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BuzzLion for the week of May 25

Short week for the BuzzLion and the rest of the Penn State community; but that doesn’t mean things weren’t going on this week.

ETS design man Dave Stong has been doing a series on the new Mac Modbook via his blog. The Mac Modbook is a third party mashup of a Wacom tablet and a small 13 inch MacBook. Dave is doing some experimenting on it, with an eye for potential uses for art and design.

Chris Stubbs, ETS programmer, talks about gaming, education, and potentially offensive content in some games. He asks some questions about this sort of potentially offensive material and whether it has a role in education. Please note, while Chris does do a great job of talking about potentially offensive things without being offensive, some of the links he offers do include some risque stuff. Which, you know, kind of brings things full circle.

Yvonne Clark, ETS instructional designer, recently posted on the new Adobe Acrobat Connect version that has been recently announced. Yvonne outlines some of the cool new features.

If you are into gaming in education, Brett Bixler, ETS lead instructional designer, would like you to know that the ABSEL (The Association for Business Simulation and Experiential Learning) has announced its 2009 call for papers. Their conference takes place in the great city of Seattle in March - more details here.

A quick bit of news:

ANGEL upcoming version 7.2 to be explored during Town Hall

Faculty and staff are invited to attend a free ANGEL Town Hall on Thursday, June 5, from 2:00-3:30 p.m., either in person at 104 Thomas Building, University Park, or via an online Adobe Connect videoconference. Attendees will be able to preview the new tools and features of the ANGEL 7.2 course management system and participate in an open discussion with their peers from across Penn State. To register, visit http://its.psu.edu/training/. In the Register for Training area, select either “ANGEL Town Hall” to attend in person or “ANGEL Town Hall (via Adobe Connect).” For more information on ANGEL, visit the ANGEL Community Hub Web site at http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/angel/.

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!

TLT CoffeeRead: Interview with Jonathan Zittrain

The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It

Very interesting interview with Jonathan Zittrain, who co-founded Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Created a fair amount of buzz in these parts during the Berkman @10 event.

You can either watch the interview or read the transcript. Your thoughts, as always, are quite welcome.

TLT Talk: Educational Gaming Commons

Yesterday Brett Bixler, Bart Pursel, and Chris Stubbs gave a talk during the lunchtime TLT Talk series about the Educational Gaming Commons initiative. The group provides a good overview of the initiative and even shows off one of the games being developed by our own jason Wolfe, EcoRacer.

Learning Design Summer Camp Concept

We’ve started working up a concept for what we are calling the Learning Design Summer Camp … it is an extension/redesign of the long standing all ID summer meeting. The idea is to provide guidance and awareness with the services we have to support teaching and learning (blogging, adobe connect, angel, podcasting, wiki, digital commons, etc) to as many people around the PSU environment as possible. I am anxious to see us also find ways to raise the level of the conversation so we are getting beyond just the technology and diving into some of the deeper/larger challenges associated with teaching and learning (assessment, engagement, pedagogy). Allan, Brett, and I have been talking about this for a few weeks and the thinking so far is sitting in the ETS wiki space … please take a few minutes to jump in and share some thoughts — preferably in the wiki itself in the “discussion” area of the article. We hope we can make this happen and that you will plan to join us.

TLT CoffeeRead: City students review possible future of books

City students review possible future of books

“Sixth-grader John Riggs and his classmates find the book “Eggs” a real page-turner.

Make that a real screen-turner.

Students in the electronic reading club at Horace Mann Middle School in Charleston dabble in a couple of types of electronic book, the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader Digital Book.”

What do you think? Will this ever replace the traditional textbook?

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