IT’s Academic will remain here for posterity, but we are moving new updates and other interactive content to our new Educational Technologies Center site at http://etc.princeton.edu/blog
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PULSe – the Princeton University Learning Series is a new IT learning opportunity that supports many of the technologies OIT makes available. Faculty, staff, and students – anyone with a Princeton netID – can participate in the live Friday afternoon webinars or access recorded tutorials on available services such as SharePoint, Roxen, and WebSpace. PULSe maintains a presence on Twitter and Facebook where additional resources are shared. In this Productive Scholar session, you will be introduced to the site, its features, and the iLinc web conferencing system that is used to present the weekly webinars.
Lynda.com is a California-based company that offers online training materials on popular software platforms, web applications, and consumer technology. Some are short introductions to a new technology or software package. Others are in-depth instructions on software applications or suites. Continue reading »
Today's Lunch 'n Learn, presented by Angel Brady of Princeton's Humanities Resource Center considered the topic of "Collaboration Tools for Scholars."
Brady demonstrated several free tools that facilitate scholarly collaboration. Most were on sites external to the Princeton computing environment, one, WebSpace, is a Princeton-only resource.
Brady explained that these new tools are popular because they are stored on external servers that keep shared resources up to date, and ensure that collaborators are always working on the latest versions.Most of the tools also include social media features that allow further communication and sharing.
Formerly, trying to share, write, or gather research materials while working collaboratively relied upon repeated email exchanges, possible mis-matches between software versions, cross-platform issues, email boxes going over quota, and various versions of a file being in circulation at the same time. A major advantage to these new cloud-based services is that they are browser-based, are cross-platform, and that they allow multiple editors to work simultaneously.
Many of the functions performed by these tools can be replicated by other applications at Princeton-- often more securely. However the ease of use, the fact that these tools are in common use among scholars, that students have equal access to them, and the advantage of synchronous editing make them very attractive for the types of collaborative documents and resources that require medium security, and that need to be shared with people from all over the word. For university business that requires the transmission of sensitive information, web-based external services should NOT be used.
The tools discussed today were Mendeley and Zotero, tools for amassing an online research collection, bubbl.us, a mind-mapping service, Posterous Groups, a sub-function of a popular micro-blogging site, Google Documents an online office suite of applications, Dropbox and WebSpace, two file-sharing services, and Diigo, a social bookmarking tool.
Medeley and Zotero perform very similar functions in that they organize reference and research materials found online, and also have social-media functions. These tools can be used to gather links to resources such as journal articles and web pages, bookmark, and annotate them. Downloading similar documents and links to one's desktop can result in file names that don't reveal the actual content of the downloaded file, and these "mystery PDFs" can be difficult to share. Mendeley and Zotero allow you to make online folders of documents, and automatically download the metadata associated with files, including titles, abstracts, and tags, listing them in a clear library-like format. You can also alter and add to the metadata. Notes, highlighting, and organization within groups and folders can be accomplished in either application. Reference collections can be make public or private, and both tools have the ability to find other public libraries organized by people who share your research interests,
Mendeley is a desktop client originally designed as a PDF annotation tool (it also supports .txt files). It also has app versions for the iPhone, iPad and iPodTouch. Mendelay works with bibliographic citation formats such as BibTeX, Research Info Systems (RIS), Zotero Library and Endnote XML. A free account in Mendeley allows for 500MB of personal storage space, as well as 500MB of shared space. Both private and public groups are supported, but the free account limits private groups to 5; with each group having a maximum of 10 members. Group folder track all group activity, and it is possible for the original group owner to reassign ownership to another user if necessary, so that existing group work does not have to be recreated in a new account. There is a bookmarklet tool to make it easy to import sources found on the web.
Cloud-based, with desktop apps for MacOS, Windows and Linux.
