June 2010 Archives

As the Sam Richards/Laurie Mulvey faculty fellow project has been progressing, we have begun working on some ideas for logos and site designs for the new World in Conversations project.  At the end of the last meeting, we were all wondering what the best way would be to talk about these designs.  Google Wave can be a bit confusing.  Google Drawings is nice for one picture, but doesn't have a mechanism for threaded discussion. 

Inspired by Matt Meyer, I tried using VoiceThread as a way to show what Hannah Halm had come up with. It was remarkably easy to create and share with the team.  As you can see from the results below, the group was able to leave comments (mostly audio) and use tools to draw on the existing design. 



One downside is that no one aside from me was able to add additional images - so as Hannah made revisions, she wasn't able to add them.  Also, as Dave Stong pointed out, it's time consuming to listen to the comments versus being able to scan them as text.  So ultimately, Hannah moved her designs to her own blog and I think that has been working out well.  I still think that VoiceThread has a place as a team communication tool.

So the above still serves as a demonstration of VoiceThread, but if you want to see what Hannah is creating, the best place to look is her blog.

During Laura's visit to State College last week, we made some substantial progress in our effort to build out a Google Earth choose your own adventure activity.  Thanks to Laura's concept map and TK's exploration of the spreadsheet mapper template, we were able to build out a nice shell of interlocking locations, which required almost no knowledge of code to build.  Based on what we've done, the stage is set for students to take an interactive tour across the world while studying paleontology, across Pennsylvania studying green living, or pretty much anywhere while they study anything.  Because while we will be creating specific learning materials for Laura's courses, part of the aim of the summer is to build the framework that can allow any student or instructor anywhere to create their own stories using their own content, regardless of their technical ability.

But as exciting as it was to see the beginning of our first choose your own adventure story come to life, two other recent developments have been just as exciting over the past week.

Google Earth and Music Education

The first, is an update on the collaboration between Laura and fellow Fellow, Ann Clements who are looking to find out of Google Earth could be used to help in Music Education.  With a little creativity and the addition of media elements, Google Earth could help bridge geography, culture, and music in new ways - helping students to develop a better local, national, or global perspective on the music they are learning about and how and why it sounds the way it sounds.


















Where will it all lead to?  At minimum some fresh ideas about music education.  But the sky is certainly the limit and it is tremendously exciting to see two of our faculty fellows coming together from completely different disciplines to create something innovative.  Stay tuned.


A Global Portfolio
The other interesting development from last week came from taking a step back from the specific goals of Laura's summer fellowship to consider Google Earth's place in her teaching. 

Instead of using it for a specific assignment, why not use Google Earth (GE) as the hub of a student's portfolio for Laura's course? 

Because of GE's flexibility in including media elements, there is no reason why the podcasts, the pictures, the presentations and papers - all of the artifacts students create during the course of a semester, couldn't be geo-tagged and mashed together to create a literal map of the work each student had done during the course of the semester. A geo-based ePortfolio if you will.

What better way to reinforce the spacial understanding so core to Laura's teaching and create an interesting archive of student work that they can be proud to share.

Its still just an idea - but its an exciting one that we look forward to exploring over the course of the summer.

I know Ann Clements is looking at the relationship of how musical play like guitar hero translates to actual music creation. I just found this video demoing Rock Band 3's new "pro" mode where you can play with an real guitar and the game prompts you to play the actual notes and chords. Check it out.

My thanks to Mary Janzen for her great article at http://news.its.psu.edu/story-1219 .

This sums up the project to date. We're waiting on some equipment, nailing down our IRB, and have two presentations lined up - both for professional music organizations. Interesting things are happening!

After several team meetings, the work around Richard Devon's Faculty Fellowship is starting to take shape. Richard is a professor of engineering design and has been using web-based tools (primarily Google Apps) in his classes to facilitate team work. Richard is looking at the advantages of using systems and materials that can by used anytime, anywhere, by anyone. These cloud-based services power what Richard refers to as a "pedagogy of convenience". Does this convenience lessen the impediments to learning when in a technological environment, as well as lessen the impediments inherent from life issues (e.g. illness, family obligations, etc)? Does the anytime, anywhere nature of Google Apps increase student learning and performance?

The anytime, anywhere aspect of these environments becomes more important when you consider that some engineering design students take part in teams consisting of people from around the globe. The open nature of cloud services make them ideal for this kind of collaboration. Consider that many systems hosted at educational institutions are based on infrastructure, such as account management systems, that make it difficult for individuals are different institutions to use the same system.

All this gets at the fact that systems like Google Apps are more akin to the kind of systems users will find after they graduate and start to work. Learning and working are not that different. It is in the best interest of organizations that employee people to create environments that facilitate communication in the endeavor to help employees learn. Systems for communication in educational context should not be so different from those you find in the professional context.

