(a) a brief summary statement of the request, (b) a listing or description of the resources being requested and (c) a clear concise explanation of the relationship and contribution to teaching and learning in your unit or in the College.  When appropriate, indicate the courses that will be affected by this proposal.  Provide a budget on a separate page.  Projects should be related primarily to teaching and learning. Awardees should expect to share ongoing results of their projects with ASSETT staff.  Proposal will be reviewed by a committee of Department chairs from each of the A&S divisions.

Funds may not be used for research conference travel, course buyouts, or summer faculty salary support.  Faculty of any rank or appointment may apply. All funds must be used by July 1, 2010.

Submit proposals of no more than 900 words (approx. 2 pages), along with a 1-page budget by Dec 7 to Laura Konyha, ASSETT program assistant, at Laura.Konyha@colorado.edu.  A second call for proposals will be issued in mid-spring.

Geology is the science and study of the solid and liquid matter that makes up the Earth . This articles covers three geology blogs: one is written by an associate professor of geology, another by a professional geologist and author, and one co-written blog focuses on both paleomagnetism and water geology.

NOVA Geoblog: http://www.nvcc.edu/home/cbentley/geoblog/

Callan Bentley, associate professor of geology in the Washington DC area, says she blogs about “geology, in all its varied aspects: from minerals to climate change, with a particular sweet spot saved for structural geology (messed up rocks).” Having started writing this blog for her students, the audience is now a varied sort, and so are her posts—some are directed toward general audiences, but others are best for geo-pros. As Bentley humorously says, “There’s something for every earthling!”

Recent blogs posts include one featuring an image of a new amygdules sample, which she found in the Sierras. The image of it was scanned into the computer alongside a penny, which shows the rock’s relative size. Another post gives a short introduction to a NOVA newspaper that she had a part in creating.

A longer post looks at a “flipping fault” Bentley saw while on a trip in Bishop, California. The post includes annotated pictures that help describe the look of the fault, helping to give those who are unfamiliar with the term some context. The post is concluded with short discussion of whether it is actually flipping, or if it is just two independent faults that propagated toward each other. Bentley suspects the latter.

Highly Allochthonous: http://scienceblogs.com/highlyallochthonous/

This blog is co-written by a geologist, Chris Rowan, at the University of Edinburg and one in the states, Anne Jefferson, at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. While Rowan writes about paleomagentism, Jefferson discusses hydrology, geomorphology and climate change.

The material on this blog is easy to read. While they often delve into lengthy explanations of geologic processes and events, they are almost always backed with photos, diagrams and videos. This media provides a background, context clues and extra visual information that help beginner geologists (and the average reader) catch on.

Recent posts on this team blog have focused on Earth-Science week. Each day focuses on a specific geologic or earth-space science topic that people can donate money to through the ‘Geobloggers Giving Kids the Earth.’ Each post during the week provides the opportunity to donate, and gives blog readers a lesson on what kids are learning with the help of these donations.

Another recent postdiscusses how to make a meandering river in your basement. Really, it offers a well-explained narrative and supporting video that tells why meandering rivers are the most common kind of river on earth, and why it has been so hard to replicate in a laboratory.

Another photo- and drawing-backed post explains the mechanisms behind two unusual earthquakes that recently occurred in Samoa and Indonesia.

Through The Sand Glass: http://www.throughthesandglass.typepad.com/

Michael Welland writes this blog on sand. Seemingly a mundane topic, this geologist and author (Sand: The Never Ending Story) brings sand and its processes to life with thoughtful, researched and media-filled posts.

A recent post in honor of Earth-Science week, discusses the “fundamentals of earth-science literacy” that everyone should know, relating each point back to what the blog is all about: sand. Some of these facts include “The earth is 4.6 billion years old.” And “Earth is continuously changing.” While these might sound like simple facts, Welland brings them to life by linking the fundamentals to sand-related points of view.

Another recent post includes a very brief discussion of the sand around the Auvergne region of France’s Massif Central. A longer post uses explanations and lots of pictures to explain an example of sand dynamics.

