ETS Hot Teams

The ETS Hot Team process is the first step in helping ETS decide what new technologies or approaches we should invest time and energy into. The Hot Team concept was born out of the need to quickly evaluate an emerging technology or approach and to assess its viability for use in an educational setting. In a general sense, we are also interested in creating a set of resources that we as educational technologists and instructional designers can share with our primary audiences — faculty, staff, students, peers, and project sponsors. Each Hot Team can be assembled based on a recommendation from a member of the staff, from an organizational need, from outside interests, or for the purpose of informing ourselves. Hot Teams are typically made up of five people with a timeline of no more than three weeks. Anyone inside or outside ETS can propose a Hot Team and we encourage people from outside ETS to participate.

All Hot Teams are made up with a set of people with diverse backgrounds — instructional designers, multimedia specialists, technologist, faculty, etc can be asked to participate together. Having multiple perspectives always yields strong results. The Hot Team will be assigned a team leader whose responsibility it is to organize the team around the project. Each Hot Team will be given a formal charge and a set of questions to answer. Typically the outcomes come in the form of a short white paper modeled after Educause’s “7 Things You Should Know” series.

Below you will find comeplete Hot Teams. Take a moment and explore what we have to share. Each title is clickable.

Hot Team: Social Ratings

Allan Gyorke recently lead a Hot Team to explore the concept of Social Ratings for content. He and his team looked at a couple of approaches and worked to expose some interesting use cases. 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.

Read the Social Rating Hot Team white paper as a PDF.

Hot Team: Zotero

Recently ETS’ Elizabeth Pyatt was the lead for a Hot Team that looked at Zotero. Zotero is a Firefox plug-in which allows users to capture and record bibliographic information about Web pages, images, and online journal articles, and export them as both a formatted bibliography or a text file suitable for EndNote import.

The white paper is now available for download as a PDF.

Hot Team: Location Aware Technologies

I’m not sure how this one slipped through the cracks, but we never posted the white paper results from a Hot Team we did in cooperation with Purdue University looking at Location Aware technologies. Chris Millet guided this team through exploring how things like GPS and Google Maps can be used to create teaching and learning opportunities.

Get the white paper and please post any comments you may have.

Hot Team: The Facebook Platform

SN Tag SmallA few months ago, Some of us here at ETS and faculty from the University Libraries were discussing Web 2.0 tools in the contexts of the Libraries. The meeting was really just to get an idea of the types of things they are thinking about and we started discussing the Facebook and the new FB Platform opportunities. The librarians showed us what some other higher education libraries were doing in that space, and we decided to form a Hot Team to look at it so we could understand the potential. Part of the team’s exploration included building a simple library search application. In looking at the it, the team sees some opportunities to mash up learning with the most popular web application among students at the University.

Download the white paper to learn more about the Facebook Platform.

Hot Team: Pachyderm

This was our first hot team. I am at a CIC Learning Technologies meeting and just heard that University of Minnesota is using Pachyderm. I thought about the fact that we never provided a link to that paper. If we were doing this now it would look much different, but it is what it is.

Take a look by downloading the PDF.

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