NowComment <http://nowcomment.com> is the most sophisticated group collaboration app available for discussion, annotation, and close reading of online documents. It facilitates rich, in-depth conversations by showing threaded comments "in context" with the original document. Students start or join conversations on whatever passages they find interesting and important, intellectually engaging with a text (and with each other) in ways that can extend or take the place of face-to-face class discussion. Instructors can join in to steer the discussion or correct errors if desired, and a transcript is automatically created for grading and student review.

Features include multiple document views, sorted comments, video and image handling, tagging, private and public documents, flexible workgroup creation, and a scalable design that can handle thousands of comments from hundreds of users (maybe more!) per document.

Some short videos:

NowComment: Educational Uses of Online Discussion 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpERPMLlwoY

NowComment Site and Document Features
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgKogcEa7vo

NowComment Basics (educational use example)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BnlNwzahi0

NowComment has been used at many schools and is now integrated into the University of Virginia’s learning management system as a core instructional tool. Instructor comments about NowComment are at http://nowcomment.com/testimonials

Much goes into making drinking water possible. Drilling and casing go hand in hand in the process of making purified water.Or at least I think they do? Can someone explain to me?

This is a second comment on the same photo, but it’s not a reply to that comment, it’s starting its own thread. The thread above is all about how NowComment works, this thread is about the landscape of the area.

A nice feature of NowComment is that it supports unlimited numbers of conversations on each passage, picture, and video…. so those interested in exploring some topic in great detail can do so without interfering with or cluttering the conversations of those talking about something else.

Source: http://www.propublica.org/article/fracking-music-video

Note that all NowComment comments have to have a Summary of Comment line. This works like the header of an email, giving you an idea of what the person is talking about in the rest of their comment.

If your comment is really short it’s fine to say it all in the Summary and leave the other (Full Comment) field blank.

Putting the start and end time of the video segment you’re discussing makes it easy to keep separate conversational threads on different parts of the video.

(Though with NowComment you could have separate conversations about the same segment of the video if you wanted, e.g. one conversation about the graphics of that segment, one about the underlying science, one about the political implications, etc.).

CNN did a piece on different accounts of water being contaminated in Pennsylvania and surrounding areas examining personal accounts of flammable water via youtube. Here’s the short video:
http://cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2012/05/23/exp-jvm-fracking-update.hln.html

In the video, after showing the flames in question, CNN explains that after concerns about the safety of groundwater, Vermont has become the first state to outlaw fracking completely. Read more here:
http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/17/us/vermont-fracking/index.html?iref=allsearch

https://fds.duke.edu/db/aas/Biology/faculty/jackson/

Robert B. Jackson is the Nicholas Chair of Global Environmental Change at the Nicholas School of the Environment and a professor in the Biology Department. His research examines how people affect the earth, including studies of the global carbon and water cycles, biosphere/atmosphere interactions, energy use, and global change.

Rob Jackson received his B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from Rice University (1983). He worked four years for the Dow Chemical Company before obtaining M.S. degrees in Ecology (1990) and Statistics (1992) and a Ph.D. in Ecology (1992) at Utah State University. He was a Department of Energy Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow for Global Change at Stanford University and an assistant professor at the University of Texas before joining the Duke faculty in 1999. He is currently Director of Duke’s Center on Global Change and Duke’s Stable Isotope Mass Spectrometry Laboratory. In his quest for solutions to global warming, he also directs the Department of Energy-funded National Institute for Climate Change Research for the southeastern U.S. and co-directed the Climate Change Policy Partnership, working with energy and utility corporations to find practical strategies to combat climate change.

Jackson has received numerous awards, including the Murray F. Buell Award from the Ecological Society of America, a 1999 Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering from the National Science Foundation (one of 19 scientists honored at the White House by President Clinton), a Fellow in the American Geophysical Union, and inclusion in the top 0.5% of most cited scientific researchers (http://www.isihighlycited.com/). His 150+ peer-reviewed scientific publications have been cited more than 10,000 and 14,000 times in Web of Science and Google Scholar, respectively. His trade book on global change, The Earth Remains Forever, was published in October of 2002. His first children’s book, “Animal Mischief”, was published in March of 2006 by Boyds Mills Press, the trade arm of Highlights Magazine for children. Its sequel, “Weekend Mischief”, appeared in 2010.

Jackson’s research has been covered in various newspapers and magazines, such as the Boston Globe, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Scientific American, and BusinessWeek, and on national public radio, including the syndicated programs “Morning Edition”, “All Things Considered”, “Marketplace”, “The Tavis Smiley Show”, “The Next 200 Years”, and “Earth and Sky” (for which he is a science advisor and scriptwriter). He conceived and organized the Janus Fellowship, an annual undergraduate award to encourage the study of an environmental problem from diverse perspectives; 1999’s first recipient traveled down the Nile River to examine water use and water policy in Egypt.

http://www.energyindepth.org/whats-eid/

What’s EID?

Launched by the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) in 2009, Energy In Depth (EID) is a research, education and public outreach campaign focused on getting the facts out about the promise and potential of responsibly developing America’s onshore energy resource base – especially abundant sources of oil and natural gas from shale and other “tight” reservoirs across the country. It’s an effort that benefits directly from the support, guidance and technical insight of a broad segment of America’s oil and natural gas industry, led in Washington by IPAA, but directed on the ground by our many affiliates — and IPAA’s more than 6,000 members — in the states.

What’s so new about harvesting oil and natural gas from rocks deep underground? Not a whole lot, actually. First you need to drill a well, then you complete that well via the hydraulic fracturing process. Our industry has been doing those two things for decades, with fracturing technology safely applied to more than 1.2 million wells over the past 60 years.

But there’s one little wrinkle when it comes shale: To make it economical to explore, you have to somehow find a way to access a greater share of the reservoir underground by drilling fewer wells. That’s where horizontal drilling technology comes in, allowing producers today to tap roughly 10 times the amount of energy we did in the past with – get this! – one-tenth the number of wells. Obviously, that’s good for the environment: fewer wells means less disturbance to land. But fewer wells are also good for business. Those things are really expensive.

On this site, you’ll find fact sheets and videos and charts and graphs — some boiling down the steps involved in the development process, others straightening out the myths you may have heard about what we do and how we do it. You’ll find letters and quotes from state and federal regulators testifying to the safety of the process – from drilling and completing the well, to managing and recycling the water, to bringing that well-site back to its original condition. And you’ll also find studies – some on jobs, others on safety, and even a few about how the shale “revolution” in the United States is impacting our “friends” in Russia and Iran.

http://www3.geosc.psu.edu/

Terry Engelder, a leading authority on the recent Marcellus gas shale play, holds degrees from Penn State B.S. (‘68), Yale M.S. (’72) and Texas A&M, Ph.D. (‘73). He is currently a Professor of Geosciences at Penn State and has previously served on the staffs of the US Geological Survey, Texaco, and Columbia University. Short-term academic appointments include those of Visiting Professor at Graz University in Austria and Visiting Professor at the University of Perugia in Italy. Other academic distinctions include a Fulbright Senior Fellowship in Australia, Penn State’s Wilson Distinguished Teaching Award, membership in a US earth science delegation to visit the Soviet Union immediately following Nixon-Brezhnev detente, and the singular honor of helping Walter Alvarez collect the samples that led to the famous theory for dinosaur extinction by large meteorite impact. He has written 150 research papers, many focused on Appalachia, and a book, the research monograph “Stress Regimes in the Lithosphere”. In the international arena, he has worked on exploration and production problems with companies including Saudi Aramco, Royal Dutch Shell, Total, Agip, and Petrobras.