Takeaway

All these blogs come from a slightly different perspective—teacher, student, and researcher—and all can give students a view of what being a geologist looks after graduation. These blogs can also be good resources for teachers who are looking for new media and new angles to teach their subject.

If you’re interested in these blogs, subscribe to their RSS feed. If you were looking for something different, take a look at their blogrolls, and see who they recommend you should be reading.

Written By: Kate Vander Wiede, CU ‘09, ASSETT Staff

Live Journal is a blog site like Blogger, Wordpress and Typepad but does not have additional tools or applications.

A blog creates a website organized around dynamic information, called blog posts. ASSETT’s website, which you are reading from right now, is an example of how pages can look when using a blog as the central way to organize information

Follow these steps to create a blog on Live Journal:

1. Enter basic information to create your user account. For students, this is the only step—you can now read a private blog after when invited. For teachers, read steps 2-5
2. Choose a theme
3. Enter personal information for your profile (optional step)
4. Customize your journal
5. Choose privacy options

Like all blogs, Live Journal uses “posts” to communicate information. Posts are text-based entries written by the author. In Live Journal, these text-based posts can also include pictures, video, polls and urls. Posts can then be commented on by those reading the blog and can be censored by the author of the site.

If you choose that your blog should be shared among friends, only friends will be able to view and comment on your posts. Live Journal also offers the ability to send private messages to users through the site. Using this feature, professors can communicate with students on an individual level.

Live Journal has many customization options. You can choose from hundreds of design themes for your journal. Live Journal also has the option of being displayed in 32 different languages.

In addition to creating a personal blog, you can also create what Live Journal calls a “community”. A community is basically a group blog that has several levels of contributors:

• Maintainer: creator and overseer of community, manages all activity and invites members

• Moderator: approves all entries before they are posted

• Members: Can see all posts; this is the role students would have on a teacher’s blog

• Watchers: these users can see all posts, except for ones that are members-only

To make a community, you just have to create a new account, and start accepting or inviting members to the blog. If you choose to convert an existing live journal into a community, all of your personal blog’s ‘friends’ will be made into watchers of the community. They can then be converted into members.

This community feature can also be implemented by a professor, particularly if you have a very large classes; you can have no limit to the number of members in your community.

Live Journal is more difficult to navigate than some other blogging sites, as its layout is not as intuitive. For support, you can search through frequently asked questions, and email a member of the Live Journal support team if yours isn’t listed.

Though Live Journal lacks third party applications and lots of extra tools, it could be a good option for professors who want a quick way to communicate with student.

Written by: Kaity Hauge, CU ’13, Research Assistant

Mark Pentleton, the founder of RLN and a previous teacher in west Scotland schools, created his first podcast in October 2006. Three years later, RLN is still quite small. Three employees work to produce 28 shows in 20 different languages.

Pentleton and his team continue to create these podcasts because they believe language doesn’t have to be taught straight out of a book—there’s no need to only learn French while sitting at a desk. Languages, Pentleton and his team thing, can be learned anywhere.

Whether you’re riding the bus, grocery shopping, or have 15 minutes between classes, podcasts can fill this otherwise unproductive space with teaching and learning.

The podcasts on RLN can be used by educators in a multitude of ways. They can supplement a lesson in class, reiterate a point made in class, or be assigned as a required listening homework. They can also help to supplement a lesson if a student misses class one day, and aren’t sure how to catch up with their peers. Students who plan to study abroad can also benefit from RLN’s podcasts while preparing them to learn a new language.

The hope is that the more practice students have with a language, the better they can become at speaking it. Because the RLN podcasts are relatively short and convenient to listen to, people may be more willing to use them throughout the day, and therefore get this extra practice.

RLN’s 6 types of podcasts:

One Minute: These podcasts, despite the name, are actually 2-4 minutes in length. They are designed for complete beginners in the language, and they aim to teach greetings, introductions, numbers, language problems and common words and phrases. There are usually ten lessons in a language’s one-minute podcast series. One Minute lessons are available for every language on the site, except for Spanish.

