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Presentation: Technology In Business Schools Online Talk

On September 25, 2007 Cole Camplese will be presenting and leading a session titled, Implementing Disruptive Technologies into the Learning Process to members of the Technology In Business Schools. This is a follow-up session that was given face to face at the annual meeting hosted by Penn State’s Smeal College of Business. This was a totally online presentation.

I am delivering the same slides as I did with only a few small modifications. Find them here.

BuzzLion for the week of September 16

The semester is in full swing for students. We in ETS are in perpetual full swing, and to prove it, here is the BuzzLion for the week of September 16….

Yvonne Clark is looking for feedback from Adobe Connect users regarding the new Connect support site. We encourage you to go to the above link and offer your thoughts.

“If you visit the site, let us know what you think — are the content and materials useful? Did you fine anything that will be helpful to the Penn State community?”

Cole Camplese contemplates what to do when you have too much of a good thing — in this case, it’s the explosion of blogs at Penn State and how to go through them all to find the ones that interest you the most. He also notes this is a great problem to have.

“The big issue for lots of people is finding these blogs. Yesterday the stats told me we have about 700 active blogs out there in the PSU Blog Cloud … finding them is tough.”

In his own entertaining style, Chris Stubbs takes a look at the latest Google app to hit the Internet.

“I’ve only had a few minutes to play with this bad boy so far, but in a word, Google Presentations, like everything else Google touches, is simple. The functionality is basic, with very few pre-built options for slide templates or themes, and no slide transitions that I could find. But regardless, its very easy to use, so it looks like we’ll be chalking up another win in the applications column for Google.”

ETS multimedia guru Dave Stong constantly finds new and interesting tools and techniques for graphic design. This week Dave discusses a way to improve Web graphics.

“This seems like it’s important information if you ever do web graphics. I’ve been at it for a dozen years, and it caught me completely unaware. An article at Sitepoint yesterday claimed that Fireworks was the only graphics application to take advantage of a little known capability specified for PNG-8. Fireworks can save a PNG-8 with more than one level of transparency and will be displayed in Internet Explorer version 6.”

Brett Bixler finds there are connections between……..effective instructional design and gardening? Read on.

“I seem to want to rely on informal, social learning when it comes to gardening, except in extreme cases. For example, last year, after three years of tomato wilt, I finally went to the net, looked it up, found a picture that matched the symptoms, read what to do, and next season implemented it. Took me five minutes to do so.”

Mary Janzen would like to learn more about what links faculty put in their ANGEL courses and invites you to share them.

“Please share with the community some of the types of Web resources you link to within your courses. In which of the above locations do you place the links? Do you organize them into categories?”

Brett Bixler posted an interesting chat transcript from a meeting on using Second Life for academic research.

“Some of the Penn State folks using Second Life met to discuss using SL for research, and what were the implications for following Institutional Review Board (IRB) standards. Leading the discussion was Professor Beliveau (Ed Lamoureux). Ed’s done some pioneering work in this area and had some good advice to share.”

BuzzLion for the week of September 9

Fall is in the air, and so is technology innovation, so here is the BuzzLion for the week of September 9….

Chris Millet gives an update on new additions to the Digital Commons Website. .

“We’ve launched a new Tutorials and FAQ section to the site. There’s a ton of great information both for beginners and advanced users. We’ll continue to evolve the content and functionality of these areas, so check back regularly.”

Elizabeth Pyatt shows us how to ensure Web colors look great on both a Mac and a Windows computer.

“It’s not perfect, but since I’ve done it, I’ve been able to see some of the weirder color changes between platforms (warm tones are especially dangerous for some reason), and have been able to find decent compromise colors.”

Cole Camplese believes that the new Apple iPod Touch has strong higher ed potential.

“We’ve been thinking and looking at the role mobility plays in education for quite some time now … I was the PI on an HP grant several years ago (maybe 5) that asked us to look at this exact topic. The tools were lame then and didn’t allow us to do the things we envisioned — they aren’t now. Couple that with the close to 250 sections of courses with an iTunes U space and it is easy to see that the time is right for a portable access device to an ever-increasing sea of digital academic content.”

If you never heard of Studiocode, Allan Gyorke invites you to take a look at Studiocode: A Tool for Coding Video Data for Analysis, Research, Transcription, and More.

