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SCOLA is a nonprofit educational organization that receives and retransmits television programming from around the world in languages including Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. SCOLA programming is available to all Penn State instructors at no cost to help students learn languages, increase knowledge of current events, and gain a global perspective. It is ideal as a textbook supplement and suitable for use by an individual or a class to extend vocabulary, grammar, reading, and comprehension skills. Anyone with a Penn State Access Account can access the material.
Our Service Sheets have been designed for you to print and share with others. It will provide you with the main details around this service and should give you all the information you may need to begin taking advantage of this Penn State resource.
Download the SCOLA Service Sheet PDF.

It snowed in Happy Valley Monday. Yes, snow after Finals Week. In the face of such hardships, the staff of ETS soldiered on and continued the work of bringing technology innovation to education.
Cole Camplese, ETS director, and Chris Millet, manager, advanced learning projects, are at Harvard Law School for the Berkman@10, The Future of the Internet event. Cole is posting updates on his blog. They are worth reading as a lot of what is being discussed has a lot of relevance for teaching and learning with technology.

Brett Bixler, lead instructional designer, recently blogged at the Educational Gaming Commons on comic books and education. He even has a few ideas on how to work Web 2.0 into them.
Elizabeth Pyatt, instructional designer, posted a “hot team paper” on social ratings and their educational impact. Hot teams, by the way, are a group within ETS that takes some time to examine an emerging technology to see if it has any potential for use in education.
Elizabeth also announced new ANGEL Town Hall meetings to discuss the upcoming ANGEL upgrade to 7.2.
Some news from around ETS:

Faculty, staff invited to participate in beta test of enhanced version of Turnitin

Faculty who include newspaper readership as part of their required coursework
can receive a daily subscription of that paper at no cost. Eligible faculty
should e-mail the program at newspapers@psu.edu and provide their contact
information, office address and a copy of the course syllabus requiring
student newspaper readership as an e-mail attachment. The New York Times and
USA Today are available at most Penn State campuses. The Centre Daily Times
is available as a local paper at University Park. Not all local papers at
other campuses offer faculty subscriptions.

The New Media Consortium (NMC) announced today the call for proposals for the 2008-09 NMC Virtual Learning Prize, a $100,000 competitive program of awards intended to create a collection of innovative open-source learning experiences that make use of the unique attributes of a virtual learning environment. (See the press release.)

As many as 20 NMC Virtual Learning Prizes will be awarded in 2008. Each of the US$5,000 awards will provide a cash incentive paid to the awardee of $500 as well as $4,500 in expert development assistance from the NMC Virtual Worlds team to create the learning experience. The range of inworld services available to awardees to actualize the proposed ideas includes professional building, scripting, design, animation, avatar design, and/or related services.

The NMC is committed to pushing the boundaries of how we collectively view teaching and learning in virtual space. The NMC Virtual Learning Prize is envisioned as a way to surface and realize creative ideas for how to make optimal use of a virtual setting, using a process that provides recognition, financial incentives, professional development services, and a return for education as a whole.

A new course on teaching with technology will be available this fall. Although the course is offered through the School of Nursing, it is open to graduate students in any major.
NURS 597B: Technological Innovations in Teaching and Learning
Instructor: Dr. Dee McGonigle
read more

Ruckus fails to quell University online music piracy
The introduction of the free, ad-supported music downloading service, Ruckus, in December 2006 has not eliminated the problem of illegal downloading on campus. This academic year alone, at least four undergraduate students received pre-litigation letters from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) as part of a batch of 417 letters sent to students at 16 colleges nationwide.

I am leading a study-abroad program in Rome - six hours ahead of University Park time. Trying to post a new blog entry today, I have been able to post text but when I try to insert a picture, the "waiting for blogs at Penn State" message appears and . . . nothing happens. This has been going on for the past 8 hours or so. Is there a problem, or an issue of routine maintenance that we need to know about?
Tom Benson

A game developed by University of Washington PhD students, with help from game designers, aims to help move medical science forward through folding proteins. The game is called Foldit, and by playing it maybe someday you'll be credited for finding the cure for HIV.

Can start-up Wired Trust build a Web 2.0 safety net?
A group of Internet safety experts plans to announce next month a new start-up aimed at helping social networks provide safer Web 2.0 environments for kids and adults.

I just read an interesting Edutopia article about comic books in education. I've been curious about this for years - a prof. at PSU into Manga gave a talk pre 2K that sparked my interest.

More recently I puchased Comic Life Deluxe for the Mac - a comic book layout program in essence. Using it, you can develop your own comics. You still have to create your own artwork, but all else (frames, text bubbles, etc.) is just a click away.
Second Life and other virtual environments are one way to obtain your artwork. Fantastic scenes abound, and characters, outfits, poses, etc. are cheap and easy. The Global Kids Project did just this to great effect.

Sound great, but what's missing here? Web 2 integrated into the process. Imagine a program that combined Comic Book Deluxe with a Google Doc-like interface. Students could come together in a participatory creative endeavour, using a medium that speaks to them to build great things. How cool would it be to work with others across the world to create an artistic story that teaches?
I'm keeping my fingers crossed here!