Hey! Using Google Glass to learn morse code. “Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have built a system that can teach people morse code while they’re concentrating on something else entirely. To do it, they modified a set of Google Glass (remember that?), which has a built-in speaker and bone-conduction transducer that simulates the experience of being tapped on the side of the head.”
Oh, thank goodness, because I might be doomed: Social media won’t affect your ability to concentrate: Study “New York: Frequent use of online social media does not lead to long-term problems with your ability to concentrate, says a new study. These modern communication tools do not, it seems, interfere with our primal instincts, such as long-term attitudes, time appreciation, and concentration, in the way that many critics have suggested in recent years, said the study published in the International Journal Social Media and Interactive Learning Environments.”
Is it like Pringles? Study finds that the more you Google, the more likely you are to keep Googling. “People who use the internet to retrieve information are more likely to use it again and less likely to use their memory, according to a study by UC Santa Cruz psychology professor Benjamin Storm. Published in the journal Memory, Storm finds the internet is changing the way people learn, remember, and solve problems.”
Looks like the Internet Archive is making an effort to archive Coursera course content.
More good stuff from the London School of Economics and Political Science: Today I Learned (TIL): Using Reddit as a tool for public engagement, profile raising and scholarly dissemination. “Increasingly US universities and research organisations, such as the American Chemical Society and mega-journal PLOS One, are making regular use of science AMAs as a way of boosting interest in their work, and raising the profile of academics with a global audience. It seemed like too good an opportunity to ignore, and so we asked one of our Faculty academics to help us test the potential reach of a Reddit science AMA. Our willing subjects were Dr Todd Hartman, a Lecturer in Quantitative Methods at the Sheffield Methods Institute, and Dr Rhys Hester from the Robina Institute at the University of Minnesota, who co-authored on a recent paper about racial bias in criminal sentencing in South Carolina. Their research had been […]
Foundr created a huge guide to how to successfully create an online course. This guide is more hype-y than the stuff I usually link to in ResearchBuzz but it’s also extensive and in-depth and I’ll forgive the hype-y-ness (It’s 1:35 AM so I’m just basically making up words.) “Now with more than 1,000 students and counting, we receive daily emails asking us how we’ve managed to build such an intuitive and comprehensive online course. So to help our readers understand just how we did it, and how anyone can do the same, we’ve put together the following definitive guide on how to create an epic online course. In the following article, we’ll walk you through the benefits of an online course, the major steps involved in setting one up, and even a guide to helpful tools and resources that we’ve used ourselves.”
TechCrunch has a writeup on an app that lets students grade each other. “… Peergrade is a platform solely designed for facilitating peer feedback and peer grading within university courses. It lets teachers set an assignment and grading criteria, and invite students to upload their completed work to Peergrade, such as in the form of a Word document or YouTube video. The platform then distributes those assignments to different students who are charged with actually carrying out the grading and giving feedback.”
The state of Kansas has a new Web site providing information on the school’s 250+ districts. “In Kansas, a new website allows the public to browse the state’s 286 school districts, along with 24 other private and specialized public school systems, in order to compare and contrast several evaluative factors and points of information.”
The ALA is offering a digitization workshop for beginners at the end of January. “Whether you’re a community repository just dipping your toes into digitization, or you need to digitize old materials to save space and enable greater access, the ability to plan and begin a digitization project is quickly becoming an essential skill for librarians. In this workshop, digitization expert Susanne Caro will show you what you need to get started if you are new to digitization.” It’s not free, but $60 for an introduction to digitization sounds like a good deal.
The University of Southern California is planning a huge initiative to teach analysis of biomedical information. “…the National Institutes of Health has awarded USC a three-year, $6.3 million grant to build Big Data U, the nation’s first Training Coordination Center aimed at teaching people with different backgrounds how to assemble astronomical amounts of data into compatible and comparable statistics. The goal is to find trends, interesting relationships and clustering effects….Big Data U, tentatively set to launch in the spring of next year, will be a hybrid of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and YouTube video tutorials. It’s a free resource for anyone who wants a self-guided or semi-structured study of topics relevant to biomedical science. Social media tools will provide ratings for course content and guide the selection of relevant training media.”
How-To Geek: How to learn another language for free online.
Very cool: a Chrome extension lets you sort of simulate language immersion. “Users select one of 64 languages supported by Google Translate that they’d like to learn, as well as the level of immersion they need, from ‘novice’ to ‘fluent.’ The extension then translates random words on whatever you’re reading online into the foreign language. “
Nice roundup from Wired: The best ooey-gooey, kid-friendly science on the Web. ”
Lifehacker has a quick writup on TechBoomers, which are very, very simple lessons for folks who want to learn to use popular Web sites. There are many sites included here, though a couple of them made me raise an eyebrow (Groupon?) I liked this a lot; it’s nice to see a site that does very simple step-by-step instructions with a lot of screen shots. There’s still a place for that.
Now available: a database of Inuktut language learning materials. Inuktut is one of the principal Inuit languages of Canada. “ITK officially launched the website Katiqsugat: Inuit Early Learning Resources Sept. 2, a central database that is home to a number of games, songs, craft ideas, research, child care policy and other resources for parents.”
