We are creating a game format in which students will post current events to share with other students. Readers will "like" postings, and the one with the most "likes" will be chosen as the current event for everyone to comment on the following week. Those comments will also be up for "liking."

Posting a current event (or two) will earn a badge. Responding to the article chosen for the following week will earn a different badge. A complete set of four badges can be traded for a token.

One random current event and one random response posting will win a token.

What's a token? A magical device that can be used to extend a due date by 24 hours during the course. Unused tokens can be converted to points on a one-to-one basis at the end of the semester.

Considerable attention has been paid recently to the potential impact of games on learning.  One difficulty for this work is in finding the appropriate games to support relevant learning objectives, or if one can't be found, the time and expense of building games from scratch.  But what if one could take the elements of a game that make it fun and engaging, and integrate those into the classroom in a way that makes that class as engaging as a game (just without the actual game)?  Is it possible that the qualities of games that cause people to become engrossed for hours at a time could also cause students to become engrossed in learning?  This idea, often referred to as "gamification", is the focus of Sherry Robinson's faculty fellowship.

Our primary questions are:

1. How can game-like elements improve student engagement and motivation in two Business courses: MGMT301: Basic Management Concepts, and BA321: Contemporary Skills for Business Professionals?
2. How can we design these game-like elements so they are instructionally effective as well as easy to use by both faculty and students?

Our goals for this Summer and Fall are to:

1. Design and implement a game-like system that encourages students to write high-quality blog reflections about current events.
2. Assess the impact of that system on student attitudes about learning.
3. Develop resources for other faculty who wish to gamify their courses.

On a technical note, the systems we are currently looking at are WordPress and CubePoints.

Mobile computing has made huge strides in terms of adoption over the the last five years. The popularity of products like Apple's iPhone and mobile operating systems like Android have led to an explosion of apps leveraging the unique qualities of these computer systems, e.g. always present, always connected, location aware, with the ability to capture photos, videos and audio. How have these qualities been incorporated into higher ed course design, though? What opportunities are there for designing course activities that take into account ubiquitous access to knowledge and peers? These are the questions we will be exploring in Jim Jansen's TLT fellowship team this summer.

The first stage of the project has two components.

1) We will be surveying the market to catalog and understand what apps already exist, identifying the state of the art as well as gaps in what is available as it relates to utilizing mobile for higher educational.

2) Partha Mukherjee is Jim's grad assistant working on this project and he is getting warmed up with iOS development. The goal is to have a working prototype of an app by the end of the summer.

Longer term, this coming fall semester will be an opportunity to refine the app with feedback from Jim's students which will lead to a more complete app that can be piloted in Spring semester with a formal evaluation.

In addition to Jim, Partha, and myself, the team also consists of Heather Hughes, Zac Zidik, and Matt Meyer.

What would a university web spaces look like if they were designed from the perspective of a student? Not designed by students but rather designed from the lens of a student, or prospective student, seeking to enter our world. That is the question our Fellows team has taken on this summer. Fortunately we're an intellectually nimble group capable of exploring the question from many angles including pedagogically (Brian Young), user- interface (Audrey Romano), community building (Robin Smail), and our student fellow, Davis Shaver.

Our objective is ambitious: By the end of the summer we plan to have a descriptive narrative case study illustrating this ideal in the hope that it can be an entry point into a discussion with those who are responsible for thinking of these things.

Our position is this: With the best of intentions we've been designing systems with the student as an end point. In our efforts to serve we've looked at things from a task completion perspective, starting at the task and working back to the student. However, in reality life works just the opposite. The student has to navigate through the systems we've developed. Systems they often find difficult and disjointed.

Well, what if we could start over? Just for fun we're going to imagine what that would look like in the hopes that as we move forward we can add this perspective to the conversation.

Summer is in swing and that means that we have a new group of TLT Fellows working with us.  By "us", I mean primarily ETS staff, but Cole Camplese and I have been talking about expanding the TLT Fellows to the other units within Teaching and Learning with Technology where it makes sense.

This year is a little different. 

First, I can't really call it the TLT Faculty Fellows program anymore because we have Davis Shaver working with us.  Davis is an undergraduate student who is very interested in ideas like social components of learning management systems, social media, and journalism.  He is the founder of Onward State and a frequent participant at our events.  So when we thought about finding ways to engage students in shaping our services, Davis immediately came to mind.

Second, both Sherry Robinson and Michael Elavsky are touring the globe this summer. 

When Sherry is in Pennsylvania, she is working with a team around Gamification ideas - incorporating games and game-like elements into courses to create activities that are interesting and have elements like risks, rewards, achievements, and competition. 

Michael's interest area is in "global communication pedagogy".  He is going to be setting up a course experience that will be shared between Penn State students and students in the Czech Republic.  They will be using a combination of technologies and digital storytelling techniques to examine stories in the media and their cultural understandings of the world.

