Twitter posts are limited to140 characters, but I discovered it takes slightly more than 140 characters to convince colleagues of Twitter’s value. I’ll try to make my argument for why professionals should use Twitter, and I’ll do it in just 14 tweets. Here we go.

#1) Professional use of Twitter 1 of 3: Post URLs for blogs, articles, & events that you want to make public to a larger audience

• #2) To promote publications, ex: “When Communicating with Diverse Audiences, Use Velcro to Make Science Stick http://bit.ly/4GD4fX“
• #3) To publicize students’ work, ex: “#DukeEngage interns turn dung into fuel in India http://bit.ly/c3u1a”
• #4) To publicize events, ex: “Citizen Science Training Opportunity July 19, 2009 http://bit.ly/16NYgc”

#5) Professional use of Twitter 2 of 3: Network w/folks who share interests or are using similar pedagogy/technology/research method

• #6) Networking tip: be sure your Twitter profile has a descriptive bio so people can find you, ex: http://bit.ly/Vqepp
• #7) Twitter can be like a virtual business card. Be sure your profile bio and webpage are up-to-date and informative
• #8) Join a twibe to find similarly-minded people. Visit http://twibes.com/ to search and join twibes
• #9) Add yourself to http://wefollow.com twitter directory so people can find you (I use #scientist #conservation #educator)
• #10) I posted ex of students’ use of edu software, was contacted by software maker to ask if they could showcase my students’ work!
• #11) Retweet to share info & build community, ex: “RT @saprasanna: Our DukeEngage project is on Duke News: http://tinyurl.com/nmuxkz”
• #12) Search for keywords http://search.twitter.com/ (or via Tweetdeck, my fav Twitr app) & follow people who have interesting tweets

#13) Professional use of Twitter 3 of 3: Back-channel conversation at conferences for feedback on talks & updates on things you missed

• #14) Ex: search for #NECC09 for examples of rich conversation and information resulting from back-channel conversations at a conference

You can follow this conversation on Twitter by searching for #TwitValue. For professional updates, follow Julie at http://twitter.com/JulieReynolds88.

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While it’s true that many other browsers (Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome) have also implemented similar features, one key Firefox feature really makes it worthwhile: Add-ons. According to Mozilla, add-ons are “little extras that customize Firefox.” With nearly 6,000 of these “little extras” now available, Firefox can be customized to fit most any workflow.

Here are six of my favorite Firefox add-ons that I use almost daily.

1) Easy YouTube video downloader

Ever needed to show a YouTube video at a conference, but didn’t have internet access? Or maybe you wanted to archive a clip for a research project? This add-on places a small set of links within a YouTube video’s page, allowing users to download the video in various formats.

2) Tab Scope

With the ability to open a link as a new “tab” instead of as a whole new “window,” tabbed browsing can really help keep things organized. However, it can also get out of hand quickly if you end up opening too many tabs at the same time. The Tab Scope add-on aims to help by displaying a small preview of the contents of a particular tab when you hover over it.

3) Delicious Bookmarks

This add-on integrates the social bookmarking tool Delicious with Firefox (see the CIT page about Delicious). Once installed, you can bookmark and tag pages and search your Delicious bookmarks from within Firefox. Any new bookmark or change is automatically synced to Delicious on the web - so you can still access the Delicious website from any computer to retrieve bookmarked sites.

4) Read it Later

Sometimes you come across a website, article or blog post that’s not perhaps valuable enough to bookmark, but that you’d still like to revisit and finish reading some other time. Read It Later was created for just such a purpose. Visit the developer’s website for more info.

5) Zotero

Zotero “is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources.”  For more information, see the blog posts in the Duke Library Hacks blog or go directly to Zotero.org.

6) Evernote Web Clipper

Evernote is a web notebooking tool that helps you collect web clippings, articles, pictures, screen-captures and more. Installing the web clipper add-on helps make copying and tagging content from the web into Evernote an even easier process. For more info on Evernote, see CIT’s toolkit page.

To learn more about using Firefox in general, see the Firefox tips page.

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Easily and legally share documentary videos in Blackboard. Duke University Libraries has acquired over 80 video titles from Films Media Group that include permissions to stream clips or entire documentaries in Blackboard at Duke. The Films on Demand collection offers a great opportunity to provide easily accessible video content to students for course reserves and to create custom playlists for a broad range of classes and topics.

