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Bonk News: Scribd Site, YouTube Survey, and IU Basketball Coach "Kelvin Clean Cut" |
| Friday, February 22, 2008 |
Three bits of news Today: (1) Scribd Site, (2) YouTube Survey, and (3) IU Basketball Coach "Kelvin Clean Cut":
1. Scribd Site (http://www.scribd.com/): Today “The Wired Campus” section of the Chronicle of Higher Ed noted a paper sharing site very similar to YouTube today called “Scribd. “ Students are sharing marked up papers but academics are also sharing high level ones too and discussing them. I think we will also be using resources like Scribd a lot in the years to come. If you need a paper and forget the URL, you might find it in Scribd. If your paper is rejected over and over, you might put it in Scribd. This is yet another way of fostering online collaboration and sharing of papers in the Web 2.0. This particular online service allows people to upload and share papers, technical reports, or even entire books using a Flash-based document reader called iPaper.
The Chronicle reporter, Jeffrey Young, says the experience of using it feels something akin to the old days of microfilm readers (see his article at http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2762/a-youtube-for-documents?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en). There is a catalog or library of iPaper documents which users can view, comment on, rate, share, etc. or upload their own documents to. I wonder whether any of my students will upload papers I have graded, thereby allowing others to see my wonderfully insightful comments (smile). Go ahead, make my day. I know a year ago when speaking in Taipei I had someone in the audience hold up a paper of hers I had graded a decade previously. I thought she wanted me to regrade it. Perhaps such discussions will take place in Scribd for the entire world to see. Smile again. Well, no one will be able to read my handwriting I think. Interesting that there are private or public groups in Scribd just like in Yahoo Groups. And you can listen to articles spoken by a choppy though effective computer generated voice. Problem is it reads everything in the document, including one’s address and zip code. You can skip over such parts though if you know where such tedious moments are in the document.
As I indicated, you might use Scribd to get out some old papers that you want others to finally read. Or perhaps some poems you wrote but never shared before. Maybe you want to upload some papers in case your computer dies or you are worried you might lose them, or, worse still, pass away yourself. If in a research think tank or research arm of a company, you might upload some white papers that are now shareable with the general public. Perhaps you have a research team which wants feedback on its initial ideas. In that case, you might use Scribd. The most viewed document I found in Scribd was a music list written in Spanish which had over 400,000 viewers. I sure wish one of my articles someday gets that many views. Smile! As with YouTube, articles can be found on many topics—history, government, health, sports, science, business, computers, culture, etc. (see http://www.scribd.com/categories). According to its Website, Scribd was founded in 2006 by people such as Adler, Jared Friedman, and Tikhon Bernstam. They have an office in downtown San Francisco. I may try to visit them when I am there in March 7-9.
2. YouTube Survey: Your Final Chance (PLEASE TAKE MY SURVEY AND WIN AN IPOD OR IPHONE): Ok, if you like Scribd, you probably like YouTube as well. My colleague, Grace Lin, from the University of Houston and I have a Web-based survey related to motivational aspects of YouTube videos is about ready to expire. You take some questions and watch a popular YouTube video and take some more questions. Wow--983 we have respondents so far. Our goal is 1,000. We just need 17 more. On February 28th or when we get to 1,000 respondents, we will have a raffle drawing for a 160 gig video iPod and another for an iPhone. If you want to participate in this survey, go to: http://trainingshare.com/video/. Note also that I have a group in Facebook related to YouTube research with over 320 members called “Bonkian YouTubian Researchian”—you can join this at: http://indiana.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6703696942.
3. IU Basketball Coach "Kelvin Clean Cut" Since I have been at IU, we have lost Bobby Knight and then Mike Davis and tonight it is Kelvin Sampson; this last one is apparently for some impermissible phone calls. See breaking news: http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/news/story?id=3258506. Gosh $750,000 just to agree not to sue IU. I can just see the fans chating, "Kelvin Clean Cut," Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap. "Kelvin Clean Cut," Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap. When I leave IU, I will promise not to sue IU. Do you think they will gladly fork over $750,000 to me? Not likely since I am just a professor. But I do know how to play basketball so perhaps that is worth something is this b-ball crazed state. Crazy? Yes. The state religion? Most definitely. I was like that as a kid up in Milwaukee. My friends and I loved basketball. I saw many a Marquette game with my best friend Stan whose father was the former athletic director there. We would shovel off the driveway just to get a chance to play hoops. Icicles hanging from our noses and we would still play. Ice on the driveway and we would still play. Foot high snowbanks around the basketball court and we would still play. Wind gusts blowing at 20 or 30 miles per hour or more and we would still play. Minus 20 or 30 windchill or worse and we would still play. Gloves, hats, scarves, thermal underwear, 2 pairs of socks, etc. and we would still play. It was tough to make shots in semi-darkness with gloves on but we tried. The backboard made a loud thunking noise when my brothers shot off it. It was so frozen the ball would just die and fall in the hoop no matter how hard they shot it. But this is what my friends and I did everyday of the winter. On days (and nights) like these, I miss my basketball hoop. I miss my friends from Milwaukee—I miss Arlie, David, Marty, Mark, Stan, Billy boy, Mike, and my brothers, Tom and Richard and anyone else who would show up at my house or whatever court we decided to play on that evening. Humm…back to the coach firing story! As an aside, someone might look up when we finished paying off Knight and Davis and how much that was and then add up all three payoffs. Such info might be interesting and surprising. And then look at the cost of tuition over the same time period as well as staff and faculty pay increases and see how they compare. As a former CPA and corporate controller, I find such data always of interest. Time to go shoot some hoops. I think each shot I can make is likely worth 5G’s tonight. Whatcha think?
Reminder: If you want to participate in my YouTube survey and perhaps win an iPod or iPhone, go to: http://trainingshare.com/video/. The drawing is just a few days away! This survey will close soon. Don’t delay. Share. Share. Share!!!!!! |
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