Zotero Groups is part of Zotero, a Firefox add-in that works with Mac, Windows and Linux (a stand-alone version of Zotero for Chrome and Safari users is available in alpha). Group Libraries, both public and private can be created. The Firefox plugin can capture journal and book information with one click. Highlights and notes can be added to content. Library ownership can be transferred to another user. Zotero can also be used as a bibliographic tool, with a drag and drop feature to MS Word (Zotero export bibliographic information in the RIS format, which EndNote can import.). Your Zotero library has an RSS feed that can be followed by group members, to notify them of updates. Zotero was designed for academics, and was originally created at George Mason University. Storage space for a free account is 100MB.
Cloud-based, and a Firefox add-in compatible with MacOS, Windows and Linux versions of Firefox; a client for Chrome and Safari is in the works.
For the visually minded, Bubbl.us is a tool that allows collaborative mind-mapping via a series of connected bubbles that diagram related concepts. The free version of the cloud service allows 3 "sheets" of mind-maps to be created; more are available with a paid upgrade. Groups can be made for editing (read/write/delete) or read-only access to Bubbl.us mind maps, but group members must join Bubbl.us to participate.
Finished mind-maps can be exported as .jpg or .png image files, but the application itself uses Adobe Flash to create the interactive maps. Maps can also be embedded in an external web page as a way to share them with others. Although the tool is very simple, as mind-mapping tools go, it also has a very minimal learning curve. Most similar tools are fee-based.
cloud-based
Posterus, a popular micro-blogging site (think "Twitter," but with the ability to make groups) also has the ability to make simple collaborative websites for blogging among group members or multiple groups. Posterous posts can include both text, images (with automatic slide shows for posts with multiple images), links and PDFs with a 100MB upload limit per post. Posterous sites can be private (password-protected) or public, and posting is possible using a number of devices, including mobile phones, emails or bookmarklets. Responding to or adding to posts is also possible via email. For a researcher in the field or on the go, it can be an invaluable tool to share information with group members almost instantly. Groups are private by default, and have no limits on the number of members. Posterous can be linked to existing sites on social networks such as Facebook or Twitter.
Cloud-based, works on mobile browsers as well as desktop ones.
Google Docs is a great tool to use for real-time or asynchronous collaboration with colleagues; several users can be working on a document at any given time (with visual hints to other editors as to what parts of the document other users are editing, and almost instant updating of new content.) The Google Docs include familiar office-type applications including a word processor, a spreadsheet tool, a slide show creator, and a tool for building forms. Documents created in Google Docs are compatible with other similar desktop based applications, such as Open Office, Microsoft Office, and iWorks, and files can be imported and exported from one to the other.
Collaborators all need a Google account to use Google Docs, but it does not need to be a Gmail account -- any email address can be registered with a Google account. Various saved states of a documents are stored and can be reviewed and reverted to when needed. Ownership of various shared documents can be reassigned to another group member, and colleagues can be invited to edit as a private group, or be completely public.
Google Docs is very popular with Princeton students, but should not be used to share secure course information that would be better put into Blackboard or another Princeton-managed storage space, however for casual collaboration, particularly outside Princeton, it's a great tool.
cloud-based
WebSpace is a file-sharing platform that Princeton has licensed from a company called Xythos, a subsidiary of the Blackboard Learning Management System. Xythos is an enterprise-level document management system that allows for users to set up workflows, retention strategies, and enter metadata for stored documents. Everyone at Princeton with a valid netid has 5GB of storage on WebSpace.
WebSpace has built-in integration with Blackboard course websites, allowing shared storage for course participants. A popular feature of the Blackboard component is the drop box, which allows students to share work with each other, and another feature that allows instructors to post links to files stored in WebSpace directly to one, or more, Blackboard sites.
WebSpace can also do simple file sharing on a file-by-file or folder level. WebSpace integrates with the University LDAP, so it is easy to make groups within the Princeton community. A "ticket" to a file or folder can also be shared with anyone in the world with an email address. Tickets contain a specific URL to the shared material that sets editing permissions, the duration of these permissions, and shares the file directly via WebSpace rather than sending it as an email attachment. In all cases, users can "subscribe" to a folder or file that is shared with them to receive notification of changes. Files in WebSpace can also be made public, and each has a unique URL so that others can link to them.