“In the Fall of 2006, I was asked to investigate a tool called Studiocode. It’s tool that lets you play a video and tag the video with keywords. Later, you can go back and quickly call up instances where those keywords applied or intersected. For example, if you’re doing research on body language within classroom lectures, you could video record several class sessions and then create keywords like “nodding”, “crossed arms”, “leaning forward”, “doodling”, “writing on whiteboard”, “student presentations”, etc… Later, you could search through all of the video recordings and watch a movie of all cases where students were doodling while the instructor is writing on the whiteboard or when students are nodding during presentations by other students.”

Chris Stubbs discovered an interesting side-effect to the Facebook phenomenon.

“The decrease can be attributed to a smaller freshman class and being unable to use Facebook to invite potential members to greek events, Interfraternity Council President (IFC) Grant Miller said….

….Say again? Greek numbers are suffering because of Facebook?

Dave Stong tells us about a great idea in film making and wonders if Penn State should become involved”.

“On May 10, 2008 sites around the world will videoconference to show films, speakers, and music. The films are political. They show lives of people who live on the other side of borders. Films like Noujaime’s Control Room.

This has the potential of coming off like a sappy Coke commercial; but like any art, doing something good involves risks; taking the risk may produce something that touches people. Hopefully an intelligent media group right here at Penn State can figure out how to stream this stuff onto the HUB lawn, Shwab Auditorium, or the side of a local garage. Hopefully too, some Penn State media people can create and submit something notable.”

Think holodecks are just science-fiction inventions from Star Trek? Brett Bixler says they are very real….well……sort of real. They do exist in virtual worlds, though, and have educational potential.

“Holodecks are devices that can create a scene in Second Life at the push of a button. Great for setting up stages with different scenes, learning environments where you need to change he scene around the students quickly, etc. Very useful of your land and/or prim space is limited!”

Education Technology Report: Podcast with Heshan Wickramasuriya

Heshan Wickramasuriya, a scholar with expertise in agricultural education, recently visited ETS all the way from Sri Lanka. The purpose of his visit was to learn more about instructional design, and during his time here he worked with ETSinstructional designers.

I had the opportunity to talk with Heshan before he traveled home to the other side of the globe about his very positive experience here. I also spoke with Brett Bixler of ETS about his role in planning this visit. Click here to listen.

Education Technology Report: Pat Besong working with Penn State Hershey Medical Center doctor on health care simulation

Pat Besong, manager, creative design and development with ETS, has been working with Dr. Leonard Pott, staff physician at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, on a Flash health care simulation that focuses on intubation decisions. Intubation is the procedure of inserting a tube into the trachea of a patient who is not breathing.

Pat began working with Dr. Pott after this year’s Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology. Dr. Pott gave a presentation on simulations for education and assessment in health care, including both high-tech, realistic dummies and flat screen versions.

The mannequins can be controlled by a technician to simulate various instances of trauma to see how students will react. There are both full body and partial dummies. The partial dummies help students gather the necessary physical skills. The flat-screen simulations, like the one that Pat is working on, help them learn the mental skills. The full dummies test both mental and physical ability, along with assessing how students react to high-pressure situations. The dummies can simulate breathing, emit fluids, make certain sounds, and perform other actions to give the student a very realistic training experience.

Pat is working closely with Dr. Pott and others at the Penn State Hershey Medical Center to develop the Flash simulation on intubation. The simulation gives a patient situation, and then makes the student navigate a series of decisions. If they choose a wrong decision, the simulation will make them try something else to “save the patient”.

Pat traveled to the Medical Center in early July to talk with Dr. Pott about the project. He showed the doctor the intubation simulation and described in detail how it worked. Dr. Pott showed Pat some other simulations that they have used, and some were quite complicated.

One of the goals that Dr. Pott wanted to achieve was to create a simulation that was not as complicated to create, and could also be used as a template for other simulations. Pat’s work on the intubation simulation was exactly what he had in mind. Once a decision tree with the questions and correct and incorrect answers is created, it was translated into a FileMaker Pro database.

The project is still under development. Pat said that Dr. Pott is gathering the appropriate photos for the Flash simulation and is also securing a server to hold the Filemaker Pro database.

You can track the progress of this project on Pat’s blog. You can also see an unfinished version of the Flash simulation. Pat notes that the content is not all there, but you can get the general idea of the simulation. You can see photos of his trip to Hershey here.