Duke’s streaming video database can be accessed on the library homepage from the Search Resources/Databases tab (see image).

You can browse titles or search across all titles by keyword. Once you have found a relevant video, copy the URL from the video page and add it to your Blackboard course as an external link.

If you have suggestions for titles to add to Duke’s Films on Demand database, contact Danette Pachtner, Librarian for Film, Video, and Digital Media.

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Blackboard automatically adds the course ID to outgoing email messages, in the email subject field. Usually a course ID consists of Course Subject, Course Number and Suffix, and Course Term. (e.g. ECON101.01-F2009)

To learn more, see our help page for the Blackboard Email Tool and visit the Blackboard support website. If you would like more help with Blackboard, request an office visit and we will come to you.

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The initial purpose of this mapping toolkit is for Duke Engage students in partnership with WISER (Women’s Institute of Secondary Education and Research) to produce useful maps to facilitate the planning of community facilities and ways to impact gender disparities in health and education in Muhuru Bay, Kenya.

Students produced a helpful website:

The mission of ISISmapping.org is to help you map your world. We believe that maps are power, a power that should be shared by everyone.

During this course, students investigated mapping technology and devices, and decided which ones should go to Kenya as part of the toolkit, based on the needs of the project and the conditions in Kenya. They produced documentation and worked out best practices for mapping, in consultation with researchers in Kenya. The recommendations and documentation they produced can be used by anyone who’d like to map their world.

Watch Victoria Szabo, Sherryl Broverman and students in the course talk about the project.

At the final presentation of the project, students were asked about the challenges they faced when exploring the technology and creating the project. They described the challenges of coming together as a team, keeping up with rapidly changing technology to determine the best way to map, and creating a way for people in Kenya to make maps with their data despite intermittent electricity and rare access to the internet.

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Over the past few months, Wharton has explored Second Life, an immersive world inhabited by several million avatars representing real life humans, as well as Assassin’s Creed, a popular video game set in thirteenth century Palestine and Syria. She is examining the effects of digital architectures on those who navigate those virtual realms. In Fall 2009, she plans to teach a course on Jerusalem in which students will join her in investigating the power of architecture in these new media.

For the past four years, Wharton has been studying “pathological architectures,” seeking to understand and describe the ways that “sick” buildings affect the people who occupy them. More broadly, she is interested in how architectures act as agents in modifying the way humans live. Her work in exploring architectures in Second Life and video games is preparation for the last chapter of her book.

“It’s impossible to understand space conventionally any longer; digital worlds and immersive spaces play too large part in our economy and culture to ignore,” Wharton said.

“I expected myself to be a kind of tourist in Second Life and in video games. But the space is invasive; it doesn’t allow you to be simply an objective observer. I have become subjectively engaged, in a way that surprised me. ”

Wharton also noted that, in Second Life, the spaces are created by the avatars themselves; both shaping and acting is an expression of their producers. As opposed to “real” life, objects retain reference to those who made them. A chair or a house in real life is anonymous; a chair or a house in Second Life, with a click of the mouse, reveals its creator. Search engines allow you to invite those makers to talk to you about their work.

For example, during the recent presidential campaign, Wharton explored the Second Life spaces created by Democrats and Republicans. Democratic spaces were functional, open, modern, information-centered. Republican sites were architecturally elaborate with classicizing buildings and the intimacy of Main Street. She drew from her observations conclusions about the working of the “public sphere” in immersive worlds.

For faculty thinking about integrating Google Earth, Second Life or video games into a course, Wharton suggests becoming familiar with the technology first. She compares it to learning a new language or visiting a new city with its own culture and conventions. Each technology may take several weeks of learning its mechanisms and exploring its the territory to feel “at home”.

With Second Life, Wharton recommends having students to visit a variety of spaces, some connected directly with the course contents and some not, in order to accustom themselves to navigating the space and interacting with other residents. But finally students can construct the historical sites they are studying in three dimensions so that they and other avatars may walk through them.

