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BuzzLion for the Week of March 23

Given that the entire ETS staff has been in preparation this week for tomorrow’s Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology, this week’s BuzzLion is going to be short and to the point.

Much of BuzzLion is pointing folks to interesting items posted by ETS staff on their blogs. However, this week, BuzzLion recommends you go take a look around the Symposium blog.

There is a lot going on already, and it will explode day of the event and thereafter. If you are going, by all means, contribute. We encourage you to blog on your experience, from Lawrence Lessig’s keynote to the sessions to the networking. Let us know what you learned, what you found interesting and cool, and who you met.

In didn’t go, the Symposium blog is the next best thing to being there, to coin a phrase. There will be links to photos, videos of presentations, podcasts, video interviews, and attendees giving their thoughts on the event.

So, that’s it for this week. There is so much going on just at the Symposium site, that should keep you busy for a while. Thanks for reading, and we appreciate any comments you may have - post away! If you have anything going on in your world that you would like BuzzLion to mention, such as an interesting way you are using technology in classes, a question about an ETS program, or an event you have attended, send a note to jco11@psu.edu, and we will run it in the next edition.

2008 TLT Symposium Kicking Off!

For most of the ETS staff today is the real start of the 2008 TLT Symposium. A full year of planning has gone into creating what we hope will be an amazing experience for the faculty, staff, and students of Penn State. We’ll be posting all sorts of stuff over at the Symposium website so keep an eye on that. We have bloggers, podcasters, people shooting video, Twittering, and Flickr photos coming in from all sorts of places. It should prove to be an exciting day.

Today we spend time with our keynote speaker, Professor Lawrence Lessig, letting him meet the Symposium sponsors throughout the day. I imagine the session with the Dickinson School of Law will be quite interesting. I am also looking forward to our dinner tonight as the table will have quite the range of perspectives around it. All in all, a full weekend of Symposium activity. S, we hope to see you bright and early tomorrow at the Penn Stater!

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More Flickr photos tagged with tltsymposium2008

Berkman @10

Berkman at 10A couple of ETS staff will be attending the Berkman at Ten, The Future of the Internet conference in May. It looks to be an outstanding event and one that we will surely get quite a bit out of. One of the more interesting sessions for me will be the Cluetrain Manifesto 10 YEars Later. The Cluetrain Manifesto has been important in the development of many of our philosophies and strategies around ETS. If you haven’t read it, I would recommend it. Also getting to see and perhaps meet Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder, sounds exciting. The conference also encourages open blogging so we’ll be sharing thoughts throughout the day here and on personal blogs.

Faculty Success Story: Patrice Clemson

Pat CelmsonPatrice Clemson at Penn State Beaver uses Adobe Connect, a Web-based videoconferencing application, to reach students at a distance and facilitate team collaboration. Over the last two years, she has gradually incorporated more of the tool’s versatile features into her information sciences and technology courses to aid communication with and among students.

In fall 2006, Clemson used Connect to hold online office hours with a student located at Penn State Shenango who was taking an individualized programming course. Because the application allows users to share their computer desktop with others, she said, “He could show me problems he was having with program code, we could work through it together, he could hand me control of the desktop, and I could help him fix his program. It worked out really well.”

In her “Usability Engineering” course, Clemson was assisted by Lu Xiao, a doctoral candidate at University Park. Xiao was developing a software application and the students were to evaluate its usability as a course project. She used Connect to teach the class her application. The students also used Connect to hold team meetings. Clemson said, “I found that when students had control over their own meeting rooms, they were doing better quality work, simply because they were accountable to each other.”

In summer 2007, Clemson used Connect to deliver a completely online course. Within the application, the meeting host can promote users to presenter status, allowing them to manipulate screen elements. Clemson decided to promote all eight students to presenters. At first, she recalled, the result was chaotic. She said, “Give IST students free access to a software tool, and they’re going to start pressing buttons to see how it works.” Rather than intervening, she decided to observe what would happen. Over the next few weeks, she found their use of the software toned down and said eventually, they developed an etiquette on their own.

During 2007-08, the Beaver campus is piloting a program to offer courses required for a four-year IST degree to students who have completed two years at the Shenango campus. Several Shenango students participated in Clemson’s “Organization and Design of Information Systems” course via Connect. She assigned students to groups, each with their own Connect room. Weekly, the groups discussed a question based on the readings, then presented their findings. Clemson said, “This allowed them to synthesize the readings and come up with their own take on the material. They came up with at least one golden idea every class. When they collaborated, the product they came up with was greater than the sum of the parts. I was happy that Connect helped them learn that important lesson.”

