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Hot Team: Social Ratings

Allan Gyorke recently lead a Hot Team to explore the concept of Social Ratings for content. He and his team looked at a couple of approaches and worked to expose some interesting use cases. Social rating systems are open systems that allow users to collectively evaluate the quality of nearly anything (e.g. books, blog posts, broadway shows, movies, news stories, hotels, etc…). In its simplest form, this may involve applying thumbs up/down or star ratings to a resource, and this can be extended to include reviews and discussions of the resources by multiple contributors. As more items are ranked, it is possible to utilize the rankings to generate sets of popular or important items, by sorting by applied relevancy ranking. In order to help maintain relevance, subsets of resources, and of people, may be required in order to rank items within the context of a course, semester, or group. This approach has huge implications in a distributed environment where courses are taking advantage of the Blogs at Penn State and faculty are looking to bring content into one location with ratings to help pull top posts to the surface.

An example can be found here.

Read the Social Rating Hot Team white paper as a PDF.

BuzzLion for the Week of April 13

It is très printemps and vive l’amour here in what is currently not just Happy Valley but Very Happy Valley, as spring has you-betcha-sprung. While the sun shines, we here in ETS continue to work hard and demonstrate that flowers are not the only things blooming around here. Ideas are busting out all over.

Audrey Romano ETS web designer, recently posted some very nice screensaver ads for collaborative learning spaces. These ads will go on student lab computers. What exactly are collaborative learning spaces? Take a listen to this podcast and find out.

Elizabeth Pyatt, ETS instructional designer, is an example of the many multi-faceted experts we have working at ETS. She has posted in her blog about instructional design, linguistics, and now about Web design. She has discovered an effective way to partner a more “Web 1.0″ content management system, Dreamweaver, with the Web 2.0 open source content management system, Drupal, to create accessible Web sites.

Brett Bixler, ETS lead instructional designer, discovered something recently that is pretty astounding. You probably have heard of virtual worlds. Maybe even heard of Second Life. But, did you know there are now more than 100 virtual worlds that are designed for young people? Brett offers a link to a report on this and makes a bit of a challenge.

Chris Stubbs, ETS programmer, never fails to find interesting technology items to post about in his blog. His latest interesting discovery has to do with blogs and Facebook. In fact, how you can blog via Facebook. Take a look and learn how.

And now, here is some news of interest……

New issue of ANGEL Shorts focuses on Action Editor

ANGEL Shorts are one-page documents covering a specific point of interest in Penn State’s Course Management System, ANGEL. They cover the five most essential things a person needs to know about the topic in order to get the most from its use. The aim is to help faculty, staff, and students maximize the value of using ANGEL as a teaching tool. The latest issue of ANGEL Shorts focuses on “Five Things Faculty Should Know about the Action Editor.” This issue, as well as all previous issues of ANGEL Shorts, is available as a downloadable PDF file on the ANGEL Community Hub at http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/angel/.

Registration for Summer-Fest technology training opens April 21

Beginning Monday, April 21 at 9:00 a.m., faculty and teaching assistants are invited to sign up for free technology workshops during Summer-Fest 2008, a weeklong training session conveniently offered during the break in the academic schedule, May 12-16. Popular topics include Using Clickers in the Classroom, EndNote, e-Portfolio, Videoconferencing for Instruction, Excel, SPSS, Office 2007, Penn State Thesis Template, Photoshop, Using Adobe Connect in the Classroom, and many more. Please visit the online catalog for a complete list of training sessions, and log in to register for training at http://its.psu.edu/training/.

That’s it for this week’s edition of the BuzzLion. We would like to hear from YOU. So, you can either email BuzzLion at jco11@psu.edu or just comment on this blog posting.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy this Very Happy Valley spring on this Blue-White Weekend.

Hot Team: Zotero

Recently ETS’ Elizabeth Pyatt was the lead for a Hot Team that looked at Zotero. Zotero is a Firefox plug-in which allows users to capture and record bibliographic information about Web pages, images, and online journal articles, and export them as both a formatted bibliography or a text file suitable for EndNote import.

The white paper is now available for download as a PDF.

ETS Talk 42: Community Cake

ETS Talk 42 is now available over at the Podcasts at Penn State site. This week Cole is joined by Allan Gyorke, Brad Kozlek, and Chris Stubbs to talk about about our reactions to the 2008 TLT Symposium, discuss some interesting new thoughts with the Blogs at PSU, and reflect on the new Flickr video announcement. A little long this week, but a good time.

BuzzLion for April 6, 2008

This week, the BuzzLion takes a look at ETS Community Hub. What’s an ETS Community Hub? It’s a community designed to foster in-depth discussion of ETS services. They include Adobe Connect, ANGEL, Blogs, Design Library, Digital Commons, Educational Gaming, iPhone, Learning Design, Podcasts, SCOLA, Teaching with Technology Certificate, and TLT Symposium. You can visit these hubs via the “Hub of Community Hubs”.

One Hub that always seems to be busy is the Educational Gaming Commons. In just this week, there posts on the Penn State Spanish language course’s virtual hacienda, gaming in IST, a call for papers for the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research, a video of the virtual THON on Second Life, a report on the Educational Possibilities in Second Life Inworld Conference, and that’s just some of them!

If you want to learn more about educational gaming and Second Life, BuzzLion recommends going to that Hub. Of course, if you want to learn more about the other projects/services, you can go to those hubs as well via the Hub of Community Hubs.

Another example of ETS’s Community Hubs is the Penn State Learning Design Community Hub. Elizabeth Pyatt, ETS instructional designer, posted to the Hub about accessibility issues, while Brett Bixler, lead instructional designer, posted about a development plan for pedagogical needs assessment.

Yet another example is one that many Penn State faculty can find a lot of use for - the ANGEL Community Hub. The ANGEL Hub is the first of the community Hubs, the brainchild of ETS’s Jeff Swain. There are plenty of ANGEL help to be found, including a regular series of specific tips called ANGEL Shorts. ETS’s senior writer/editor Mary Janzen has a post letting people know what to do when course and group mail from prior to May 14, 2004, is deleted.

Please keep in mind, these are just samples of what you can find. BuzzLion only mentioned a few examples. It is well worth your while to go to the “Hub of Hubs” and visit the Hub that interests you, and then subscribing the RSS feed.

That’s it for this week’s BuzzLion. Again, if you have anything you would like mentioned, be sure to email BuzzLion at jco11@psu.edu.

Thanks for reading.

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