Category: Podcasts

We begin the news roundup on this week’s podcast with a bit of embarrassing news from Dan, then dig into several stories about big media companies entering the online learning market and Google Books becoming more useful for scholarship. In our feature segment, Tom and Mills explain how they try to stay productive in a world of constant digital distractions like email and blog feeds. Helpful links this week include a terrific site for teaching through famous trials, a way to customize Google, and a dead simple online to-do list. And we remember 9/11 through our own site, the September 11 Digital Archive.

On the latest episode of the Digital Campus podcast, we continue our discussion of blogging, this time with a closer look at the challenges and difficulties of starting and maintaining a blog, attracting and keeping an audience, and making sure it doesn’t get in the way of other academic pursuits. In the news roundup, we compare the iPhone and Facebook platforms, examine two software projects that mine Wikipedia for trustworthiness, and wonder once again if anyone is home in Second Life.

Dan, Mills, and Tom celebrate the tenth edition of Digital Campus with part one in a new series on blogs and blogging. In this episode, we take a look back at how we became bloggers, examine questions of subject matter, voice, and style, and debate the risks and rewards of blogging in a scholarly context. We also report on problems posed by the iPhone for wireless network administrators, the subversive role of SMS in China, and ups and downs for humanists in Second Life. Picks of the week include Flock, a “social” web browser, the David Rumsey collection of nearly 16,000 historic maps, and the launch of plain text Google Books.

What are students, researchers, and librarians supposed to do with the tremendous volume of digitized scholarly materials now available to them? We discuss the problem of information overload in this week’s feature segment. The news roundup turns into an iPhone-fest–or is it an iPhone-bashing? Dan tries not to go near an iPhone for fear of an impulse buy, while Tom and Mills debate the true value of Apple’s new gadget. Helpful tips for the week include a site for getting to know “learning 2.0,” a great new blog on museums and technology, and a digital Time Magazine archive.

How can you learn technical skills such as web design, programming, and related methods and technologies for work in the digital humanities? We tackle that difficult question on this week’s show, while also covering the top IT issues that universities face (according to CIOs), transcribing books the new fashioned way, and analog and digital news about Abraham Lincoln. We’ve also added an embedded player for those who want to sample the podcast on our website.

Bill Turkel joins us on the podcast to discuss his fascinating work on “history appliances,” or the possibility of making history more real by creating physical environments and interfaces that truly immerse us in the past. In the news roundup we ponder whether the opening of Facebook to outside developers means possibly better integration with academic services or merely the end of its pretty interface, applaud Google’s new “universal search” for returning video and other media in addition to text, express skepticism that Google has crushed the market for online term papers, and wonder if a university might soon suffer the same fate as Estonia, which saw its computer networks swamped by “hactivists”–or the Russian government.

In the sixth episode of our podcast, our creative lead and web design guru Jeremy Boggs discusses recent trends in the composition of websites, and how to make sites that work well in academia, museums, and libraries. In the news roundup we highlight several stories with a common theme–information and images showing up at inopportune times and in inopportune places.

We take a break from our normal format to spend the entirety of this episode thinking about the role of technology—its great power to forge social bonds and enable a new kind of memorialization, as well as its unfortunate ability to underscore the separation of those who remain outside social circles—in the terrible tragedy at Virginia Tech.

This week on the Digital Campus podcast we debate whether Facebook and its ilk can play a productive role in academia. I forgot to post about episode #3, which delves into what “cyberinfrastructure” is. Both podcasts feature greatly improved sound quality than #1 and #2, so give them a try.

In our second podcast, we revisit the debate over Wikipedia, including hearing from Mills about how Cambodians are using it (and how to find a WiFi signal in the Cambodian jungle). Our feature story explores whether and how YouTube is useful in the classroom.