My Daily Phrase: This podcast format, which is only available in Italian at this point, is made for complete beginners as well. 100 episodes make up this series of 4-5 minute podcasts. The full course is meant to cover “common travel situations” and helps prepare new speakers to get around Italy.

Coffee Break: This is a podcast for intermediate speakers down to beginners and false beginners (those who learned the language once, but had trouble then and now grasping grammar and vocabulary). Most languages in Coffee Break format include 80 lessons and are 15-20 minutes each. Some language’s Coffee Break podcasts have not yet reached a full 80 lessons, as they are still being produced.

Walk, Talk and Learn: This is a audio and video series that is only offered in French at the moment. Aiming to teach beginner to intermediate French learners, this podcast series “introduces grammar in a completely different way.” Viewers will watch as the teacher in the podcast walks the streets of Paris to help teach grammar in ten lessons. Each lesson is 7-9 minutes long.

A Flavour Of: Only offered for the German language, this series of ten podcasts lessons is meant for intermediate to advanced learners. The idea for the podcast series is to give lessons on different common idioms, to extend the range of the speaker’s expression in their language.

Show Time: The 80-lesson podcast series is only offered in Spanish. Each lesson is 20-25 minutes long and is meant to teach intermediate to advanced speakers. The idea behind this podcast is that students who already have a grasp of the language can take their speaking skills to the next level by using these “varied and lively lessons.”

The following shows are available for the given language:

French: Coffee Break; Walk, Talk and Learn; One Minute
German: A Flavour Of; One Minute
Italian: My Daily Phrase; One Minute
Spanish: Coffee Break, Show Time
Catalan, Danish, Gaelic, Greek, Irish, Japanese, Luxenbourgish, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Portugese, Romanian, Russian, Turkish: One Minute

RLN podcasts are available on iTunes and can be downloaded from their website. All podcast lessons are free.

If you enjoy listening to the podcasts, RNL does offer extra materials for a cost. You can pay a fee for Premium Access accounts, which come with extra materials like enhanced podcasts, wordlists, exercises and lesson plans. As a member with Premium Access, you can also participate in discussions within the Member Forum.

In all, these podcasts can be helpful to students struggling to first learn a language, and can give students who want to hone their language skills a chance to do so.

If you are interested in seeing what the different podcasts cover, please see their website. A guide is available to help new users make their way around the site. Also, you can head directly to iTunes and download the podcasts for free or by searching for them in the iTunes store.

Anthropology is the study of human beings over the course of all history and locations. In other words—it’s a very broad subject. Anthropology can be broken into four distinct disciplines: cultural anthropology, physical (biological) anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology.

There are two blogs featured in this article, one from the archaeology side, and another on cultural anthropology. Four blogs are included at the end of this article that offer some interesting information, but don’t fit clearly into one discipline or another.

These blogs will not represent the whole of anthropology but offer a starting place if you’re looking for relevant and current information on the subject.

I chose the blogs for their ability to link events happening today to anthropological theory and practice. By analyzing other research papers, popular news articles and each other, these anthropologists’ blogs can give students an idea of how the discipline can be put into practice.

Blogs

Archaeology: John Hawk’s Weblog – http://johnhawks.net/weblog
If you cross the fields of anthropology, geology and paleontology, you end up with a paleoanthropologist. This is what John Hawk does for a living.  He studies the entire 6 million years of human evolution, looking at the environmental and genetic causes that created us, and that cause us to change.

Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Hawk writes with depth and humor on a variety of topics. Recent blog posts have analyzed and discussed a news story from MSNBC (entitled “Naughty Neandertals nixed monogamy”), a short post about new research that shows the ease of acquiring false positives in a common neuroscience test, and a response to a new research paper in India.

Although Hawk steers clear of allowing comments on the blog (too much maintenance), he often writes articles based on reader’s emailed suggestions and has a place called “my mailbag” where he posts selected email responses from readers and his comments on them.

Cultural Anthropology: Savage Minds – http://savageminds.org/
Written by a collection of Ph.D. students and professors, this blog has 9 regular contributors, as well as guest bloggers that pop in from time to time. The About page explains what their aim is: to bring anthropology to the general public, and to start a discussion about the latest anthro research.

