bavatuesdays

As Mikhail pointed out to me, when you have the headphones plugged in on the the MAcBook Pro in XP the built-in speakers still play sound. For a quick-fix to this problem intel has released a program that re-routes all the sound to the headphone jack. The only trade off is no built-in speaker functionality. I figured this works well as a temporary solution until bootcamp fixes this bug. If interested, here is the link to the fix.

Update: Mikhail just found a fix on the apple discusssion board that gets both the headphones and built-in speakers to work. Click here.

Redefining the term “bumbling idiot”! It is amazing how this politician completely butchers the whole concept of what the internet is, no less what net neutrality is. How can someone so inarticulate and ill-informed be a spokesperson for something so vital to the process of democracy? John Dvorak does a nice summary of this train wreck of a speech in his article on PCMAG.com. You can hear the entire 10-minute speech on publicknowledge.org. At first this misguided tirade against the “two-tier” system that net neutrality will create (I have no idea what he means by this) seems somewhat comical, but when you realize this man is in a postition of tremendous power and is backed by extremely wealthy corporations -it quickly becomes very scary!

Well, installing Windows just got a little easier, primarily because you can now do it on a MAC! The Bootcamp setup assistant makes installing Windows on your MacBook Pro as easy as finding an external disk drive on OS X.4. I was prepared for a long, drawn out battle with the install of Windows XP on my new MacBook Pro, but it was a cinch with Bootcamp. So while this setup assistant is still in Beta (and I will try and report any bugs I run into), the setup is a breeze. Being a good Lukacsian, as a rule I try not to fetishize commodities, but MAC is making this a harder and harder for me to live up to. Below are pictures of my brand new baby – the veritable the Maserati of the computer world!

Update: If you are like me and you don’t read directions all the way through, here is a tip that may save you some time on the discussion boards. After installing XP with Bootcamp, be sure to load the Macintosh drivers that you made a CD/DVD copy of when using the Bootcamp Installation Assistant. Impatience is NOT a virtue.

By way of boingboing, as usual, I discovered an unbelievable example of how image repositories and the study of literature are made for one another. John Anzalone, professor of French at Skidmore College, in collaboration with the Tom Hickerson and Katherine Regan (from Special Collections in the Cornell University Library) have created an unbelievable resource of over 300 images dealing with the fantastic in literature. While the subject matter is unbelievably cool to begin with, I am even more fascinated by the ways these folks are thinking through the connections between literature, art, and technology in truly exciting and persistent ways for everyone interested in such resources – scholars or otherwise. Below is a quote from the about page which gives an overview of the project and its rationale:

Sponsored by Cornell University’s Institute for Digital Collections (CIDC) this image-bank provides a visual resource for the study of the Fantastic or of the supernatural in fiction and in art. While the site emerges from a comparative literature course on the topic at Skidmore College, it is also intended to open the door to consideration of some of the constant structures and patterns of fantastic literature, and the problems they raise. In this sense, the materials presented here may find a use among students in a variety of disciplines.

To explore the collection follow this link.

Fred Stutzman, manager of the Lyceum project and co-founder of claimID.com, has an excellent post about five huge social networking sites. Despite frequent assumptions that Web 2.0’s social networking is always already a global phenomenon, the five sites listed in this article suggest how such sites align themselves along national lines. For example, Cyworld is South Korea’s largest social networking service with 20 million daily users (or 25% of the population) according to the article -simply staggering numbers! “Well, this is obvious Jim,” you say, “for how many people outside of Korea can speak Korean?”

All right, smart guy, how about this then -how many of us in the U.S. (or even North America) are aware of British social networking sites like Faceparty (with over 6 million users), or a post-colonial social networking space such as India’s Hi5 (with over 40 million users, published in English – that most ubiquitous of online languages -but that is another story about language, colonialism and the traces of empire).

More broadly, how do linguistic, national and cultural differences make some of our claims about the international nature of the web fall flat? I say this knowing full well that DTLT has been forging unbelievably fruitful international relationships with Instructional Technologists in Canada. But does this beg the question -why not Mexico? Or Liberia? Or Jamaica? While not trying to be overly polemical, I think our frame for Web 2.0 as a necessarily “global” movement may, at times, ring true, yet how do we explain the nationalized boundaries that social networking like MySpace or Hi5, or Faceparty rearticulate and reinforce?

