Symposium Story
From ETS
Symposium Story #2, October 2008
Work on the symposium ramped up this month. For starters, both the session proposals form and the registration form are now available on the Symposium site. The official call for proposal announcement will go out the last week of October but we have already begun receiving proposal submissions and people are registering so the word is getting out. Additionally, you can now find information about our two speakers, David Wiley and Danah Boyd on the Symposium site. Wiley believes that higher education needs to align itself with the changes in both society and its student base by innovating in the areas of openness, connectedness, participation, and personalization. Boyd's focus is on how American youth use networked public spaces, including MySpace and Facebook, for sociable purposes. Both are on the forefront of the modern education movement and will provide topics for lively discussion for our attendees.
In accordance with this year's theme, "Student Engagement and the Culture of Teaching and Learning," the Program Team sent out several personal invitations to faculty members who are using technology to engage their students in interesting and innovative ways. We can expect to see presentations covering topics like:
- Students using digital media to create compositions for their English class in lieu of submitting a paper; - The use of blogs for student portfolio's and academic advising. Using Web 2.0 technologies for role play in a distance learning class; - And much more.
Finally, the Marketing Team has begun working on the campaign for this year's Symposium. Among the various marketing materials we're planning on distributing, you can expect to see several video programs highlighting some of the students and faculty using technology to enhance the learning experience.
Symposium Story #3, November 2008
We continue to receive proposal submissions from faculty wanting to present at the 2009 TLT Symposium. Reading over them you see what amazing things faculty and students are doing with technology to enhance teaching and learning. We will have a full day of breakout sessions covering a bunch of topics, from digital literacy to using blogs to create electronic portfolios to innovative ways of introducing mastery quizzing into large classes. The submissions are coming from all around the commonwealth and it appears as if we will have a good amount of campus representation in April. We will most likely extend the proposal submission deadline into early December to accommodate all the requests we are receiving.
The symposium marketing team began developing our marketing materials for our faculty-student profiles. Working with our symposium digital media team they began interviewing the faculty member and his students for our first profile. In addition to our poster marketing campaign, this year we hope to produce a series of four short videos highlighting our theme of student engagement in the culture of teaching and learning. The goal is to have our first one complete by Christmas break.
In addition to a full day of activities on Saturday, April 18, we are also planning several events for the prior afternoon. These plans are still very much in the developmental phase but I think it is safe to say you can expect them to include an informal session on using collaborative web spaces and I believe the gaming folks have something brewing as well.
You can watch the event come together by visiting the symposium wiki page (http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/wiki/TLT_Symposium_2009). If you have not registered for the symposium, please do by visiting the symposium site and completing the registration form (http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/content/2009-tlt-symposium-registration-form).