A desktop client is available for 32-bit Windows machines. A Mac version is in beta. For those for whom the client does not work, the WebSpace drive can be mapped as a network drive.
Dropbox is the most popular of the cloud-based file sharing services as a stand-alone application, and is also used by many other applications as a storage mechanism. Dropbox allows for public or private file sharing among groups and individuals. Dropbox group members must also be members of Dropbox.
Dropbox can be mounted as a web drive on Mac and Windows, and also has a desktop client for Mac, Windows and Linux. Dropbox is used for many mobile applications, and automatically syncs all versions to the web. Dropbox free accounts have 2GB of storage, and can track changes, for some level of document versioning control.
Cloud-based, Mac, Windows, and Linux. Both tools can be used for file sharing, and collaboration, and while Dropbox is the easier tool to use, WebSpace has integration with Princeton-specific resources that can aid collaboration.
Diigo is a social bookmarking tool that allows you to bookmark web pages, annotate and highlight them, and then share your marks publicly or privately. You can create groups for gathering and sharing bookmarks. Bookmarks are organized by tags, and group ownership can be transferred to another user. Diigo, and Diigolet, the Diigo bookmarklet tool, work with Firefox and Chrome. For fans of Delicious, a popular social bookmarking among scholars that has been around for years, Diigo is a good alternative. (Delicious's new owner, Yahoo!, has announced that it will soon "sunset" Delicious.) Diigo has an import tool that will ingest your existing Delicious bookmarks, and at lest for now, has a setting that will allow you to bookmark sites in Diigo and Delicious simultaneously.
A copy of the presentation used in the talk is visible here:
The presentation can also be viewed online here, or downloaded from this location.
A podcast will be posted here shortly.
For reunions last year, OIT created a special web site tailored for the small mobile devices that are now proliferating in the marketplace, cell phones with web browsers, iPhones, Blackberries, and the like. The experiment proved to be quite successful. To accelerate the development of such services, OIT signed an agreement in December that will give the University access to Blackboard Mobile, an environment that will permit users to access public information about the University in a format especially suited to such mobile platforms.
The result will soon be a Princeton-specific application, m.Princeton, for leading brands of smart phones.
Mobile Central was founded by a group of Stanford students who developed the core products offered by Mobile Central by rising to the challenge of a course assignment in a Stanford computer science class - the task: to deliver real mobile solutions for the Stanford campus community.
iStanford now permits users to search the campus directory and campus map, view athletics and course information, and a variety of other campus services. The students later formed the company TerriblyClever Design in 2007, and developed several more mobile suites for other colleges and universities.
During the past year, several universities, notably Stanford, Duke, and MIT, have used these same services to permit mobile users to access campus maps, directories of people and places, bus schedules and campus tours, event calendars, announcements and news, as well as images and videos.
Princeton is now building a full suite of such mobile applications for the benefit of the entire campus, as well as visitors, parents, and prospective students. OIT has assembled a team with representatives from several departments to complete the first phase of the work in time for reunions this coming May. The first phase will include a campus map, a campus directory, athletics schedules, course information, news, and the public events calendar.
During the first phase, Princeton will also assemble support for Reunions, from events and campus maps through directories and local restaurant menus.
The second phase will be ready in time for the fall. It will deliver real time shuttle information, access to the library catalog, an image gallery, additional video content, building maps (library floor plans, for example), as well as an online Orange Key tour.. Additional changes will be made as needed and will be delivered as updates to the existing application.
At the April 28 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, Janet Temos ‘82 *01 and Ryan Irwin ‘10 of Blackboard Mobile Central discussed the details about the coming Princeton mobile apps. They noted that the apps will be delivered in formats that support the Blackberry Storm, Curve, and Bold, the iPhone, the iPod touch, and eventually the iPad. The apps will also work on any smart phone that can support a web browser. The application will be free, but users will need to download the application that suits their brand of phone.
The Apple applications will be available for download via iTunes. Blackberry applications will be available from the Blackberry app store. Blackboard Mobile Central and Princeton will host the web-based version.
Check back soon at www.princeton.edu/princetonmobile.