To allow students to devote more in-class time to group work, Clemson recorded her lectures using Connect, allowing students to review material outside class.

As a final project, the groups were asked to design the ideal collaborative machine, then create a presentation the class could view in Connect. Clemson said that after seeing the presentations, “I practically flew home. These were folks who were complaining about having to use a software tool to talk to people who were sitting next to them. Then they realized that what they could do with it was bring all of their thoughts together, to put the ’straw man’ up and manipulate it, and come up with an outstanding final project. They amazed each other and me.”

BuzzLion for the Week of March 16

The March Madness NCAA basketball tournament starts this week, and of course, Penn State is not involved. Fortunately, Penn State is much better at creating innovative educational technology, so here is the BuzzLion for the week of March 16….

As you may have heard by now thanks to ETS’s crack marketing squad, there is a big educational technology event happening March 29. The Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology will happen March 29 at the Penn Stater Conference Center and Hotel. There is a lot going on at the site, such as a very nice summary by ETS’s Allan Gyorke called Eight Steps Toward the TLT Symposium. In addition, Cole Camplese, ETS director, posted in his blog on some of the various Web 2.0 media being used at the Symposium.

Another subject that seems hot this week at ETS is blogging. Cole discusses a presentation on blogging he gave Wednesday, and included some examples of blogs. Brad Kozlek, senior programmer at ETS, seems to have discovered a use that BuzzLion sure never thought of - using blogs as a tool to create and present a slideshow. Brad also talked about public tagging of blog entries. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Pyatt wonders how to squeeze blogging into a busy schedule.

Dave Stong, ETS graphics expert, made two more great posts this week on using technology in art and design. One was on using Flash to draw. Another was on organizing all that great artwork he creates. Along with offering great design tips, Dave’s posts are worth checking out even if you are not a designer. One reason is he always offers examples of his great work, and these two posts are no exception.

Those massive mult-player online games (MMOG)are a waste of time, right? Well, Chris Stubbs, ETS programmer, posted recently on his blog about the MMOG “Eve”, a space-based game. He talks about its educational value and how it uses democracy. See? These games have lots of potential.

So, what did Brett Bixler, ETS lead instructional designer post to the Educational Gaming Community Hub?. Better question - what didn’t Brett post? Go to the hub and you will see recent blog post links on the right. Brett sure was busy, posting on seven things you should know about virtual worlds at Penn State, game magazines in the library, and a recap of this month’s educational gaming brown bag lunch.

Before we end this week’s BuzzLion, it’s time for some important ANGEL news:

ANGEL Import Wizard and Export Wizard tools to be turned off during finals week

To optimize the performance of Penn State’s Course Management System, ANGEL, during spring finals week, the Import Wizard and Export Wizard tools will be turned off from 5:00 a.m. Saturday, May 3 until 7:00 a.m. Saturday, May 10. These tools include the Copy Course, import Content Package, import Master Course, and export ANGEL Archive functions. The tools for importing and exporting individual lesson content items between courses and groups will be turned off as well. These temporary changes for that week are one of a number of steps that have been taken to improve ANGEL performance during the period of intense usage associated with finals week.

The Copy Course tool allows instructors to copy one of their existing ANGEL courses into another course section. A master course is a special course set up as a template that multiple instructors can import into another course section. The ANGEL Archive tool is used to download a backup of a course as a ZIP file; this file can then be imported into another section using the import Content Package tool.

Instructors who need to use these tools to set up a course for the summer session are encouraged to plan ahead and perform necessary course imports or exports prior to finals week. During finals week, instructors can continue to create course content and to create master courses and learning object repositories. Students can continue to upload/download files and access lesson content.

As a more long-term measure to optimize ANGEL performance during finals week, Information Technology Services is installing new hardware with 300 percent greater processing capacity than the hardware available in fall 2007.

For any questions, contact ANGEL support at angelsupport@psu.edu.

That’s all for this week on the BuzzLion. Thanks for reading, and we appreciate any comments you may have - post away! If you have anything going on in your world that you would like BuzzLion to mention, such as an interesting way you are using technology in classes, a question about an ETS program, or an event you have attended, send a note to jco11@psu.edu, and we will run it in the next edition.

Thanks for reading

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