Digital Literacy Centre

Dr Stan Ruecker is at the Digital Literacy Centre’s Summer Institute this week talking about humanities visualization, an alternative strategy to data visualization, and performing workshops with Dr Teresa Dobson (Director of the DLC) on Digital Applications for Knowledge Visualization. One of the tools being examined is the Mandala Rich Prospect Browser.

Here is a site where you can read about and play around with a current prototype:

Mandala Rich Prospect Browser

“The Mandala Browser is a rich prospect browsing concept that allows users to explore a data set using multiple criteria. Unlike boolean searching, the Mandala Browser permits a more nuanced search by allowing users to determine the strength of each criterion. Its design allows enormous flexibility in terms of the number of criteria used, the number of items represented, and the types of items represented.” (From http://mandala.humviz.org/)

LINK
“Teaching for the 21st Century” is a collaborative initiative between British Columbia School District 62 (Sooke) and faculty at the University of Victoria, the University of British Columbia, and Simon Fraser University. The project is garnering some attention and was highlighted by the Goldstream Gazette earlier this week. Researcher-practitioners teaching in a Victoria-area school are joining forces with university researchers to examine the use of and possibilities for e-readers in high school settings. Two classes of students in a Victoria-area school have been given Sony E-Readers. The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria is building a corpus of electronic texts comprised of classroom readings with the expert help of Serina Patterson, and these texts have been loaded on the e-readers so that students have all of their materials on one machine. A team of researchers, including Teresa Dobson (UBC), James Nahachewsky (UVic), Ted Reicken (UVic), Ray Siemens (UVic), Devon Stokes-Bennett (West Shore Centre for Learning and Training), and Kirsten Uszkalo (SFU) will study the way in which students employ these devices in their learning.