Janet Temos was trained as an architectural historian, and received degrees in art history from Williams College (MA 1992), and Princeton University (PhD 2001). She began working with the Educational Technologies Center (ETC), in 1993, and became a full-time member of the staff in 2000. She is now director of ETC, and continues to work with faculty who wish to use computer technology in their teaching. Current projects include courses on film, archaeology, medieval manuscripts, African languages taught in the US, and a collaborative project with the Princeton University Art Museum to develop an on-line repository of digital images of objects in the museum’s East Asian collection.
The podcast and presentation are available.
In the Fall term of 2009, Princeton conducted a pilot sponsored by the High Meadows Foundation, the University Library, and the Office of Information Technology, to assess the use of e-readers in the classroom. The reader used was the Amazon Kindle DX, a lightweight, portable e-reader with the capacity to hold approximately 3500 books, in three University courses.
The project aimed to explore the use of the e-readers in classes for which e-reserves were the primary readings. The printing of e-reserve readings at Princeton accounts for a large portion of printing in public clusters (total of 10 million sheets of paper last year). The e-reader pilot sought to target e-reserve readings and present them on an e-reader to see if printing could be reduced.
The pilot participants consisted of three faculty members, 51 students, and several administrators in the Library and the Office of Information Technology.
The three courses in the pilot involved considerable eReserve reading, all had some content in the Kindle store, and they had to be of a size that would permit the involvement of three courses. The courses in the pilot were Civil Society and Public Policy (Professor Stanley Katz, an undergraduate seminar), U.S. Policy in the Middle East (Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer, a graduate seminar), and Religion and Magic in Ancient Rome (Professor Harriet Flower, a graduate seminar).
Devices were given to students in September. The pilot was voluntary with opt-out possibilities at any time. One student opted out at the start of the pilot. No student opted out after the pilot began. Students were asked to do the bulk of the course reading on the Kindle. 95% of the students reported that they had not previously used an eReader.
Participants were asked to do pilot course readings on the e-reader without printing as much as they felt it was possible. The pilot concluded with a survey and some final focus groups in February 2010.
The survey results are available at at the e-reader project web site and in the presentation slides.
The goals of the pilot were to reduce the desire to print, to explore the unique strengths of eReaders, all while being careful not to affect adversely the classroom experience.
At the April 14 Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, Janet Temos, Director of OIT’s Educational Technologies Center, Stan Katz and Dan Kurtzer two of the faculty involved in the pilot, and Trevor Dawes, Circulation Director at the University Library reviewed the findings of the Princeton e-reader pilot and shared their experiences.
Temos reported that the pilot did indeed reduce students’ desire to print.
Students judged the screen size, image resolution, device weight and storage capacity to be excellent. Highlighting, annotating, navigating within and between books, and the dictionary features achieved much less positive evaluations. Overall, Temos reported, the students thought that the devices had promise, the reason they said at the end that none opted out.
Kurtzer noted that, in his graduate seminar, all of the students were expected to read the course material before coming to class. And so, while they may have experienced some challenges with navigation, those did not occur in class. He reported that all of the students liked the fact that they could carry all of their reading around all of the time.
Many of Kurtzer’s students have recently downloaded material from current classes to maintain the experience. Main criticisms included highlighting, keeping track of bookmark references, and moving between and among passages from different books.
One problem that the pilot addressed was the difficulty of working with pdf documents because you can’t enlarge the type size. The only surprise in the data, reported Kurtzer, was that the pilot appears only to cut down 50% of the students’ printing.
Use of the Library’s eReserve system has grown exponentially, Dawes commented. The pilot provided a good opportunity to test the use of the eReserves system on an eReader platform. For this project, the processing was different in that it was required to scan the pages individually, trimmed, and processed further by OIT staff. Early on, we discovered that the Kindle could not read pdf documents in their native format. The amount of staff time involved was large and, he concluded, would not be sustainable for the device. We will continue to monitor progress to see if new devices will be able to accommodate pdf’s more efficiently.
