The ETS BuzzLion

Each Friday, The ETS BuzzLion will take a look at a sampling of what has the Penn State education technology community talking. It can include a trend we are noticing, a new project, a new product, how faculty are using technology in their courses and in research, opinion pieces, success stories at Penn State, news announcements, and more. It’s a great way to both keep up with educational technology innovation at Penn State and join in the conversation yourself.

BuzzLion for the Week of July 6

BuzzLion for the Week of July 6 is a short one, as we here at ETS may have devoured too much Arts Fest food to blog much. However, what is here is great stuff, so here is the BuzzLion for this week:

Cole Camplese, ETS director, sees big changes in the field of learning design, and it’s all good in his eyes. He sees more people involved and roles changing, and he tells us about it and invites comments.

Chris Stubbs, ETS programmer and prolific blogger, talks about gaming and how it relates to community. He really makes some great points about the power of community. Don’t be scared off by the crazy screen shots of the upcoming game Diablo 3, and don’t be scared off by the idea of community.

Dave Stong, ETS graphics expert, adds an interesting take on the idea of Second Life. He sees potential in the virtual world as a graphics learning opportunity. Read more about what he has in mind.

Elizabeth Pyatt, ETS instructional designer, recently posted on the Learning Design Community Hub about a series of Summer Multimedia Workshops offered by The Digital Commons. Elizabeth offers more information in her post.

Finally, here is some important news about Penn State’s course management system, ANGEL:

Information Technology Services (ITS) has canceled the ANGEL upgrade to version 7.2 originally scheduled for the weekend of July 19. Testing and analysis of 7.2 indicated that the new version (and some features) may not perform robustly in our environment, and for this reason we will remain at 7.1 for the next year. During this time frame, ITS staff will work closely with the ANGEL vendor to optimize a future release to meet the needs of the growing Penn State user environment. ITS will provide periodic updates to the user community throughout the coming year.

That’s all for BuzzWeek for this week. Enjoy the Arts Fest and the weekend!

BuzzLion for the Week of June 30

Short week for BuzzLion and ETS with the Fourth of July holiday on Friday, but there was still a lot going on in educational technology at Penn State.

Cole Camplese, ETS director, has found that the Macbook Air keeps his head in the clouds. But Web 2.0 technology keeps him grounded when he needs to work on documents, review Web links, write his thoughts, and read email.

Work on a team or have a group of students work on a project, and note the dynamics involved (i.e., the grandstanders, the loafers, the hard workers, etc.)? Elizabeth Pyatt, ETS instructional designer, links to an article on social learning in online student teams, and offers her own thoughts on how to manage teams.

Elizabeth also invites everyone to help design “tag stickers” for the Learning Design Summer Camp August 12-13. Learn more about this project and just what a “tag sticker” is by going to her post in the Learning Design Community Hub.

Illustrations can be used to help convey concepts, and Dave Stong, ETS graphic artist, shows us some cartoons that he created as part of a Flash piece on the creation/evolution of the universe for a BiSci course.

Brett Bixler, ETS lead instructional designer, is an active proponent of educational gaming. His latest post to the Educational Gaming Commons offers a strong case for educational gaming as more than just a fad or frivolous activity.

A quick note: Blogs at Penn State (http://blogs.psu.edu) will not be available from July 3rd at 5:00pm until July 7th, 2008 at 7:00am due to the scheduled pass space migration. For more information about the PASS space migration, see http://alerts.its.psu.edu/alert-740.

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

BuzzLion for the Week of June 22

Despite the muggy weather that makes the BuzzLion exist in a sort of a torpor, things are rolling right along in Educational Technology Services these days. So let’s get right to our look at the week that was….

You don’t need an invitation to participate in Web 2.0, so says Chris Stubbs, ETS programmer. In fact, he even declares this Stubb’s First Law of the Social Web: No Invitation Required. He urges more participation in things like wikis, blogs, etc. on his outstanding blog, and even somehow manages to use a John Mayer quote (yeah, the musician, that one) to good effect. Go to the blog, and consider it an invitation, er, opportunity to participate by offering your thoughts on this subject (Cole Camplese, ETS director, offers sort of a companion piece to Mr. Stubbs’ thinking on his blog, as does Allan Gyorke, ETS manager of educational technology, on the Learning Design Community Hub).

Brett Bixler talks about the challenges of getting faculty and administrators to learn more about and accept gaming in education. Given so many people think of gaming as pong or Grand Theft Auto, this is a challenge. Read the suggestions Brett offers to overcome this challenge on the Educational Gaming Commons.