The writers vary in their interests: to balance the anthropologist focused on technology, video games and resource development in New Guinea, there’s one with their attention turned to Christianity in Tanzania. Their specialties, though wide ranging, all come together in the blog, giving a general view of cultural anthropology while offering specific examples of its application.

Two shorter recent posts cover the new iPod nano as an anthro field tool, and the medical anthropology book by Barry F. Sauder. A longer personal essay delves into the new Internet Addiction center that has recently accepted it’s first patient. In this essay, the blogger dubbed ‘Rex’ poses the question of whether the Internet can really be an addiction, and eventually chooses the answer no.

Savage Minds is easy to read for the layman, sometimes humorous and mostly interesting (depending on the day and the blogger). It provides some quick quips of knowledge as well as more thoughtful prose, always keeping the reader on their toes.

Community

An interesting thing to note about anthropology blogs is the community between them; each blog inevitably mentions worthwhile stories on other blogs. A very concrete example community is also seen in what these blogs have dubbed “The Four-Stone Hearth.”

Hosted by a different anthropology blog every two weeks, the authors of this post are tasked with summarizing the best posts that other anthro bloggers have created within the time period. Once the list is posted, all the bloggers who participate in the project put up a short post on their own blogs, telling their readers where to find the list.

I felt this was an interesting way to use blogs and still keep up a modicum of peer review and accountability. If you want to be considered the best of the best, you should not only be writing about interesting things, but be doing so in a way that the community approves of.

These blogs can provide a place to have conversations with peers, or offer a resource you can share with your students. While only two were featured  above, there were other blogs deserving of attention that have been included below.

Notable Mentions

The Mermaid’s Tale: http://ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/
Sr. Research Association, Anne Buchanan and Professor, Kenn Weiss of Penn State’s anthropology department co-write this blog, which is focused of the biological/physical anthropology topic. Thoughtful, interesting posts frequent this blog, where altruism (and its evolutionary oddness), T-rex’s, and color blindness have all recently made an appearance.

DigiPast: http://www.digipast.com/
This anonymous blogger is a self-labeled journalist and anthropologist who wants to make anthropology accessible to everyone. Blog posts are usually short, with links to the longer stories it mentions. Recent post topics: teeth analysis, the Chesapeake Flotilla, and the old-world practice of eating domesticated dogs.

Anthropology: http://anthropology.net
This blog hopes to start a conversation with the online community interested in anthropology. With three regular contributors, it reacts to new research and news. These contributors also write posts in response to other anthro bloggers, creating a community and continuing conversation.

Neuroanthropology: http://neuroanthropology.net/
This blog’s name says it all. They discuss topics at the intersection between neuroscience and anthropology. A biological anthropology site, the two authors of this blog have recent post titles of “Sympathy for Creationists” “PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury: Trauma Inside Out” and “Conference: Evolution of Brain, Mind, Culture”

If you’re interested in these blogs, subscribe to their RSS feed. If you were looking for something different, take a look at their blogrolls, and see who they recommend you should be reading.

Written By: Kate Vander Wiede, CU ‘09, ASSETT Staff

Google subsidizes many of the webpage creators that have been featured in this series, such as Blogger. Additionally, Google has produced its own website creator called Google Sites.

Google Sites is just one of many services that Google offers to users, along with G-Mail, Google Maps, Google Scholar, Google Finance, and many more. Google Sites provides a way for those with Google accounts to create a simple website. The web pages you can create are straightforward and plain in nature, and can be an effective tool for document sharing.  Google Sites offers few features, but requires very little time for site maintenece.

Google Sites can be created by following these steps:

1. Create a Google account. This also allows you to access all other Google services, like the ones mentioned above. Students must also create a Google account to access your site. You can use any email address to create a Google account.
2. Name your site
3. Choose privacy options- whether your site is public or restricted to invited viewers. You can later invite students to view your page via email.
4. Choose the appearance of your site from 50 options. This theme can be changed later.

