Jolanda-Pieta (Joey) van Arnhem, M.F.A.

The College of Charleston’s Marlene and Nathan Addlestone Library will celebrate National Library Week by accepting canned food items to reduce library fines. From April 12 through 18, each can will remove one dollar in library fines. All cans collected will be given to the Lowcountry Food Bank to help with their relief efforts.

“This is our way of helping the campus and the community during tough economic times,” said James Williams, head of circulation services. “Our hope is that we’ll encourage patrons with fines to return chrome://foxytunes-public/content/signatures/signature-button.pngoverdue books to the library while keeping cash in their pocket. With the current state of our economy, the Food for Fines campaign allows our patrons to pay outstanding fines with donations of canned food rather than with cash.  One dollar will be waived for each can of food donated.”  During this week-long campaign, students and Friends of the Library who do not have outstanding fines are also encouraged to donate canned food.  Large collection boxes will be placed in the Circulation Department to receive canned food.  At the end of each shift, the boxes will be emptied and the canned food will be stored in a secure location.

The library cannot accept cans that are damaged, dented or beyond their expiration date.  The cost of the food item is not considered. Fines for lost or damaged library items not included. Up to $25 may be paid with canned items.

For more information, contact James Williams at 843.953.8004.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/W6LH9Uwp7bQ" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

53rd Annual Conference of the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES): The Politics of Comparison

Date: Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Location: Bell 207

Time: 10:00am - 11:30am

Integrating new technologies and undertaking practice-driven, creative research that reflects an increasingly digital approach to scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences, four (4) educators at the College of Charleston, South Carolina, are initializing a unique classroom called The Center for Expressive Culture (CEC). Its purposes are to train anthropology and sociology majors to interpret expressive culture beyond traditional definitions and to study art, film, media, poetry, dance, and performance in their many cross-cultural manifestations. This interactive session will be held in the CEC so that conference-goers can witness the site in action. In a panel-discussion format, the four faculty members will demonstrate its key features and explore the challenges and benefits of undertaking interdisciplinary collaboration. They will explain how digital media and technology are affecting learning, teaching and scholarship in this ever-changing environment, and they will share how “best practices” are transferring from one discipline to another. Featuring student projects informed by digital tools, methods, and state-of-the-art technologies, they will discuss how the CEC enables them to work beyond disciplinary and geographical boundaries and to access the “best practices” in education. Finally, they will explore how other cultures’ ideas about expressive culture may influence their future designs and directions.

The Center For Expressive Culture Website

Panelist: William Danaher, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Sociology, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, College of Charleston, SC 29424 - Teaching the Sociology of Music

Sociology of music focuses on how the sociological perspective can be illuminated by using music as the unit of analysis. This session discusses how the use of visual elements and musical performance helps students to more clearly understand the role of music in society.

Jerry Spiller, M.S.I.S., Language Resource Center Director, College of Charleston, SC 29424 - Resource Selection and Evaluation in the Multimedia Classroom

Information professionals today must address both the hard and soft needs of users under no shortage of real world restraints. This session will explore the issues in resource selection and evaluation in a newly developed course in a new facility. Care must be taken to address a range of technical proficiencies among both students and faculty, with a realization the classroom time is finite and valuable. Further, familiarity with a technology may be a help or hindrance its adoption for new uses. Budgeting and institutional issues must always be taken into careful consideration. Heuristics for resource selection will be examined and taken from theory to practice in light of the development of the Center for Expressive Culture.

Addlestone Thursday@3Sessions
Web 2.0 confusion be gone. The enlightenment shall now commence……..

Digital Audio: Where can I put my podcast and how do I put it there?
Thursday March, 12, 2009
Addlestone Room 122
3pm – 4:30pm

Listen to our Demo Podcast:
[podcast]http://stream.cofc.edu:8083/vanarnhemj/PodcastHowTo.mp3[/podcast]

What do I do with my podcast once I have made it? Where do I put it? In this enlightening Addlestone Session, we shall tell you where to put it. Honest. Your confusion will be eased and more questions shall be inspired concerning podcasts and podcasting.

This session will cover basic methods of distribution (blog, website, iTunes) and the requirements for each.  For example, embedding an audio file in your blog or website, creating an RSS feed, and uploading files to College of Charleston iTunes U. Now, if your head is spinning about now (and we would be concerned if it isn’t), no worries. This only shows that you are enlighten-able.

Basically we shall give you the Oprah explanation of podcasting*.  Which means (in this instance at least) that we shall make it easily understandable and practical to your life and life’s work.

Link here to register for this session.

Please indicate the March 12^th Session.

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Who and what we are and what we think we are doing:

Addlestone Thursday @ Three Sessions
Workshops Introducing Practical, Useful and Free Web 2.0 Tools for Personal Productivity and Collaborative Learning.

In the Addlestone sessions for this semester we will explore specific Web 2.0 technologies that integrate thematically, transforming social media into tools for teaching, collaborative learning and personal productivity.  Topics for the sessions include blogs, wikis, social networks, social bookmarking tools, podcasts, RSS, micro-blogging, photo sharing and video-sharing sites. These tools and resources offer new, accessible and flexible ways to learn, teach, and interact socially anywhere at anytime.  Information regarding pedagogy and Web 2.0 may be found at Addlestone Sessions Raison d’être and on the Addlestone Thursday@3 Instruction Wiki.