Yvonne Clark, ETS instructional designer, invites everyone to go to the Adobe Connect Community Hub and complete the analogy “Adobe Connect is to holding a meeting as Microsoft Word is to ________________.” Go to her post there and offer your ideas.

Elizabeth Pyatt, ETS instructional designer, recently posted on Information Sciences and Technology students from Penn State who are blogging about their summer internship using blogs set up via Blogs at Penn State. Sounds mundane, but they are doing it in Bangalore, India. Find links to their blogs here.

Elizabeth also offers a muse on Personal Learning Environments titled “Lifelong Learning or Lifelong Research”. What on earth is a “Personal Learning Environment?” Elizabeth explains that and more in an excellent blog post.

A quick reminder, ANGEL, Penn State’s Course Management System will be unavailable during the upgrade to version 7.2 from 6:00 p.m. (EDT) Friday, July 18 to 6:00 p.m. (EDT) Sunday, July 20.

BuzzLion will end with another note on participation. ETS is planning a Learning Design Summer Camp August 12 and 13 here at University Park and would like your input and planning help. Go to the Learning Design Summer Camp wiki to find out how you can participate in this great event.

That is all for BuzzLion for this week. Thanks for reading!

BuzzLion for the Week of June 15

BuzzLion for the Week of June 15 starts with an interest blog post by Brad Kozlek, senior programmer here at ETS. For those who may have a hard time making the connection between all this digital technology and what it really means for education, this is a must read.

Dave Stong, ETS graphics guru, has downloaded the new Firefox 3. Dave has found a very cool color management tool for images, and offers some documentation on how to turn it on.

Games are just getting more and more interesting. Chris Stubbs, ETS programmer, talks about a new game called Spore. It’s a virtual world with similarities to SimCity, but players can create their own creature and share it with people. Sort of a Web 2.0 version - the big question, of course, is does this have applications in education?

Chris Millet, ETS manager advanced learning projects, posted a podcast in the Digital Commons Community Hub. The Digital Commons crew interviewed Dr. Matt Jackson of the College of Communications to discuss copyright law, Fair Use, TEACH Act, and their impact on teaching and learning, especially as it concerns student and faculty use of multimedia. Take a listen as he offers insights into a difficult and complex subject.

Brett Bixler, ETS lead instructional designer, recently posted a great article on the growing importance of gaming in education. It’s by writer Heather Johnson, who regularly writes on the topic of grants for graduate school, and you can read it here.

That’s all for the BuzzLion for this week. Thanks for reading, and be sure to offer your comments if you are so moved - we love to hear what you think!

BuzzLion for the Week of June 8

BuzzLion was a topic of discussion at one of the sessions (Tapping into Web 2.0 and Social Networking Tools for Marketing and Communication at a Large Enrollment University) at Monday’s Penn State Web Conference. If you attended the session, here’s what the presenter was talking about - BuzzLion is a weekly summary of everything great and interesting going on in educational technology at Penn State.

Let’s start with Cole Camplese, ETS director, who has a blog post this week on how the information online should be organized. He raises some challenging ideas - how challenging? Well, he starts off by saying “I know from the start that much of what I am working through will agitate a great number of the people around campus and the world that I consider colleagues. I apologize in advance, but this is territory I want to explore with others.” Read what he has to say, and by all means, be sure to offer your own thoughts.

Keeping with the Web Conference theme, Chris Stubbs, ETS programmer, co-presented at the Conference with Binky Lush of Penn State Libraries. The subject was the Penn State Libraries application on Facebook, and you can read more about what they presented on and view the slides here.

In the previous edition of BuzzLion, we linked to Dave Stong, ETS graphic designer, and his ongoing look at the Mac Modbook. You can continue reading his review of this very cool new device at his blog.

A few items of note on the ANGEL Community Hub. First off, Jeff Swain, ETS instructional designer, posted about the recent ANGEL Town Hall that look at new features of ANGEL 7.2.

And speaking of ANGEL 7.2, Mary Janzen, ETS associate editor, posted a reminder about the upcoming ANGEL upgrade set for July.

There are several ETS staff at this year’s New Media Consortium Summer 2008 conference. Some of the more interesting parts of this event regarding gaming and virtual worlds are being blogged over at the Educational Gaming Commons.

Allan Gyorke, ETS manager of educational technology, is looking for people who are interested in getting intermediate training in the video editing and tagging software Studiocode. He also lists some introductory resources for Studiocode.

That’s it for this week’s BuzzLion. Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend and next week!

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