The Omeka team should be encouraged. At three weeks since we released the public beta, we’re had over 500 downloads and had a flurry of interest at conferences including WebWise & code4lib. We’re in a good position to continue building an active developer community that augments Omeka’s core. Here are three exciting examples:
1) Omeka forum user Kerim recently posted on the forums about his idea to use the iPaper document viewer for displaying pdf and doc files in a slick flash-based interface. After experiencing some problems, he asked for help and Omeka crack programmer Jim Safley went to work on a soon-to-be-released iPaper plugin. I know there has been some buzz about iPaper recently, so it’s great to see this feature being added to Omeka’s growing plugin directory.
2) One of the hardest parts of getting an open source project off the ground is helping support early adopters, and despite the high level of traffic the forums have been receiving we’ve been able to keep up-to-date with most questions, thanks to the hard work of the Omeka team and the community itself! This is one of the most-promising signs of the project, that users unaffiliated with CHNM are going out of their way to help others with their installations. Special thanks to MrDys and Syma!
3) Wally Grotophorst at the GMU library has been exploring ways of harvesting data from their MARS (Dspace) repository and pulling that metadata into Omeka. According to Wally, “once an Omeka database of items was built using the DSpace metadata, non-technical staff could log into Omeka and build exhibits.” And Wally isn’t the only one interested in this; others I met at code4lib made strong cases for Omeka’s use in very similar situations. With some terrific ideas for how this could be done, this is the start of a conversation that will mature in the future.
As our community of Omekans continues to grow you can enter these ongoing conversations by posting on the forums. We’ve created categories for different topics, including plugins and a space to discuss data migration. I’d encourage anyone who’s interested in migrating data to Omeka to post their ideas and works-in-progress there. For updates on what’s going on with Omeka, I’ll continue to post here on my blog, as well as the official Omeka blog. If you’re on twitter, you can follow Omeka or myself.
Following up a blog post by Tom Scheinfeldt on using Twitter as an outreach tool, I recently came across a service under development called Edmodo. Billing itself as “Twitter for teachers and students,” Edmodo is in alpha testing as a social educational portal, including a classroom-calendaring feature. Based upon the screen capture of the service, I don’t see how this is significantly different than Twitter. In fact, the Twitter API could be used to build a service like this. So while this is nothing groundbreaking, it caused me to reflect on some of the significant changes in social networking of the past year, and how those changes are trickling into online educational tools.
In my judgment the largest shift we’ve seen is that of a “friends activity feed.” In the case of Facebook, I can be notified when my friends modify their profiles, add other friends, or perform any activity (as long as they haven’t disallowed the display of these messages). And while that information was available before, its display is now one of the core features of Facebook itself. Your “news feed” shows the activities of your friends upon logging in. Since then, Myspace has followed suit with a similar feature. These features encourage users to be active on the site in order to gain the attention of others, or be seemingly overlooked among your other collection of virtual friends.
The other change that has been developing is the idea of providing your “status.” In some ways, I see this as an outgrowth of the AOL Instant Messenger away message. Depending on the person, away messages can be informative, have song lyrics, or be an ambiguous word. So has become the nature of the social networking “status.” The free-form nature of it allows anyone to express what they’re feeling or doing at the moment. Twitter’s sole purpose is to express these statuses, while many other social networks offer it as a feature of a larger and further complex social network.
The merging of these two ideas offers interesting pedagogical possibilities for educators who can think outside the box. What are ways that providing a “status,” or sharing text-messages in a public space engages students? What is the benefit of students seeing the activity of their peers in real-time? How can these tools build a greater sense of community and cooperative learning between students?
The nature of social networks often demands a high level of participation in order for them to be worthwhile to participants, and seeing the activity stream of your classmates is only helpful if you check it once, or several times a day. So while the tool can facilitate rapid dialogue between classmates, its usefulness is based upon the students in the class and their decision to be constantly hooked-in, or to not be. Its worth mentioning that other web tools for learning like wikis, blogging, forums, and listservs facilitate the public distribution of analytical work, while Twitter and microblogging services are better-suited for shorter messages in greater frequency. Although I’ve seen microblogging in the classroom, I wonder if its asking too much from students.
