"New ELI 7 Things… Brief Explores iPad Apps for Learning"

"New ELI 7 Things… Brief Explores iPad Apps for Learning"

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From the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative:

Applications designed for the iPad offer interactive content that takes advantage of touch-screen navigation. The iPad combines robust computational functionality with a screen large enough to serve as a legitimate replacement for printed textbooks and other course materials. Where the iPad applications have led, other tablets and their attendant applications can be expected to follow, creating a more competitive and diverse market for tools of this type. Applications that live in the spaces where education and entertainment overlap can capture the imagination, enticing students to learn on their own.
The “7 Things You Should Know About…” series from the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.
In addition to the “7 Things You Should Know About…” briefs, you may find other ELI resources useful in addressing teaching, learning, and technology issues at your institution. To learn more, please visit the ELI Resources page.

Direct to the Brief (2 pages; PDF)

Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) Language Resources

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From the OLAC Language Resource Page:

[The] catalog, developed by the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC), provides access to a wealth of information about thousands of languages, including details of text collections, audio recordings, dictionaries, and software, sourced from dozens of digital and traditional archives.

(via Twitter)

"See How Newspapers Around The World Celebrated Egypt's Freedom"

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Ujala Sehgal from Business Insider has compiled images of the front pages from 17 newspapers and has made them available on the BI web site. The collection includes newspapers from several countries.
Sehgal writes:

The front pages of newspapers in moments like this become part of history itself, so we went through the world’s newspapers today to see the ways they documented this incredible moment.

Of course, some of our favorite covers still came from our colorful local newspapers, like the Daily News‘ headline “Hosni Mu Bye-Bye!” and the New York Post’s “That’s A Wrap!” (featuring Mubarak’s head on top of an Egyptian mummy.)

 
Direct to the Collection

Lists & Rankings: They're Here: E-Book Bestseller Lists Debut in the New York Times

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From the NY Times Arts Beat Blog:

This week’s Book Review introduces revamped best-seller lists, the result of many months of planning, research and design.
On the Web, there are three entirely new lists. One consists of rankings for fiction and nonfiction that combine print and e-book sales; one is limited exclusively to e-book sales for fiction and nonfiction; and the third, Web-only list tracks combined print sales — of both hardcover and paperback editions — for fiction and nonfiction.
All the other lists, though presented in reworked formats, will be familiar to readers.

Direct to the New NY Times Bestseller Lists

"Down in the Data Dumps: Researchers Inventory a World of Information"

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From a Scientific American Article:

Data are the common currency that unites all fields of science. As science progresses data proliferate, providing points of reference, revealing trends, and offering evidence to substantiate hypotheses. Decades into the digitization of science, however, data proliferate exponentially, at times threatening to drown knowledge and information in a sea of noise.
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One of the most interesting articles***, however, attempts to quantify exactly how much data we’re actually talking about and makes a key distinction between data and information. In “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate and Compute Information” Martin Hilbert, a doctoral candidate the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in Los Angeles, and Priscila López Pavez, a graduate student studying information and knowledge in society at the Open University of Catalonia in Santiago, Chile, report on their efforts to track 60 analog and digital technologies during the period from 1986 to 2007. The researchers found that the amount of data generated those two decades exploded as digital technology moved into the mainstream. For example, the amount of data stored electronically in 2007 was equivalent to 61 CD-ROMs per person living on the planet at the time. For perspective, if those CDs were stacked, they would reach from Earth to the moon plus a quarter of that distance beyond.

*** The “articles” (more than 10) that are referred to in the story are available for free from Science. You’ll need to register here.

Data Visualization Tool: IssueMap.org From the FCC and FortiusOne

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From O’Reilly Radar:

Citizens have a new tool to visualize data and map it onto their own communities. Geospatial startup FortiusOne and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have teamed up to launch IssueMap.org. IssueMap is squarely aimed at addressing one of the biggest challenges that government agencies, municipalities and other public entities have in 2011: converting open data into information that people can distill into knowledge and insight.

From the News Release:

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and FortiusOne, the leading location analysis software provider, today announced the launch ofIssueMap, an online mapping site that enables citizens to quickly map data they care about and easily share it through social networks. IssueMap is as simple as copy, paste, map.” Users can go from a spreadsheet to a shareable map in less than 60 seconds.
The FCC and FortiusOne share a commitment to making public data sets more usable and valuable for all citizens. The Open Government Directive of 2009 brought about the release of massive amounts of tabular government data. Without a simple way to visualize and add context to this data, it has remained largely untapped by the public. IssueMap’s intuitive mapping interface enables citizens and decision-makers alike to engage with this data for better understanding of the issues impacting their communities.

Direct to IssueMap.org