Professor Katz’s course involved 23 books. He emphasized that the device is superbly ideal to accompany travel, and he and students agree wholeheartedly with that assessment. That said, it was wholly inappropriate for the close textual work involved in the course.
Classroom discussion required that all students be looking at the same passages, and they were expected to annotate those passages. Annotations collapse into footnotes, the keyboard is tough to use, and the Kindle had built-in limits on the amount of text that could be highlighted and annotated. The tedious nature of finding passages caused consistent classroom confusion. All that said, he is off to San Francisco for a dissertation review. “I will load it into the Kindle, said Katz, “and love it once again.”
Janet Temos was trained as an architectural historian, and received degrees in art history from Williams College (MA 1992), and Princeton University (PhD 2001). She began working with the Educational Technologies Center (ETC), in 1993, and became a full-time member of the staff in 2000. She is now director of ETC, and continues to work with faculty who wish to use computer technology in their teaching. Current projects include courses on film, archaeology, medieval manuscripts, African languages taught in the US, and a collaborative project with the Princeton University Art Museum to develop an on-line repository of digital images of objects in the museum’s East Asian collection.
Daniel C. Kurtzer retired from the U.S. Foreign Service with the rank of Career-Minister. From 2001-2005 he served as the United States Ambassador to Israel and from 1997-2001 as the United States Ambassador to Egypt. He served as a political officer at the American embassies in Cairo and Tel Aviv, Deputy Director of the Office of Egyptian Affairs, speechwriter on the Policy Planning Staff, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, and Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research. Kurtzer was a member of the American delegation to the Israel-Palestinian autonomy negotiations (1979-1982), helped negotiate the creation of the Multinational Force and Observers (1981-1982), negotiated and oversaw the successful arbitration of the Taba border dispute between Israel and Egypt, crafted the 1988 peace initiative of Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and in 1991 served as a member of the U.S. peace team that brought about the Madrid Peace Conference. Subsequently, he served as coordinator of the multilateral peace negotiations and as the U.S. Representative in the Multilateral Refugee Working Group. Kurtzer received several of the U.S. Government’s most prestigious awards, including the President’s Distinguished Service Award, the Department of State Distinguished Service Award, the National Intelligence Community’s Award for Achievement, and the Director General of the Foreign Service Award for Political Reporting. Ph.D. Columbia University.
Stanley Katz is president emeritus of the American Council of Learned Societies. His recent research focuses upon the relationship of civil society and constitutionalism to democracy, and upon the relationship of the United States to the international human rights regime. He is also a commentator on higher education policy. Formerly Class of 1921 Bicentennial Professor of the History of American Law and Liberty at Princeton University, Katz is a scholar of American legal and constitutional history, and on philanthropy and non-profit institutions. He is the editor of the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise History of the Supreme Court of the United States and of the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Legal History (OUP, 2009). The author and editor of numerous books and articles, he has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Society for Legal History and as vice president of the Research Division of the American Historical Association. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Newberry Library, the Copyright Clearance Center and numerous other institutions. He is a commissioner of the National Historic Publications and Records Commission. He also currently serves as chair of the American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council Working Group on Cuba. Katz is a member of the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, the American Philosophical Society; a fellow of the American Society for Legal History, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Society of American Historians; a corresponding member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and an academico correspondiente of the Cuban Academy of Sciences. He has honorary degrees from several universities. Ph.D. Harvard University. Katz is director of the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies.
Trevor A. Dawes is the Circulation Services Director at the Princeton University Library, where he is responsible for the circulation, reserve, current periodicals, stack, remote storage and Borrow Direct operations in the library. He previously held several positions at the Columbia University Libraries. Mr. Dawes earned his MLS from Rutgers University’s School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies, and has two additional Masters Degrees from Teachers College, Columbia University. He is an active member of the American Library Association and the Association of College and Research Libraries.
The podcast and presentation are available.
