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: Collaborative Writing Tools

wiki tag smallTom Davis recently lead a Hot Team to investigate collaborative writing tools. Tom is uniquely qualified to think about the need for tools that facilitate collaborative content creation and sharing because he actually spends most of his days working from his home in Pittsburgh. For those of you unfamiliar with PA geography, that is a good three hours or so away from most of his teammates here in State College. Tom and the group looked at a couple of tools that can enable online content creation and sharing. The resulting white paper is a quick survey of these tools and provides a nice overview of this new and emerging space. The white paper is modeled after Educause’s “7 Things” series. Take a look and let us know what you think.

Hot Team: Studiocode

Video Tag SmallA few months ago, some faculty from the College of Education approached TLT to talk about their use of a software product called Studiocode. We decided to create a Hot Team to do a thorough analysis of the tool so we could understand what it is all about. The resulting white paper is now available for download.

Essentially, Studiocode is a video editing and analysis package. As Studiocode plays live or pre-recorded video clips, you code them with terms that you define based on your area of interest. You can use these codes to retrieve video segments and build compiled movies. For instance, if you are interested in disruptions in high school classrooms, you could build a set of codes around types of disruptions, demographic information about the students, and their position in the classroom. Once the video clips are encoded in this manner, you can search through them and pull up combinations such as “male students in the back of the classroom who throw objects”. Seconds later Studiocode would produce a customized movie composed of cases where all of those conditions were met. This movie could be saved as a separate file for later analysis or inclusion in a presentation.

In addition to the ability to code and search through files, Studiocode includes video editing, compression, and transcription features. If you transcribe a movie, the transcript becomes searchable, enabling you to compile video segments where certain words or phrases were used. This kind of integrated package has a great potential to streamline video-based research. It can also be used to provide rich feedback to students or for students to compose video essays of their own performance.

Hot Team: iWriter

Hot Teams keep turning out results here at ETS. The latest technology to be put through the paces was an interesting little piece of software by Talking Panda called iWriter. On the surface it allows you to create interactive games for the iPod … our team discovered you could do quite a bit more with it.

Our Hot Team found that iWriter has potential to enhance the educational experience in a great number of disciplines, from foreign language instruction to science and technology. iWriter provides the opportunity for educators to quickly and intuitively create rich instructional media where utilizing a mobile platform like the iPod might be beneficial. In an age where such mobile devices are becoming increasingly sophisticated, the simplicity of iWriter and the iPod interface is a refreshing combination that can be applied to many situations.

I have promoted the use of small teams to investigate technologies that impact teaching and learning since I arrived at Education Technology Services close to a year ago. We have done five such investigations in that time … each one has brought teams of designers, technologists, subject matter experts, and others together to do a quick hitting review and investigation of a specific technology. The latest Hot Team investigated a very interesting little piece of software by Talking Panda called iWriter. On the surface it allows you to create interactive games for the iPod … our team discovered you could do quite a bit more with it.

Our Hot Team found that iWriter has the potential to enhance the educational experience in a great number of disciplines, from foreign language instruction to science and technology. iWriter provides the opportunity for educators to quickly and intuitively create rich instructional media where utilizing a mobile platform like the iPod might be beneficial. In an age where such mobile devices are becoming increasingly sophisticated, the simplicity of iWriter and the iPod interface is a refreshing combination that can be applied to many situations.

Download the PDF of the white paper and let us know what you think. I also have a sample iWriter project created by a member of the iWriter Hot Team for download — I warn you that it is a little big (13 MB).

Hot Team: Faculty Guide to Teaching through Videoconferencing

VC Tag SmallAllan Gyorke, Manager of Educational Technology, within Education Technology Services recently produced an excellent Faculty Guide to Teaching through Videoconferencing white paper. Allan’s paper does a very nice job of providing some insight into the use of videoconferencing to support teaching and learning.

The purpose of this guide is to be a pedagogical primer for faculty who are relatively new to using videoconferencing to teach a course. This guide contains a list of questions that have been asked by faculty along with suggestions and examples provided by experienced videoconferencing instructors. These suggestions were supported based on research in the field of distance education.

This guide does not go into technical details on operating videoconferencing equipment since each setup has a unique set of features and controls. Information Technology Services has a good technical overview of videoconferencing systems. For a list of other technical and research resources, please see the “Additional Resources” section at the end of the document.

If you are interested, the White Paper is available for download. Also, if there are things you would like to discuss please leave comments.

Hot Team: LionShare

To quickly investigate and assess emerging technologies ETS employs a custom Hot Team process. A Hot Team is essentially a small group of instructional designers, technologists, faculty, or other interested parties who are given a fixed amount of time to quickly review a specific technology. In addition to reviewing technology, Hot Teams must discuss its applications to higher education and produce an analysis in the space of a few of weeks. One of the end products of this process is a white paper, which is a summary of the team’s discussion. Today, we’re releasing the white paper for a product called LionShare (http://lionshare.its.psu.edu). LionShare is a Peer-to-Peer application that enables faculty and staff to share academic matierials. The idea is similar to programs like LimeWire and Kazaa, except that users are authenticated and sharing can be restricted to individuals or groups of a certain type, such as all faculty at Penn State and Stanford University. We’ve included a few use cases to help people imagine how this tool could be used and there are a few interesting features (look at the PeerServer idea) and some areas for future development.

So have a look at the white paper and let us know what you think, both about the technology and the hot team process.

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