create tools and interfaces to make them freely accessible and useful for research and teaching. An article by Jane Ganahl, in the San Francisco Chronicle on September 27, 2004, described his goal as wanting to design a Web site that "featured such high resolution and mobility that clicking on a map would be like holding it in your hands." And maps are important, he says, because, "Everyone is curious about where they live. And every map is like a little snapshot of history; each is a visual history."
Rumsey's web site gets, "around 7,000 hits a day," he says. "This tells you that the Internet can create an interest in pretty much any subject matter. We know that the site is used by a wide variety of people -- colleges, of course, but more than that. There are even homeschooled kids in Iowa who can download three historic maps of their area. It's wonderful to track who is using it; it's like hearing footsteps in a quiet library."
One tool in particular that can be used to access the Rumsey collection is called insight, which is created by Luna Imaging, a company known in academic circles for its research tools. insight works with several different browsers, and can be used through a web browser or as a more powerful Java Client, enabling the user to browse, search, collect, digital high- resolution images, and to zoom-in to explore the beautiful details in the images. Users can also read extensive data about each image, such as dimensions, publisher, dates, and descriptive notes.
The Rumsey site is now branching into fine art images by linking to collections numbering in the tens of thousands. "It's history and art and geography at the click of a mouse." And Rumsey couldn't be happier with how things are turning out . . . "By the time my granddaughter is my age, this is how libraries will be transformed," he smiles. "Everyone will have access to all these fantastic things from our past. I think it's wonderful — a great cause for celebration."
Read the complete SF Chronicle article, or go to David Rumsey's web site.
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Upcoming Events
On October 20 the Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP) began a Writing Teachers Write Berkeley reading series. Recommencing in January 2005, the monthly reading at Barnes & Noble on Shattuck Avenue in downtown Berkeley will showcase teachers reading from their own work. Selected evenings will also include students reading their work. The next event, on January 26, will feature Bruce Green and students from El Cerrito High. More information about this BAWP event is located here.
Check the Bay Area Writing Project (BAWP) homepage for announcements about upcoming Saturday Seminars for Teachers during the school year. The 2004-05 series began in October, and the latest information on future events will be posted on the BAWP site.
The Bay Area Science Project (BASP) and the Bay Area Math Project (BAMP), both of which are affiliated with the Lawrence Hall of Science, now have their event calendars for 2004/2005 on-line. You may view them at the links above.
The Bay Area Science Project (BASP) is a teacher leadership network committed to quality science education that is equitable and accessible for all students, and is based on research, sound teaching strategies, and teachers' experience of effective classroom practice.
The Bay Area Mathematics Project provides a forum for professional growth for K-12 mathematics teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area. BAMP Saturday Seminars are free and open to all Bay Area teachers.
This year BAWP, BASP and BAMP will be sharing the Albany Middle School site for Saturday Seminars. Visit the sites listed here to keep informed of upcoming events, and to find registration instructions and maps.
The Office of Resources for International and Area Studies (ORIAS) will offer the ORIAS working group for 2004/05. A series of Saturday morning seminars at U. C. Berkeley for K-14 teachers.
This year's theme is: Constructing Identities: Comparative Short Fiction From the Arab World, East Asia and Western Europe. This year's series begins December 4, discussing Ovid's Metamorphoses with Edan Dekel from the Classics Department at UC Berkeley. Human identity is formed and reformed in Ovid's rewriting of Greek and Roman mythology through stories of transformation. ORIAS lecturer Edan Dekel will introduce this year's seminar series with an exploration of the construction of identities in this highly influential work from the ancient world.
As described at the ORIAS site: Authors, like history teachers, often ask their audience/students to imagine the lives of people outside their own experience - to construct an identity for the "other." This year's ORIAS working group looks at comparative short fiction from Europe, the Arab world and East Asia with a focus on constructing identities. How do we construct identity? Is it flexible? In what ways is it pre-determined? How does our community define and test our identity? Readers, coffee and lunch provided. Readings will be provided in advance.
The working group is open to all educators but space is limited. Registration is free for the first 15 applicants in each session. Funded slots are full. You may guest in for individual sessions. There will be a $20 charge per session for additional teacher enrollment and guests.
For more information visit this link, which offers more information and a summary of the scheduled presentations.
EarthTeam, is an environmental network for teens, teachers and youth leaders. The EarthTeam Restoration Initiative (ETRI) creates restoration projects for SF Bay Area teens throughout the year at different sites around the Bay area. Ongoing ETRI restoration events offer students a chance to do hands-on environmental work locally, support teachers who want to promote environmental learning and stewardship, and help local habitat restoration efforts of government, nonprofit, and private organizations
In November ETRI will hold resotration events on November 6 at Fort Funston in San Francisco, and on November 20 at MLK, Jr. Shoreline Park in Oakland.
For more information about EarthTeam check out their website.
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