BuzzLion for the week of February 10

Posted on February 15, 2008 
Filed Under BuzzLion

First off, if you haven’t registered for the 2008 TLT Symposium on Teaching and Learning with Technology, you might want to move fast! As I am writing this, we have 12 seats left! That’s 338 attendees and counting. You can sign up by going to the Symposium site. If registration is full, make sure you get on the waiting list.

Screencasting - the digital recording of a computer screen and the activity on it - is fast becoming a great tool for teaching. Cole Camplese, ETS director, talks more about it on a recent blog post. He talks about how this form of training is evolving and summarizes a cool new tool to take it to another level.

Cole also recently discussed a recent article that talks about how hard it is to get out all of your information of Facebook once you leave it. It reminds BuzzLion of a paraphrase of a famous line from The Godfather, the more I try to get out, the more they keep pulling me in. Cole notes that “identity is really a meta identity made up from the social places we share our pictures, favorite books, music, and thoughts.” So be careful who you flame in a message board and maybe it’s not a good idea for a student to post that wild tailgating photo from last October.

Using his trademark style of expressing himself, ETS Programmer Chris Stubbs admits to being a full-scale technology junkie (hey, he can’t help it, he’s just a programmer). However, he wonders how much is too much technology in education. Can it actually become a barrier to learning? Give it a read, and let Chris know what you think by posting a comment or two.

If you are a unicode user, then ETS Instructional Designer Elizabeth Pyatt’s Unicode blog always has some helpful tips and information. For example, this week she informs us that the standard Mac font Lucida Grande is going to be available in Windows. Read more about that, and while you are there, be sure to bookmark that blog, unicode users!

Lots of things going on over at the Educational Gaming Community Hub this week. Allan Gyorke, manager, education technology with ETS, points out that the best games are often the ones with the more simple graphics and interfaces, something that a student could design for a class.

Brett Bixler, the man at ETS in charge of the gaming initiative, encourages members of the Penn State community contribute to Innovate magazine’s request for papers.

Brett also announces the release date of the very anticipated sym game “SPORE”, and wonders if there is an educational element to the game.

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