ETS R&D

ETS believes in collaboratively working to identify new and interesting uses of technology to support teaching and learning. To achieve this goal we work to create communities of practice related to what we are learning through our active investigations. The ETS R&D Space is here to expose you to the things we are actively investigating and can be viewed as an open invitation for faculty, staff, and students to work with us. If there are things you see below that you want to get involved with please contact us today.

Clicking the title of any of the projects below will provide more details.

Social Ratings

Social rating systems are open systems that allow users to collectively evaluate the quality of nearly anything (e.g. books, blog posts, broadway shows, movies, news stories, hotels, etc…). In its simplest form, this may involve applying thumbs up/down or star ratings to a resource, and this can be extended to include reviews and discussions of the resources by multiple contributors. As more items are ranked, it is possible to utilize the rankings to generate sets of popular or important items, by sorting by applied relevancy ranking. In order to help maintain relevance, subsets of resources, and of people, may be required in order to rank items within the context of a course, semester, or group. This approach has huge implications in a distributed environment where courses are taking advantage of the Blogs at Penn State and faculty are looking to bring content into one location with ratings to help pull top posts to the surface. An example can be found here.

Location Aware Technologies

Location-aware technology is a general term for technology that can determine its own geographical location. A familiar example is the Global Positioning System (GPS) — the navigation system that is installed in many cars today. A GPS uses satellites to triangulate its position on the surface of the Earth. It then displays this psition on a map. Value is added when physical information is combined with the descriptions about that location (e.g. street layouts, local landmarks, directions to a destination, etc.). Related terms include “georeferencing” and “geotagging,” which refer to specifying the geographic location associated with some piece of information. An example of this would be relating key events in history to points on a map, thus enabling a new way to navigate the content and discover relationships within it. One of the things we are looking at how location aware mobile devices can be used to update learning opportunities on the fly.