Penn State Learning Design Community Hub

 Just wanted to let everyone know that we will be holding Multimedia Community group meetings on a monthly basis. Topics will include Flash, video, audio, 3D, podcasting, and basically anything related to multimedia. Our first meeting will be held on Friday, September 26th from 10-11 AM in 202K Rider Bldg. Our first topic will be on transitioning to Actionscript 3.0 for Flash users. We welcome any multimedia developers or others that may be interested in the topics.

Many times, we look for videos that would be good illustrations of a lesson, a concept, or just examples with other possibilities that we can share with students, faculty, staff, and colleagues. There are sites that have material available that can be used, but it isn’t always in the appropriate format compatible with PowerPoint, Softchalk, or ANGEL.

University Park

The Digital Commons just posted its Summer workshop schedule at: http://digitalcommons.psu.edu/workshops
Note: Workhops are listed with August workshops at top and July workshops at the bottom.

These are small-group, hands-on workshops, and are highly focused so you can learn the basics of a multimedia software package (such as iMovie, Garageband, or Final Cut Pro) in the duration of 1 hour.

Please register for workshops through ITS Training at http://its.psu.edu/training.

I recently met with the rest of the ITS Streaming Services team, and we discussed the direction we should take with the ITS QT streaming server. One feature that has been asked for is to make it open to student use. This has not been possible in its current iteration due to scalability issues. After some discussion, however, we thought that a good direction would be to eventually store the video assets in individual users' PASS space. This could solve the scalability issue as well as make it easier for anyone to manage their files.

This past spring I served on a committee that looked at options for delivering video-based instruction to remote learners. As a way of comparing and evaluating options, we developed a chart (attached) that I thought might of of use to others.

Hi everyone,

At the York Campus, we are awaiting the arrival of the Digital Commons - but in the meantime, we've needed to come up with a new way to videotape student presentations in speech classes - that would allow students and faculty to review their work and also get rid of post-production blues...

We did not have a DVD burner in our classroom set-ups yet, which would have allowed us to just record directly with that tri-colored wire connection (how is that for technical jargon!) to a DVD - and no budget to get them yet.... so we improvised and came up with this set-up...

If you've been hearing about ETS Hot Team projects, but aren't sure where to download actual papers, you can see them all at on the tweaked ETS news hub at:

http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/category/hot-team/

One paper that was not advertised much was one on "Location Aware Technologies" from a group led by Allan Gyorke.

I'm checking the TLT Symposium site in preparation for the upcoming event. One resource a lot of people may find useful is the TLT Faculty Stories.

http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/stories/

It has several case studies for new techniques such as podcasting, video and blogging, you might want to read some case studies at the 2008 TLT Symposium Conference site. You'll see lots of different examples with detailed notes on what they did.

Even if you can't make the conference, this could be really helpful.

There has been concern in recent weeks about the accessibility of iTunes, so Apple has released a PDF statement at

http://images.apple.com/support/itunes_u/docs/iTunes_U_and_Accessibility...

The big news is that iTunes 7.1 (March 2008) now includes VoiceOver compatibility which should allow most screen readers to access the iTunes menus/navigation. I haven't tested this, so I can't verify functionality.

If you are interested in learning more about Studiocode, ITS Training Services is offering Studiocode training during three sessions. If you get this after these dates and want to see more upcoming sessions, I recommend going to the Training Services web site and searching for "Studiocode".

Upcoming Sessions:

• February 28
• March 10