BuzzLion for the Week of March 16

Posted on March 21, 2008 
Filed Under BuzzLion

The March Madness NCAA basketball tournament starts this week, and of course, Penn State is not involved. Fortunately, Penn State is much better at creating innovative educational technology, so here is the BuzzLion for the week of March 16….

As you may have heard by now thanks to ETS’s crack marketing squad, there is a big educational technology event happening March 29. The Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology will happen March 29 at the Penn Stater Conference Center and Hotel. There is a lot going on at the site, such as a very nice summary by ETS’s Allan Gyorke called Eight Steps Toward the TLT Symposium. In addition, Cole Camplese, ETS director, posted in his blog on some of the various Web 2.0 media being used at the Symposium.

Another subject that seems hot this week at ETS is blogging. Cole discusses a presentation on blogging he gave Wednesday, and included some examples of blogs. Brad Kozlek, senior programmer at ETS, seems to have discovered a use that BuzzLion sure never thought of - using blogs as a tool to create and present a slideshow. Brad also talked about public tagging of blog entries. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Pyatt wonders how to squeeze blogging into a busy schedule.

Dave Stong, ETS graphics expert, made two more great posts this week on using technology in art and design. One was on using Flash to draw. Another was on organizing all that great artwork he creates. Along with offering great design tips, Dave’s posts are worth checking out even if you are not a designer. One reason is he always offers examples of his great work, and these two posts are no exception.

Those massive mult-player online games (MMOG)are a waste of time, right? Well, Chris Stubbs, ETS programmer, posted recently on his blog about the MMOG “Eve”, a space-based game. He talks about its educational value and how it uses democracy. See? These games have lots of potential.

So, what did Brett Bixler, ETS lead instructional designer post to the Educational Gaming Community Hub?. Better question - what didn’t Brett post? Go to the hub and you will see recent blog post links on the right. Brett sure was busy, posting on seven things you should know about virtual worlds at Penn State, game magazines in the library, and a recap of this month’s educational gaming brown bag lunch.

Before we end this week’s BuzzLion, it’s time for some important ANGEL news:

ANGEL Import Wizard and Export Wizard tools to be turned off during finals week

To optimize the performance of Penn State’s Course Management System, ANGEL, during spring finals week, the Import Wizard and Export Wizard tools will be turned off from 5:00 a.m. Saturday, May 3 until 7:00 a.m. Saturday, May 10. These tools include the Copy Course, import Content Package, import Master Course, and export ANGEL Archive functions. The tools for importing and exporting individual lesson content items between courses and groups will be turned off as well. These temporary changes for that week are one of a number of steps that have been taken to improve ANGEL performance during the period of intense usage associated with finals week.

The Copy Course tool allows instructors to copy one of their existing ANGEL courses into another course section. A master course is a special course set up as a template that multiple instructors can import into another course section. The ANGEL Archive tool is used to download a backup of a course as a ZIP file; this file can then be imported into another section using the import Content Package tool.

Instructors who need to use these tools to set up a course for the summer session are encouraged to plan ahead and perform necessary course imports or exports prior to finals week. During finals week, instructors can continue to create course content and to create master courses and learning object repositories. Students can continue to upload/download files and access lesson content.

As a more long-term measure to optimize ANGEL performance during finals week, Information Technology Services is installing new hardware with 300 percent greater processing capacity than the hardware available in fall 2007.

For any questions, contact ANGEL support at angelsupport@psu.edu.

That’s all for this week on the BuzzLion. Thanks for reading, and we appreciate any comments you may have - post away! If you have anything going on in your world that you would like BuzzLion to mention, such as an interesting way you are using technology in classes, a question about an ETS program, or an event you have attended, send a note to jco11@psu.edu, and we will run it in the next edition.

Thanks for reading

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