Gapminder and Gapminder World will leave your student's mouths agape...

from New Media Consortium RSS by Keene Haywood

Many of you may be familiar with the excellent TED Talks given by Sweden's Hans Rosling about visualizing data. His tool, Gapminder, is an innovative Flash application that allows normally rather mundane data to come alive and reveal trends and patterns not normally seen. Gapminder was snapped up by Google in 2007. However, Gapminder's website still has some cool PDFs of visualizations as well as access to some canned visualizations that are excellent. In particular, visit Gapminder World which allows you to play with a wide range of world population data all they way back to 1800 embedded in a full browser screen. The graph ties nicely into a map as well to see the spatial relationships.

In case you are wondering if you can create your own moving bubble graphs with your data, yes you can. The renamed Gapminder is a now a Google Gadget called Motion Chart that anyone can use. The TED talks and other info available right on Gapminder's homepage. This webapp is very powerful for visualizing your data and a great tool to have in your digital toolbox.

Student perceptions of the effectiveness of group and individualized feedback in online courses

from EDUCAUSE | All Content by ckeller

While an abundance of research exists on best practices in the face–to–face classroom, the same is not true for online learning. In this new and constantly evolving environment, researchers are just beginning to understand what constitutes effective learning strategies. One of the most well recognized models for explaining online learning is the Community of Inquiry Framework (CoI). However, despite its recent empirical validation, the CoI provides only general indicators of effectiveness, not guides to specific practices. This study looks at a common practice, providing students with feedback, and assesses whether narrowly targeted, individualized feedback or group feedback is more effective. Through mixed methods research, the authors examined student preferences and strategies by student level, finding that while there is no one best solution there are strategies that appear most appropriate for different learner levels. Suggestions for implementing best practices and directions for future research are also discussed.

2008 NMC Summer Conference Proceedings

The 2008 NMC Conference Proceedings features ten papers including case studies; a tutorial; introductions to current topics such as storytelling, digital media, and fair use; descriptions of special services, tools, and information technology support programs developed at member schools; and discussions of new media and pedagogy. The topics were ones nominated by attendees at the 2008 NMC Summer Conference held in June at Princeton University.

Download Individual Chapters:

Digital Storytelling: An Alternative Instructional Approach
Ruben R. Puentedura, Hippasus

Digital Storytelling: Old Ways, New Tools
Laurie Burruss, Pasadena City College

The Adding Machine: Remote Digital Storytelling and Performance
George Brown and James Ferolo, Bradley University

Building and Supporting a Large-Institution Digital Media Service
Chris Millet, The Pennsylvania State University

DAM if You Do! BlueStream Digital Asset Management Infrastructure
Louis E. King, The University of Michigan

A Call for the Corporeal ‘cause Pixels Are Ephemeral and Archeologists Won’t Find Them
Jared Bendis, Case Western Reserve University

Infrastructures in Virtual Learning
Holly Willis, University of Southern California

Learning 2.0: Who’s in Control Now?
Wendy Shapiro and Lev Gonick, Case Western Reserve University

Why Walk When You Can Fly? Reflections from an Advanced Second Life Preconference Session
Christopher Holden and Beth Sachtjen, NMC Virtual Worlds

Fair Use Ain’t What You Think It Is: Copyright and Fair Use in the Digital Classroom
Mark J. Davis, Tulane University, CERT, and Loyola University