I had mentioned that I would further detail the steps of setting up a MySQL database for Lyceum for those of you that may be unfamiliar with the process. Keep in mind, however, that the following steps assume that you have a web hosting service with CPanel.

The part of the config file where you fill in your database information in Lyceum is as follows:


define('DB_NAME', 'jimgroom_lyceum'); // The name of the database
define('DB_USER', 'jimgroom_jimgroo'); // Your MySQL username
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password); // ...and password
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); // hostname or IP of database server (possibly 'localhost')


The four fields above (DB_NAME, DB_USER, DB_PASSWORD, & DB_HOST) are all settings that you have to fill in with information relevant to the particular database tables you set in your CPanel. Where does one get this information you ask? Well, let’s do a play-by-play to find out …
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Update: For a nice overview of Digital Asset Management Systems on college campuses check out the recent article in Campus Technology. Thanks Andy!

Well, I have been away from bavatuesdays for a while now, and I have been beating myself up for not blogging regularly. At least until I remembered that I have, indeed, been blogging regularly with Lyceum form my English 375 class blog, so I promptly made up with myself and will now proceed with a regularly scheduled bavatuesdays article.

I must say that UMW has been the epicenter of some extremely interesting discussions as of late, and while the echoes of Faculty Academy 2006 are still audible given the recent podcasts on facultyacademy.org, DTLT was fortunate enough to have Andrew Treloar on campus today who brought into sharp focus the relationship between digital asset management systems (DAMS) and “the future of scholarship” for higher education institutions around the globe, to paraphrase Andrew himself.

Andrew is the director of Information Management and Strategic Planning at Monash University, and he spent much of the day laying out the strategic questions higher educational institutions must engage when considering the implementation of a DAMS. Andrew’s generosity in sharing best practices culled from his own experiences designing projects such as ARROW and DART was only surpassed by the quick-witted flare with which he presented the numerous lessons learned throughout the course of his own work.

And what are these lessons learned? Below are just a few, and I am sure Gardner and the other ITS’s will fill in any and all of the gaps I have overlooked, ignored, or just simply failed to grasp.

• First, Andrew immediately made it clear that when designing a DAMS the greatest challenge is not necessarily technical, but rather the process of navigating the particularities of the institutional culture. A very interesting point which certainly means different things to different institutions, nonetheless negotiating the needs and concerns of the academic and administrative departments at UMW has been a large part of strategizing such an initiative, even before we began to explore the numerous technical options.
• Second, in thinking through the formats we would use to capture metadata for the digital resources, questions emerged around how we would use a SQL database structure in conjunction with the Resource Description Framework when serving the digital objects. Turns out that Fedora (the DAMS Monash University has chosen) is moving towards an indexed RDF file that in many ways combines these two processes in ways I haven’t entirely conceptualized as of yet (Patrick, Cathy – any help here?). Point being that specifications for recording and eventually serving metadata such as Dublin Core and RDF in a DAMS are becoming standardized as projects such as the semantic web become more established.
• Thirdly, do not reinvent the DAMS wheel! While a few of us in DTLT had been kicking around the possibility of designing elements of a management system from scratch with PHP, I think we all were a bit relieved when Andrew directed us to open source DAMS systems out there like Fedora and DSpace. And, while the fact that Fedora is programmed in JAVA may scare some universities away with limited resources (like, for example, UMW), open source projects such as Fez , a highly flexible web interface to Fedora designed at the University of Queensland, is a ready-made frontend for interfacing with Fedora programmed in PHP. Additionally, DSpace is another alternative for UMW, given that it is an out-of-the-box open source DAMS solution -yet another avenue we will be exploring in the near future.
• Finally, in the words of the great Keith Jackson, sports announcer par excellence, “this analyzing is paralyzing … just play this dang thing!” In other words, Andrew suggested that we start the pilot, begin the iteration, make the necessary mistakes, and learn a ton. For while we are experimenting with these options we always know that exporting/migrating less than 5,000 digital objects and their metadata to another system will not prove too painful. But, more importantly, we at UMW will be much, much wiser than when we started!

So, as you can see we all have some work to do in DTLT, but the kind of work this group was made for!