Over the course of the summer, the team - Richard Devon, Matt Meyer, Audrey Romano, and Myself - will be working on redesigning elements of Richard's courses. We will be considering issues such as content as student shared construction of knowledge, openness of content, and the aforementioned pedagogy of convenience. Two elements we have already started to look are enhancing the requirements for students portfolios and having students tap into their existing social networks as part of the idea generation phase of a design project.

That's a quick summary of the thinking happening amongst this faculty fellow team so far. I'm looking forward to see where the summer leads us.

I just read Chris Stubbs' post about the Google Earth powered choose your own adventure game project that Laura Guertin is working on this summer as a Faculty Fellow and was reminded of something I saw earlier this morning related to the upcoming World Cup. What I really like about the demonstration below is how it ties directly to the context of a widely popular current event and is not just a stand alone visualization. I think linking this kind of work to current topics is a really interesting approach and wonder how it might help spark some thinking in Laura's team.

You can explore all the World Cup venues in Google Earth by checking it out here.

Over the course of the next few months TK Lee, Chris Millet and I will have the distinct pleasure of working with Dr. Laura Guertin, Professor of Earth Science at Penn State Brandywine, during her Faculty Fellowship here at ETS.  This summer Laura is looking to leverage interactive storytelling in the choose your own adventure vein to create interactive educational experiences that will improve student learning.  Of course interactive fiction has been around for a long time and so Laura is looking to up the ante by creating such stories with Google Earth to tie spacial awareness - one of her core learning objectives - into the mix. And we're here to help.

Our goal for the summer is three-fold.  First, we're looking to create several Google Earth based stories that Laura can take and immediately use in her teaching during the next academic year. Second, we're looking to build a resource library and a template/ tutorial that will make it easy for other students or faculty to create their own stories in Google Earth with minimal technical knowledge.  And finally, we want to build a research agenda that will assess our efforts and advance Laura's scholarship.  Did I mention we might go mobile with all this too?

We're about two weeks in from our first team meeting and the team has hit the ground running.  Thanks to a bit of experimentation, we have the humble beginnings of an Google Earth based interactive story framework.  TK has also discovered a potentially powerful and very simple way to use Google Spreadsheets to populate Earth that we'll be exploring over the next week. 

Laura will be visiting University Park next week and we're hoping to use her time here to flesh out a solid prototype and begin to think critically about how we're ultimately going to assess the impact this tool could have.  Stay tuned - some very cool things are cooking.

http://tlt.its.psu.edu/about/news/2010/annclementsff

Clements, who gives guitar instruction, said that guitar sales actually increased by 23 percent after the release of the first "Guitar Hero" game. She is interested in how to help music teachers assist K-12 students who have become good at playing a game like "Guitar Hero" to undergo the necessary transition to be good at playing a real guitar.

We are so lucky to have Ann as a Faculty Fellow this summer.  I would encourage you to check out the story linked above.  Her work with music and musical play is really quite interesting.  After you read the article above, check out the wiki page for her project.

So I need to say a couple of things right from the start.  While the vast majority of my ideas start out from some crevice deep inside of my cranial cavity, they don't get too far before Laurie (my wife, for those who don't know) shapes them into something presentable for the world AND infinitely more complex and nuanced.  So in a way I just motivate her to think about some issue and then take her thoughts public and out into the world...and then I get credit for being "innovative" and "forward-thinking" and sometimes "insightful."  So reading Allan's post makes me just a bit uncomfortable in that, while I am a "TLT Faculty Fellow," every decision that I make will be run through Laurie for her "approval" along the lines of, "Is this what you had in mind?"

So in many ways I'm very much the public face of a larger project that starts with our relationship and extends out into the many initiatives that we get off the ground by putting our heads together.  This is why Laurie (and Gregory Collins -- a local videographer who has been doing some amazing work with us) will be accompanying me to the summer TLT meetings with Allan, Jeff, and Erin.

That said, Laurie and I were having a conversation the other night about how this TLT gig is going to blow our work out of the universe in which it currently resides.  As Allan mentioned, whereas we proposed working with the SOC 119 class and having those changes spill over into the Race Relations Project, we are now going back to square one and starting with our very reasons for doing this work that we do in the first place.  In fact, we're starting with the question "Why?" and it's best captured in this TED talk. 

Our first step was to get a new web site that can be the umbrella site for all of our endeavors (www.worldinconversation.org).  I am totally stoked and can't wait for our next meeting.  I'm ready to rock this thing to new places.

Working with Rich Doyle, we categorized impacts of technology as ranging from hype to autogenic, self replicating technology (eg, grey goo).  Before the grey goo scenario is reached Rich argues that many technologies have been ontological in changing what it means to be human. Some recent examples would be atomic weapons, IT, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology will probably get there soon.  Older ones include irrigation technology in ancient Mesopotamia and the printing press, but many have been documented under the rubric of technological determinism.  More prosaic but often hugely important are mass technologies and their social and environmental impact. [There are no natural lines between these levels of impact, it is just a metaphor.]