Not necessarily looking to displace other tools as ways of classroom communication but rather augment them, Twitter and Edmodo offer interesting possibilities. How can these tools for sharing basic knowledge and engaging in public discourse be integrated into pre-existing tools and computer-based strategies for teaching? The next step in my judgment is integration into courseware management tools like Blackboard, and even ScholarPress CourseWare.
There’s a small typo in this year’s Code4Lib schedule - Omeka is the digital archive and exhibit-building software developed by the Center for History and New Media, not Omedka as the program states. Hopefully anyone at the conference who Googles “omedka” will find this, and visit our official website, http://omeka.org
We made it to episode two! And check out that Omeka swag! Omeka was featured in the most-recent episode of THAT Podcast, including interviews with CHNM Managing Director, Tom Scheinfeldt and Director of Public Projects, Sharon Leon. The second half of the episode is a screencast taking you through the process of downloading and installing Omeka. The interviews are great reflective moments on Omeka’s current strengths, and where the project is moving in the future.
Jeremy and I plan on featuring Omeka in future episodes - hacking themes and creating plugins, so I’d encourage you to subscribe to the video podcast, or the audio version as well.
On Monday I’ll be traveling out to Portland, Oregon for the week with some fellow CHNM‘ers to present Omeka! Trevor Owens will also be giving a Zotero presentation and pre-conference workshop. It will be a great opportunity to meet some developers face-to-face who I’ve only worked with via email so far. Time permitting, I may blog about while I’m at the conference. For those who will be attending the conference and have stopped by my blog, feel free to introduce yourself in person. A great time to meet-up is at the CHNM-hosted happy hour that’s going on at Bailey’s Taproom - there will be a sign-up sheet at the registration table with more details. I’ll see you in Portland!
This morning we released the first public version of Omeka, the web publishing system for digital collections that I’ve been lucky to be a developer of at the Center for History and New Media since last May. And we’ve come a long way. I’ve seen the code change dramatically, increase significantly in speed, and mature as a tool. This public release follows an internal-beta testing period where a limited number of testers gave Omeka a whirl.
The public release is an important one. We’ve reached a point where we feel comfortable enough with the code that it can run seamlessly for the largest number of users possible. A huge addition, we’ve created what is the start of a plugins directory, allowing Omeka’s core to be augmented in a WordPress-like fashion. Users are encouraged to contribute plugins, as well as themes. And with that openness, we are beginning the development of a community that is centered not only around publishing objects, but also creating open source software that can make history and information accessible to people.
So far Omeka’s 0.9.0 release has been mentioned in several notable places, including the Official Omeka Blog, Inside Higher Ed, Found History, Steve Lawson, and Dan Cohen’s blog. Tom gives a great overview of the project, and how it fits into our former director Roy Rosenzweig’s belief in the practice of public history. Dan Cohen provides some beautiful screen captures of Omeka, and came up with what’s got to be my favorite description of Omeka so far: “For Zotero, it’s ‘like iTunes for your references and research’; for Omeka, think ‘WordPress for your exhibits and collections.’” Wordpress for your exhibits and collections it is! And the bundled COinS plugin for Omeka makes your site Zotero compatible, too!
I expect to see you all on the forums! If you have questions or comments about Omeka, please address them there.
The Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC) was instrumental in not only deploying the earliest computers into public schools in Minnesota, but also developing software that would become nationally popular like The Oregon Trail computer game. A window into the past, I’ve come across an oral history interview with Dale LaFrenz, the founding assistant director of MECC who recounts the creation and growth of MECC. The interview is available for download in its entirety through the Charles Babbage Institute’s website.
