Educational Technology Report: A look at this year’s featured Symposium speakers

Posted by Jamie Oberdick on Mar 30, 2007 in Blog, News | 3 comments

One of the advantages of events such as the Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology, held April 14 at the Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel, is the opportunity to hear talks by people who can inspire us to continue to do great things with educational technology here at the University. This year is of course no exception. Along with a list of great sessions facilitated by your Penn State peers (http://tinyurl.com/yryuy8), we have invited two outstanding individuals as our Keynote and Featured Speakers.

The Keynote Speaker is Lee Rainie, the founding Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. The Washington, D.C. research center examines how people’s Internet use effects their families, communities, health care, education, civic and political life, and work places. His talk will relate to how the Pew Internet Project’s research is relevant to this year’s Symposium theme, “Social Computing and the Culture of Teaching and Learning”.

Prior to launching the Pew Internet Project, Rainie served as the managing editor for U.S. News and World Report. He is a Harvard graduate and holds a master’s degree in political science from Long Island University.

Rainie has produced a variety of reports, articles, and presentations. You can review some of them here: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/a/102/about_staffer.asp

A few highlights that are relevant to our work include:

• A report on tagging: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/201/report_display.asp
• A presentation on communities, learning, and the Internet: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/89/presentation_display.asp
• A presentation on “Digital Natives,” a look at how today’s youth are different from their “digital immigrant” elders and how that effects libraries: http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/71/presentation_display.asp

The featured speaker is Byran Alexander, research director of the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE). The NITLE is a not-for-profit initiative that provides opportunities for teachers in liberal arts fields to create transformative learning experiences for and with their students via the innovative use of emerging technology. Alexander’s talk will focus on his specific interest, which is the intersection of mobile computing and social computing.

Alexander holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He has taught English and information technology studies as faculty at Centenary College of Louisiana.

Alexander maintains and contributes to a series of blogs, including Liberal Education Today, located at http://b2e.nitle.org/. He has also made past contributions to the mobile communications blog SmartMobs, and you can see an archive of his posts here: http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/authors/bryan_alexander/

If you would like to hear excellent podcast interviews with each of them done by ETS’s Allan Gyorke, you can find them at http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/.

And speaking of podcasts, we have great news for those who cannot make it to this year’s Symposium (registration is already full, proof that interest in educational technology is strong at Penn State). All presentations, including the Keynote and Feature Speakers’ talks, will be available on the Symposium site via podcast: http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/. While at the site, we also encourage you to participate by adding comments to the various blog posts you will see once you go to that link. We really would love to hear your thoughts.