After creating your site, you will start with a blank slate. Using the tools that Google sites offers, you can add information and customize your page. These tools are: Manage Site, Edit Page, Attachments.

Using the “Manage Site” tool, you can make changes and add content to your website. You can further edit the layout and appearance of your site, as well as add content by adding page elements, some of which include:

• Navigation – provides links to other pages, and is how you and your visitors will get around your site.

• Text Entries (posts) – this is where the majority of your site’s content will be posted. Text entries look like blog posts.

• Recent site activity – shows readers what updates have recently been made to the site. This can help guide users (students) to the newest assignments and information they need to pay attention to.

• Countdowns – displays a countdown to your next big event or deadline

Using the Edit Page tool, you can add text to your main pages, as well as subpages. You have the option of adding additional authors to your Google Site. These authors can also post on the main page, but cannot edit the content of the rest of the site. You can add TAs as authors so that they can post assignments, tips and information.

Another useful tool is the “Attachments“ tool, which allows you to post files to your pages that the readers of the site can download.

In addition to your Google Site, creating an account gives you access to another Google service called “Google Docs”, which is linked to your site. Google Docs is a file storage and collaboration site, where you can upload documents, PowerPoint presentations, and spreadsheets, as well create them directly on Google Docs. You can store up to 5000 documents and PowerPoints, 5000 images, and 1000 spreadsheets in your Google Docs account.

Google Docs can also give students the option of turning in assignments online. It would also provide professors another venue to post homework and assigned readings with students. You can chose to share Google Docs documents with other Google users, or you can keep them private.

“Google Calendars,” is an online calendar tool that can be shared with anyone who has a Google account. Using Google Calendars you can post major deadlines, tests, and events so that students can be aware of and prepared for all upcoming occurrences in the class. Those with access to the calendar can be given permission to edit it, or can be locked out of being able to make changes.

Unlike the other website creators visited in this series, Google Sites does not provide third-party applications that you can add to your page. This means that there are relatovley fewer options for ways to display information. The tools that are provided are aimed at one-way communication from the professor to the students, rather than a more reciprocal style of communication.

However, Google Sites can be useful in posting Sylibi, new assignments, and due dates. It provides a simpler and less time-intensive option for educators that want to try out a class webpage.

Though Google Sites has very basic features, it can still serve as an effective, navigable and straightforward way of communicating information and assignments from professors to students.

Written by: Kaity Hauge, CU ’13, Research Assistant

The process of answering this question involved throwing out everything we currently know about email, and thinking about everything else that is out there: photo sharing, video posting, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Wikis, real-time communication, Skype.

Defining Google Wave

Google Wave is a mashup of all of these tools, and more. It is, in Google’s own definition, an

“online communication and collaboration tool that makes real-time interactions more seamless — in one place, you can communicate and collaborate using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
A wave is a conversation with multiple participants — participants are people added to a wave to discuss and collaborate on its content. Participants can reply any time and anywhere within a wave, and they can edit content and add more participants as a wave develops. It’s also possible to rewind waves with the playback functionality, to see what happened, and when.”

Google Wave is a service like Gmail, with all of your information existing “in a cloud” online. You do not need to download anything to your hard drive to use Google Wave.

What It Does

The following breakdown is borrowed and modified from Ben Parr’s description of the service in his Mashable article, Google Wave: A Complete Guide.

Real-time: Google Wave is not only a real-time communication like instant messaging, but you can actually see what someone else is typing as they type, character-by-character.

The idea is that many online chat conversations are taken up by reading after the other person finishes typing and allows you to see their message. This means you can read as they type, limiting the time it takes for a conversation to take place.

Embeddability: Google Wave has it’s own website, but the tool can be added to any blog or website, so people can communicate there. If you embed a wave in a website, interaction on the wave will appear on both the website and your Google Wave page in real-time.

Applications and Extensions: Just like a Facebook application, Third party developers can build their own applications to be used within waves. They can be anything from bots to complex real-time games. As these are still being developed by people from around the world who have access to Google Wave, there is no formal list of applications to choose from yet.