Many people may not realize that The Oregon Trail was originally a game written for teletype machines - what were essentially typewriters connected to a computer mainframe. Those computers originally made-up MECC’s backbone, with one computer shared by each school district using time-sharing. Dale’s interview gives insight into MECC’s decision-making process in 1973, explaining decisions that had a ripple effect across the world of educational computing. Dale recounts:
MECC dispatched two people out to talk to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who were the 21-year-old kids with the new Apple computer. They had already announced their intent to save the world and they were going to help education using the computer. They had no information about what we were doing in Minnesota. They didn’t know anybody was using computers in schools. We told them about MECC and said we’d like to buy five Apple II’s at a special price. They gave us a special price. We brought the five back to Minnesota to sell to Minnesota schools. Minnesota schools not only bought five, but that year we sold over 500 Apple II computers. [...] Moving on to 1980, MECC became the largest seller of Apple computers. And so it happened that Apple got its start in the educational computing business through its Minnesota connection.
What’s also interesting is Dale’s discussion of the decision made to sell MECC, which was a state-owned operation, to a company (MECC would then become the Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation). According to Dale, both IBM and Apple weren’t interested in such an acquisition.
It’s hard to keep on top of the latest technologies and tools for digital humanists, and knowing how to use those tools effectively is an entirely different matter. The Humanities and Technology Podcast, fondly known as THAT Podcast by Jeremy Boggs and myself is a new endeavor to meet those needs. Offering both a video and an audio version, we lead our viewers through the new and challenging obstacles of digital tools.
The inaugural episode of our monthy podcast features an interview with Matt Mullenweg, the inventor of WordPress and a screencast of ScholarPress Courseware, the educational WordPress plugin to manage a class blog and course information. Each episode will follow a similar format, focusing on both an interview and related teaching screencast that leads viewers through the process of using digital tools. The editing in this is a little rough at times, but as our first effort podcasting I’m happy with what we’ve come up with.
Last month I set up a blog for the American Studies Crossroads Project as a way to keep people up to date with changes made to the site. Since 1995, Crossroads has provided a comprehensive and integrated platform for pedagogical, scholarly, and institutional information for the international American Studies Community. New content is being added, including a future exhibit on the organization of disciplinary knowledge on the web. Visit the blog, and subscribe by RSS or email.
If you haven’t seen Crossroads in a few years, give the main site a look as well – it has a terrific new design and some useful material for teaching and learning in American Studies.
I’ve resisted the urge to reflect on the state of Finding America since it first went live; until now. So this isn’t a New Years epiphany, but an opportunity to reflect on my blogging process and give my readers a preview of how I plan to shape the blog’s future. I’d encourage readers to subscribe to this blog to receive future updates via RSS or email updates.
As the centerpiece of my personal website, Finding America highlights my academic pursuits and research. This includes work that I’m doing at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the American Studies Crossroads Project at Georgetown, among my own personal research of computer-based pedagogy and the intersection between culture and technology. I broadly address the Digital Humanities while maintaining a focus on American Studies. First going live last spring, my readership has since grown to about 40 subscribers.
I’ve experimented with different approaches to blogging by varying my frequency, content, and voice over the past year. My strongest moments have not been single posts, but series of posts which, connected together, reveal layered arguments and observations. So over the next year, new posts will often be more analytical than the news-like format I’ve more-recently adopted. One notable exception will be any work that I’m involved with at CHNM, which I’ll plug and discuss in greater detail. So if you’re interested in Omeka, ScholarPress, or THAT Podcast, you’ll continue to learn more at Finding America. For the interesting links and stories that I sometimes reflect on, I modified my blog’s design to include my del.icio.us links, which serves that purpose. You can also subscribe to them by adding my del.icio.us profile to your RSS or as a fan.
Lastly, I’d like to put forward an approach to blogging I’ve sometimes practiced and hope to continue which is focused around experimentation and building. I’ve found that mini-projects both expand my insight in a particular topic, and start a conversation at Finding America. Two great examples of this are the Sigil Archive and the American Studies Tagline. These were self-started projects of my own: one to explore historical roleplaying communities in Second Life, and the other to experiment with the visualization of academic texts and provide a new tool for AMST scholars. Blogging and the internet as a medium is a rich platform for these projects, which I’ll continue to explore. I know of several projects in the near future, and can only dream where my research will take me in the future; thanks for joining me.
I'm a digital humanist and graduate of American Studies, currently working as a web developer and