Princeton University has created a cyberinfrastructure, says Curt Hillegas, the Director of Princeton's TIGRESS High Performance Computing and Visualization Center, itself a collaboration between the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering (PICSciE). Developed within the past decade, this cyberinfrastructure consists of computational systems, data and information management, advanced instruments, visualization environments, and people, all linked together by software and advanced networks to improve scholarly productivity and enable knowledge breakthroughs and discoveries not otherwise possible.
At the April 8 Lunch 'n Learn seminar, Hillegas noted that the University's research computing activity has grown to keep pace with and to provide leadership for this international trend. Tigress maintains a vast hardware and storage infrastructure. And staff provide support for programming and for the new visualization facilities within the Lewis Science library.
The effort, of course, also involves faculty across many disciplines and departments. This session highlighted the work of two University faculty: Professor Annabella Selloni from Chemistry and Professor Clarence Rowley from Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. The session demonstrated how computational science and engineering is enabling and accelerating scientific discovery.
Annabella Selloni’s research activity is aimed at obtaining a microscopic understanding of the property of materials with specific emphasis on surface and interface phenomena. At the Lunch ‘n Learn seminar, she discussed the quest to discover an efficient and perhaps less expensive alternative to platinum as a catalyst for the production of hydrogen. Princeton’s high performance computing systems have permitted her to model and to manipulate functionalized electrodes. At the seminar, she played simulations that illustrate how small surface changes can have a significant effect in the production of hydrogen.
Professor Clarence Rowley is modeling flows past a cavity, as would occur with a sun roof or an aircraft wheel well or weapons bay. Although his efforts have employed the processing power of a supercomputer, his aim has been to achieve workable results and a control design with a much more limited number of equations. Full systems require as many as 2,000,000 equations. Rowley now has control designs based upon just two equations. With such active control, it may be possible, for example, to mimic the fluid dynamics of insects and small birds and to design a controller to stabilize the leading edge of aircraft wings.
Hillegas concluded by inviting prospective users to apply to use the Tigress HPC resources. Users will find all the information needed to select the resources they need as well as information about applying for an account and time on the systems.
About the speakers:
After undergraduate studies at the University La Sapienza, Roma (Italy), Annabella Selloni graduated from the Swiss Institute of Technology in Lausanne-Switzerland (1979). This was followed by a postdoctoral position at IBM T.J.Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights (1980-1982). She has been Assistant Professor at the University La Sapienza in Roma (1982-1988), Associate Professor at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy (1988-1995), and Associate Professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland (1996-1999). In 1999 she joined the Dept of Chemistry of Princeton University, initially as Senior Research Staff and Lecturer, and as a full Professor (since 2009). Her research interests are in theoretical and computational condensed matter physics and chemistry, with particular focus on the use of first principles electronic structure and molecular dynamics methods to obtain an atomic scale understanding of the structural and electronic properties of surfaces and interfaces, including organic-inorganic and solid-liquid interfaces, surface reactions and catalysis, photochemistry and photocatalysis. Prof. Selloni has over 160 publications in the area of theoretical / computational chemical physics. She is part of the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Chemical Physics and Surface Science.
Professor Clarence Rowley received his B.S.E degree from Princeton University, and his M.S. and Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. He joined the Princeton faculty in 2001, and he is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and an Associated faculty member in the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. His research interests involve modeling and control of complex systems, particularly fluids systems with specific areas of interest including modeling and model reduction for bifurcation analysis and control; numerical methods, both for fluids simulations, and analysis of dynamical systems; and applications of geometric methods in fluid mechanics.
Curt Hillegas received his B.S. in Chemistry from Lehigh University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Chemistry from Princeton University. Curt is the Director of Princeton’s TIGRESS High Performance Computing and Visualization Center, a collaboration between the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering and the Office of Information Technology. He has helped to build a centrally managed research computing infrastructure that includes 65 TFLOPS of computational systems and 1 PB of shared storage as well as staffing for system administration, programming, and visualization support. He also serves on the Steering Committee for the EDUCAUSE Campus Cyberinfrastructure working group. Curt’s past work at Princeton includes managing the enterprise Unix group, architecting enterprise server and storage solutions, designing and managing central email infrastructure, and general Unix system administration.
The podcast and presentations are available.