Wiki functionality: Anything written within a Google Wave can be edited by anyone else. Thus, you can correct information, append information, or add your own commentary within a developing conversation. Say person A makes a typo while they are responding. Person B can fix that typo while person A continues to type.

Open source: The Google Wave code will be open source, which means that innovation and adoption amongst developers will produce more products like it, or using some of it’s features, in the future.

Playback: You can playback any part of the wave to see what was said. If you are invited to a wave late, you can replay what has happened, and how the conversation has progressed. Google Wave isn’t linear, so playback can give you a sense of how and when things were added, edited, attached and discussed.

Drag-and-drop file sharing: You can attach files the ‘old fashioned way’ or you can do by dragging your file and dropping it inside Google Wave. Everyone can see it and you have the option to download all pictures from a wave into an album, creating a whole new way to share photos online.

Using Google Wave In Teaching and Learning

After spending time on the site with fellow testers, reading reviews others have posted, and watching the developers video (one hour and twenty minutes long, but is engaging and interesting to watch), I have collected and created ideas for how Google Wave can be used in education.

Usage for the classroom:

Student projects: Students can create a wave together, sharing documents, editing each other’s work, and sharing information.

Note taking: Whether at a meeting, in a class or attending a conference, Google Wave can be used to take notes. All students (attendees, etc.) could be added as a part of a ‘wave.’ As class proceeds, each student could type notes, questions and comments within the wave, creating a log of everything that is happening in lecture.

At the end of class, everyone would have access to set of comprehensive notes—gone would be 200 students taking notes in 200 different notebooks. What one student didn’t have a chance to write down, another wouldn’t miss. Teachers could use these notes to identify parts of the lecture that weren’t clear and need to be revisited.

Office Hours: A teacher could host virtual office hours through Google Wave. If a developer were to create a real-time “sketch” tool (which is not hard to imagine, as tools like this now exist) even complex equations and symbols could be communicated between students and educators.

Google Wave not only allows public messaging that all parties can see, but offers the functionality of private messaging within a public wave. Students could opt to send private messages to the teacher during office hours, giving students the comfort of asking questions in a non-threatening environment, while still allowing for a real-time public conversation to take place.

Issues and Questions Remaining

Google Wave is currently in a ‘preview’ stage. That means that after a limited release to developers, these new users have been given the ability to invite others into the fray.

As a ‘preview’, Google Wave is still in its alpha/beta stage. Kinks, quirks and problems are plentiful, and getting around the site is a little confusing. There is currently not a single guide on Google to help explain how to use the site.

As more and more applications become available from third-party developers, the ways you can use Google Wave will expand.

The questions that remain are many:

When will the bugs be fixed?

What other applications will be created?

Will there be a way to filter out bots/spam/other people from “private conversations”?

Will Google Wave be more like Twitter? Outlook? Gmail? Facebook? IM?

Will it be the perfect tool, or too hard to learn?

At this point, the only concrete thing that can be said is that Google Wave may end up being a game-changer in how we all communicate online, and it certainly offers some incredible new features that we haven’t used before. It will be interesting to see how this new tool develops, and what other uses it will be good for.

Written By: Kate Vander Wiede, CU ‘09, ASSETT Staff

Now, we want to share how you can find more blogs on your own. Authors of blogs often link to other bloggers within their posts, but blogging technology also offers another tool to help you find more information: the blogroll.

The blogroll can be considered a 21st century equivalent to a rolodex. A blogroll works by gathering links to blogs the author finds interesting, just like a rolodex collects business cards. The difference is that while a rolodex is a private collection of contacts, a blogroll is visible for all readers to peruse.

Because the blogroll is visible to everyone, you can also think of it as the way that one blogger recognizes the efforts of another. If you’re reading a blog that is interesting, thoughtful, and well-researched, it’s likely that this author’s ‘rolodex’ will direct you to blogs that write in a similar way. (Or at least in a way that the author thinks is worth noting.)