* Despite our Oprah connection, access to Tom Cruise cannot be guaranteed.

Tracy, Jared, Jerry and I have been exploring Photosynth technology, which creates 3-D environments from overlapping photographs.  With a little screen capturing, some Public Domain music from Internet Archive and a bit of video editing we turned it into a little tour for the library.  If your curious how we did it we will be going over the process in an upcoming Thursday@3@Addlestone session: Video 101 on April 2nd.

This Thursday (March 12th) we will be covering Podcasting How To’s.

We hope you enjoy the tour and hope to see you at Thursday@3@Addlestone!.  Let us know what you think:)

• [podcast format="video"]http://stream.cofc.edu:8083/vanarnhemj/Photosynth_Addlestone.m4v[/podcast]

• itpc://blogs.cofc.edu/vanarnhemj/feed/

I made a note about Omeka and other tools from the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University in February of this year and ran into it again while reading an article by Penelope Coutas on using the iPhone as Method/s.  I posted her interesting use of new technology for ethnographic fieldwork on my Research Methods in Expressive Culture Course Blog. Her post prompted me to review Omeka in more depth. I plan on installing it in the near future on my own space and giving it a go.  I’ll let you know what comes of it.

For now,  I am providing an excerpt from the Omeka website.

What is it?

Omeka is a free and open source collections based web-based publishing platform for scholars, librarians, archivists, museum professionals, and educators.  It brings Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to academic and cultural websites to foster user interaction and participation.

How would you use it?

Scholars:

• Use Omeka to publish an essay or digital dissertation, share primary source collections, and collaborate with others in the creation of digital scholarship.
• Features you might like: design themes, exhibit builder, tagging, dropbox plugin, iPaper plugin, geolocation plugin.
• Examples: Digital Worcester, Euclid Cooridor, Experiencing Medieval Places

Museum Professionals:

• Use Omeka to share collections and build online exhibits with objects you cannot display in the museum. Invite your visitors to tag and mark items as favorites, or to contribute content. Start a blog to publish museum news and podcasts.
• Features you might like: Dublin Core metadata standards, W3C and 508 compliant, design themes, exhibit builder plugin, MyOmeka plugin, contribution plugin, dropbox, data migration tools (coming soon).
• Examples: Object of History, Catawba River Docs, Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives

Librarians:

• Use Omeka as the publishing tool to complement your online catalog or launch a digital exhibit.
• Features you might like: Dublin Core metadata standards, W3C and 508 compliant, extensible and customizable item fields, RSS/Atom syndication, MyOmeka plugin, data migration tools (coming soon).
• Examples: Photographs by Homer L. Shantz, Eminent Domain, Upper Ringwood Library Collection.

Archivists:

• Use Omeka to share your collections, display documents and oral histories, or create digital archives with user-generated content.
• Features you might like: Dublin Core metadata standards, W3C and 508 compliant, exhibit builder plugin, extensible and customizable item fields, iPaper plugin, tagging, data migration tools (coming soon).
• Examples: Bracero History Archive, Hurricane Digital Memory Bank

Educators:

• Use Omeka to build inquiry-based tasks for students, to create lesson plans with accompanying primary sources, or build learning modules with your team.
• Features you might like: design themes, exhibit builder, MyOmeka plugin, blogging plugin, iPaper plugin, tagging.
• Examples: Laurel Grove School Teachers Workshop, Making the History of 1989.

Enthusiasts:

• Use Omeka to share you personal research or collections with the world, build exhibits and write essays that showcase your expertise.
• Features you might like: design themes, exhibit builder, contribution plugin, live directory (coming soon), blogging, tagging.

Excerpt from http://www.ppt-to-video.com/blog/a-few-tips-to-reduce-powerpoint-file-size.html

1. Use compressed graphics file formats to reduce the size of PowerPoint
There may be many images in graphic formats like bitmap (.bmp) in your PowerPoint presentation. The suggestion is to open bitmap image with a program that converts images and save the image in one of the following graphic file formats: jpg, gif, tif, wmf.

Once your image has been saved under another format, you can reinsert it into your slide. If you do this for all your images, your presentation will be much smaller and it will run smoothly and fast.

2. Save your presentation a second time to reduce the size of PowerPoint
Open your presentation, go to File (2003)/Office Button (2007) >> Save As… and give it another name. Then click “Save”.

Doing this you will have a second presentation that often is smaller than the original copy. This is because PowerPoint usually stores lots of redundant information such as earlier drafts and previous used images. Once you save it as another file, the unnecessary redundant information would be purged.

3. Choose E-mail (96 ppi) output to reduce the size of PowerPoint Pictures

Tools >>Format >> Compress Pictures >> Options >> Target Output >> E-mail (96 ppi)

(For PowerPoint XP and 2003, right-clicking the image >>Format Picture >> Compress >> Web/Screen) This would change all the pictures used in your presentation to an optimal size.

4. Insert a hyperlink instead of inserting an object to reduce the size of PowerPoint
When you insert an image, you have the option to insert it either as an embedded object or as a linked file. By inserting it as a linked file means it will not become a part of the final presentation file. But you should always make sure that the linked file is with you and in the computer where you will run the presentation. Otherwise, the hyperlink won’t be working.

Insert >> Picture >> From File >> Select the image you want to insert >> Click the little down arrow besides Insert >> Link to File