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Paths to Our Mission: Path One

Please take a little time to help us think critically about our organization and cite examples of where we are doing well and areas where improvement is needed. Please leave thoughts in the comment section below. I thank you in advance!

Creating opportunities to engage faculty to further their use of technology for teaching and learning.

New Form of Organizational Reflection

We are approaching the end of our fiscal year here at Penn State and that means we are rapidly thinking about staff reviews, new budget cycles, and our annual report. In an effort to be more open and transparent I am suggesting that we attempt to examine ourselves according to the six stated paths to our mission as a community. Starting on Monday I will be posting the first of the six paths and asking those both inside and outside ETS to contribute evidence, stories, or reflections related to our attempt to meet these stated objectives. Through this process I am hoping to gain not only some tangible evidence of progress, but also thoughts from the community related to how we are going about our work. I can envision some active dialogue while we move through this new process and I want everyone to know that you are invited to be an active participant.

Our primary mission is to provide leadership and support in the appropriate use of technology for teaching, learning, and research. We do this by:

  1. Creating opportunities to engage faculty to further their use of technology for teaching and learning
  2. Supporting technology innovation and adoption to support teaching and learning
  3. Participating in research opportunities to better educate faculty, staff, and students in the use of emerging technologies as they relate to teaching and learning
  4. Enhancing curricula through the use of instructional design
  5. Managing University-wide technology implementations that are designed to support teaching, learning, and research
  6. Hosting both physical and virtual events that are designed to bring members of the teaching and learning community together to engage in meaningful activities

So on Monday you’ll see a post that will ask for some feedback on our first path towards our mission. Please take a little time to help us think critically about our organization and cite examples of where we are doing well and areas where improvement is needed. I thank you in advance!

Selber to Join ETS as Fellow

ETS is thrilled to announce that Dr. Stuart Selber, Associate Professor of English and Sciences, Technology, and Sociaety, will join ETS as a Faculty Fellow this Summer. During his time as a Fellow, he will be exploring the topic of that “Changing Nature in Online Instruction Sets” in collaboration with TLT/ETS staff. You can learn more about his project by visiting the emerging description at the ETS wiki. Stuart has been working with ETS for the past year in a redesign of English 202C. We are all thrilled to have him spending time with us this Summer and we know it will lead to some exciting outcomes and discoveries.

My argument is that Web 2.0 environments have begun to recast the instruction set in concrete and meaningful ways. The relevance of the instruction set has been amplified and widened by an online participatory culture that encourages involvement, collaboration, and information exchange. More than simply a good example, the instruction set has become something of a metonym for the complex world of Web 2.0.

Faculty Fellows engage with ETS to integrate technology within emerging educational projects that can be shared and implemented widely throughout Penn State. To be considered for a Fellowship please visit our Faculty Fellowship page.

Hot Team: Grassroots Video

Most of the content in YouTube is grassroots video: short videos posted by ordinary people who are recording what is going on around them.  Most of these videos don’t have special lighting, sound, scripts, costumes, or props.  In a 2008 survey of Penn State students, we found that 85 percent of them were watching videos on YouTube or a similar service and 17 percent were uploading videos of their own.  That means that 14,000 students at the university are creating and uploading video.  These videos are easy to search, rate, share, comment upon, and embed in other locations, such as blog posts.

How does grassroots video work and what are the implications for teaching and learning?  To answer these types of questions, we formed a Hot Team, which wrote a Grassroots Video White Paper.