If you’ve been to the blogs that we have suggested, you may have noticed that on the right or left side margins of the main posts, there are a few separate lists of links. This is where the blogroll will be located. Often, it won’t be named a ‘blogroll’ verbatim, but as you start clicking on links and experimenting, you will find the list that directs you to other bloggers’ sites.

Blogrolls are helpful tools that can assist you in collecting information that is valuable to you. But again, just like rolodex, they can become out of date. If you click on one link in the blogroll that was updated months or even years ago, don’t be discouraged. Just try clicking the next one.

Blogrolls, like RSS feeds, can make finding information on the web easier and faster than searching for yourself, and can begin to create a network of information that you’re interested in reading.

Written By: Kate Vander Wiede, CU ‘09, ASSETT Staff

We’ve written a lot of articles and provided a bunch of help resources lately: on blogs, podcasts, and social media tools that you can use in the classroom. But you might find yourself wondering about the big picture:

How does Twitter work?

Why would anyone choose to write a blog?

What is so exciting about social media?

When you get confused about the different options out there, you can always turn to ASSETT for assistance. But you can also turn to the 3-minute videos of Commoncraft.com.

Commoncraft is a website of videos that forgo the step-by-step explanation to give you that “big picture” view.  In a break from the traditional music-filled, color popping web video, Commoncraft uses paper cut-outs to provide an easy-to-understand information. Or as their tagline reads, “In Plain English.”

The two creators of Commoncraft explain on their site that “despite our fun and lighthearted style, we take explanation seriously.” In keeping with this goal, the videos they make are often light, and to the point. They often relate online tools to offline and interesting examples.

One of the videos likens social media to a place called Scoopville—a fictional town with one large ice cream factory. To maximize profits, this factory only creates three flavors. Modern corporations these days operate in the same way.  The video goes on to explain what happened when a cheap way to make ice cream was discovered—the townspeople started making new flavors!

These townspeople stand for the people who are now on the internet—we all have access to inexpensive media (aka icecream makers) that we can use. Commoncraft shows through their example that social media can bring about more options, and create communities of people who care about similar things. Commoncraft explains that this is what makes social media such a powerful and popular tool today.

Commoncraft has 15 videos on technology-based tools. You can watch them for free online or download them to your computer for offline access for around $20 each.

Commoncraft aims to make the Internet and its tools a little more user-friendly. Not only does it provide a beginners look at the tools available online, but it also can help students to understand how different technologies can be used. Check out their videos to see if they can help you make your online visits a bit little easier.

Written By: Kate Vander Wiede, CU ‘09, ASSETT Staff

In a previous article on our site,  DATC Richard Blake talks about how to create podcasts. Following up, this series will cover podcasts you may want to start listening to.

Podcasts are audio recordings published online, then downloaded and played on your computer or mp3 player, like an iPod.  You can think of them as a downloadable radio shows that are regularly available on websites.  Podcasts cover a variety of topics, and fortunately for us, many of them are useful as well as entertaining.

We will cover podcasts that discuss ideas in the different branches of A&S, from the humanities to the social sciences to the natural sciences. We put an extra focus on language podcasts, which are very prevalent in the podcasting world.

Podcasts can supplement or add content to a traditional course in any number of ways.

A podcast themed around Roman History might offer a new topic each week, providing an ever-present springboard for discussion. A poetry podcast might offer an alternate interpretation of a piece, or detail the life and times of its author, putting his or her work into context. A Japanese-language podcast might provide help to a struggling student on a tricky grammar rule they didn’t understand in class.

In all, these podcasts were chosen because of their content, and the value they could add to courses in the A&S.

Podcasts can be a convenient and hassle-free way for students to learn outside of the classroom. Most podcasts are offered for free, and can be transferred from your computer to media device (like an iPod, iPhone, of mp3 player) for easy listening.

Educators can use podcasts to supplement their lectures, to help nail down a difficult point, and to give students a way to learn their subject while on the go. Finding quality podcasts that connect with your subject can be difficult, though, so this series is aimed at showing you the gems that exist out there.

Written By: Susan Craft-Rendon, Japanese Major, ASSETT Staff