Most residents of Second Life are “in world” for social purposes or for entertainment—from soft-porn to “dancing for Jesus.” But groups engaged in politics, education, art and music are also active there. Avatars can walk around the Sistine Chapel and the Temple at Karnak or they can attend discussions of Obama’s Cairo speech with Egyptians, Turks, Iranians and other Muslims from around the real world. The first brief piece that Wharton wrote about Second Life described her first visit during the Gaza War to the newly opened Palestine Holocaust Museum (article at iReport).

“It is really worth investigating digital technologies,” Wharton says, “They give you a new means of rethinking your old assumptions—a central concern of education.”

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Google Books has added some enhanced features, such as improved browsing and searching and the ability to view scanned or plain text pages.  As part of the updated, they’ve added an embedding feature that lets you put a book in your web page or blog, similar to the way you can embed a movie from YouTube.

To embed a book, look for the “Link” button in the upper right corner of the page when you are browsing it at Google.  Just copy the “Embed” link and paste the HTML code into your own blog or web page.

If the book appears too large or small, try changing the numbers for “width” and “height” in the code. In many books, the table of contents in the text is hot-linked to easily browse through a book.

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iPhone and iPod Touch users can browse and search twenty collections that range from advertisements and documentary photography to sheet music. You can save and download images to an album, and access all descriptive information.

Making digital image collections viewable on mobile devices is part of the library’s ongoing efforts to make its resources available whenever and wherever researchers need them.

DukeMobile, introduced in March 2009, currently serves about 50,000 users, providing mobile access to the campus directory, sports scores, interactive maps, event listings, the course catalog, and Duke videos on YouTube.

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We recently made some substantial changes and updates to our website. The biggest change is the addition of a new section called “Resources.” Within the section, you’ll find three subsections:

• Getting Started: These are resources that anyone thinking about starting an instructional technology project can readily use. We’ve included pages for faculty new to Duke, pages for help planning projects, and a “Web 2.0 Toolkit” that describes uses of several new web-based tools for teaching and learning.
• Teaching & Learning: This section covers the ‘nuts and bolts’ of teaching and learning with technology, including recommendations and guides for managing assignments, large classes and students groups.
• Assessment: Guides and information to help you assess your students, teaching and projects.

We’d love to get feedback on these changes, and hope you find them useful.

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Most everyone is familiar with discussion boards, which have been used widely on the Web and as a tool in Blackboard for several years.  Discussion boards are used to create a “thread” or “topic” where participants in the board can post replies or start threads on new topics.

Most commonly, discussion boards are used in courses as a supplement to in-class activities.  An instructor might ask the students to post comments on a reading and use those discussion board posts as a starting point for “in person” class debate.  Faculty might also use discussion boards for peer review - students post their work and peers in the course can “reply” to their thread, offering their suggestions and comments.

Blogs are relatively new when compared to discussion boards.  Blogs or “web logs” originally emerged as a way on the Web for individuals or groups to post a kind of ongoing journal.  So, blogs, unlike discussion boards, are more focused on a chronology of information, displaying the most current “posts” first.

Faculty typically use blogs to have students make a record of ongoing research in a course.  For example, an instructor might have students pulling original research materials and reporting on what they find in a blog.  The most current posts are displayed first, allowing the class to add comments to posts or discuss in class the latest material.  Faculty also use blogs as an ongoing course journal for themselves to follow up class discussions with summaries of material or to answer followup questions after class sessions.  In some courses, blogs are used by students for personal journals to reflect on assistantships or research work in the community.

Blackboard includes a blog tool or faculty can use non-Duke services such as WordPress or Blogger for public course blogs.

While discussion boards present material thematically and blogs show material chronologically, wikis show student work with any structure you choose.  A wiki is a collaborative web space where authors can write web pages together.  A wiki starts out with a blank “home” page and subpages can be created and linked to each other.

Wikis are typically used by faculty to have students assembling an online resource, such as a textbook or series of “white papers” on a topic.  Students can add comments to wiki pages, but wikis also include the ability to show a history of how and when pages were changed and by which author.

There is a wiki tool in Blackboard and faculty can use DukeWiki to create pages visible to the public that are edited by Duke authors.  If you are collaborating with non-Duke authors, you can sign up with services such as PBWorks and WikiSpaces to create your own wiki.

If you would like more information on options for using blogs and wikis in your course or if you would like to discuss approaches to using other tools in your courses, contact the CIT to speak with a consultant.

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