BuzzLion for the week of August 12

Posted on August 18, 2007 
Filed Under BuzzLion

A look at what has ETS staff abuzz and gets people talking for the week of August 12…..

What are HDR images and what are their benefits? Dave Stong applies his design/image expertise and tells us why.


“I tried to project some sort of scenario where I might recommend HDR techniques to a faculty member. A botanist, for instance, may use digital photos to make field notes. Bracketing the images, or shooting a variety of images at different film speeds, could help guarantee usable results under varying light- and skill- conditions. Deep woods shadow, bright meadow sun. No photography skills. Like using old-school curves, layer masks and channel opps, the expertise would need to exist for post processing.”

Yvonne Clark offers some thoughts on how students can use Adobe Connect Meeting Rooms for their courses.

“Adobe Connect is a Web-based desktop video conferencing tool that is available for use by everyone in the Penn State community. Although students may not create or own meeting rooms, they may work with staff advisers and faculty members to obtain access to meeting rooms.”

ETS staff often talk to their peers at other universities and compare notes on similar projects at their respective institutions. Brad Kozlek shares his notes of a phone conversation with Shane Nackerud of The UThink: Blogs at the University of Minnesota where he learned about our counterpart to Blogs at Penn State.

“UThink has 10,583 authors, but not all of them are active. This Summer there are 520 active blogs. During Fall and Spring there are usually around 800-1000 active blogs.”

Keeping with the theme of networking with peers, Cole Camplese discusses the Institute for Interactive Technologies at Bloomsburg University and their work in educational gaming and Second Life.

“These days there is some very interesting stuff still going on at the IIT. One of the big things happening there is revolving around Dr. Karl Kopp. I didn’t know Dr. Kopp when I was an IITer, he wasn’t there yet, but his work in the serious games for education and training space is getting some major play across the industry.”

EDUCAUSE has produced a white paper on Second Life, and Brett Bixler has the link to it in the Penn State Virtual Worlds blog .

“Educause Connect just released a white paper titled:

‘Second Life: Reaching into the Virtual World for Real-world Learning’

You will need an Educause account (it’s free) to access the PDF. It’s written by AJ Kelton of Montclair State University. I know AJ well through our SL connections and events we participated in - he’s a good guy that knows his stuff.”

Elizabeth Pyatt shows us how to tell time the global way in her Unicode blog.

“The concept of time zones isn’t exactly a Unicode issue, but it does relate to issues of globalization.

This blog entry from 4 Guys from Rolla explains the advantages of storing times/dates in UTC format vs. local time. The first one mentioned is that if your servers switch time zones, your data will still be the same.”

Mary Janzen would like to hear how you use folders in ANGEL.

“Please share with the community the ways in which you have used folders. How do you arrange your content? Do you use a different approach for different courses? How many levels deep do you place subfolders within folders?”

Cole Camplese gives details on a talk that he did with ETS’s Allan Gyorke on digital expression. You can read more and see the slides from the presentation here.

“Day before yesterday my colleague, Allan Gyorke, and I gave a talk to the Instructional Design and Development group at the Penn State World Campus related to Digital Expression. It is a talk I’ve done before and it really focuses on the platforms PSU has been working to deliver for the last 18 months or so. The talk frames the need by looking relatively deeply at the changing characteristics of our undergraduate resident population — they are very mobile, very smart, and very plugged into social spaces (read, Facebook).”

There are some talented designers and developers at ETS, and />Mark DeLuca is one of them. You can read more and see the slides from the presentation few examples of his work.

“The Nutrition faculty members have decided to sprinkle flash self-assessment activities throughout the course to allow students to judge their level of understanding - which is a great idea and something that Flash is perfectly suited for.”

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