Hot Team: Grassroots Video

Hot Team: Grassroots Video

Most of the content in YouTube is grassroots video: short videos posted by ordinary people who are recording what is going on around them.  Most of these videos don’t have special lighting, sound, scripts, costumes, or props.  In a 2008 survey of Penn State students, we found that 85 percent of them were watching videos on YouTube or a similar service and 17 percent were uploading videos...

Read More

Hot Team: Social Ratings

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...

Read More

Hot Team: Zotero

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. Image credit,...

Read More

Hot Team: Location Aware Technologies

Hot Team: Location Aware Technologies

In our first collaborative Hot Team we worked in cooperation with staff from 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. We have used data mash-ups for several projects, but the PSU Study Abroad GeoBlog is a great example of how location...

Read More

Hot Team: The Facebook Platform

Hot Team: The Facebook Platform

A 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...

Read More

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...

Read More