Finally, Jim Janzen will be working with us for over a year instead of just the summer.  His interest is in the development of mobile learning applications that can be used as a kind of just-in-time teaching assistant for students in his courses.  These would be along the lines of the Wolfram Alpha Course Assistants.

The teams are already meeting, planning, brainstorming, and breaking things.  It should be a very interesting summer (and beyond). 

Just a quick pointer to our own Same Richards' Ted Talk and its availability from the TED Talks website. I saw Sam was being promoted on the front page and thought it would be good to capture it here. His talk is excellent and well worth the time spent. Check out, "A radical experiment in empathy."

One of the outcomes of my summer with my dream team has just finished.  I taught a new half-semester course for the first time, EARTH 400 - Earth Science Seminar, with the focus on public lands and fire.  With valuable assistance from Chris, Chris, and TK, I used a blog to share course materials and had the students upload all their audio recordings and Google Earth files in the blog.  Be sure to check it out!  http://tinyurl.com/earth400fire

I presented this course to the students as a "green" course - the students turned in all their assignments on the blog as audio and video files embedded in Google Earth.  The only paper students received on me was a copy of the syllabus.  On Day 1, students were handed digital voice recorders (SONY ICD-UX200) and handheld video cameras (Kodak Zi8) and started recording right away.  I was pleased at how excited the students were to having a course with a "different" format for assignments and the opportunity to spend time in the field.  It was also nice for me to see the quality of multimedia products improve for each student as the weeks went on.  The creativity in these files was also impressive - for example, several students would speak in different voice styles to portray different characters in their recordings.  Ben Bean's campfire conversation and Centralia video were some of the highlights for me as an instructor.

Even the final exam was a series of audio recordings, completed at Ridley Creek State Park.  How many opportunities do students get a chance to complete a final exam outdoors?  And I will admit, this was the only other time I gave students something on paper - the questions for the final exam.

Will I do this course again?  You bet.  This class was the best teaching experience I've had in the 9+years I've been at Penn State.  The students even told me I need to teach this course again, but they are suggesting the theme of "water" instead of "fire."

What will I do now that my half-semester course is over?  I need to start planning for next semester, of course!  But I need to be thoughtful about what the course goals will be and how the technology will help me get there.  More audio recordings?  Google Earth and/or spreadsheet mapper for a Choose Your Own Adventure?  Things that make you go hmmmm.......

In the meantime, I'm still working with one of my undergraduate researchers on the wonderful  project we're calling Teaching World Music with Geospatial Technology (http://tinyurl.com/googleearthmusic/).  This project involves fellow TLT Fellow Ann Clements and her graduate student Teri Yerger.  We've recently found out that we'll be presenting this project at the Pennsylvania Music Educators Association Conference in Hershey in April, and then who knows where else this may lead???  Fingers crossed, there will be an article in the next issue of Penn State Outreach about this cross-campus collaboration.
 
I plan on stopping by the TLT Fellows Office on my next visit to University Park.  That office served as a "dream space" for me (I tell my students that each of them need to find their own "dream space," a space that serves as a source of inspiration, innovation, and high levels of work production).  Hopefully, spending a little more time in the TLT Fellows Office will kick start the technology innovations going into the planning for my spring semester courses, too.

Something I didn't add in my last post is that this TLT Faculty Fellowship has tapped me into outcome in a way that generally eludes me.  For whatever reason, I don't put outcome and assessment at the forefront of my thinking and class design.  That's odd, I realize, but "learning" and "critical thinking" are things that I just assume happen in my classroom and I just never put energy into figuring out how to improve them.  More to the point, over the past twenty-five years students have consistently said that they "left my classes with their heads spinning with new ideas" and so I never saw the need to focus on assessment in my course design.  As to those students who did not say this, I just assumed that they were jaded curmudgeons and there was no reaching them.  Convenient....yes...I know.

But as I've entered head first into course design I've been able to see the ways in which I don't even understand assessment and outcome, let alone focus on it.  And so this has been a bright spot among all of the other bright spots of the summer.  What DO I want my students to get out of an assignment?  It's not enough to just think it's cool (even if it is cool); putting some thought into how the assignment will land in the laps of students and what they'll do with it can greatly enhance the likelihood that they'll think it's as cool as I do.  And if that happens, then I've got them where I want them.  It's amazing how the basic principles of pedagogy 101 have escaped my understanding and application for so many years.  What a knucklehead I can be...but at least I can laugh at myself.
 

So I jumped on the TLT Faculty Fellows blog to see what's happening in people's lives and how projects are unfolding and I realized that I haven't visited in a few weeks.  I'm inclined to say "sorry about that" except it's the very nature of the work and vision of the TLTers that leads me to have so little time to document what I've been up to.  Let me explain.

Every new idea creates about five others and somehow when I find myself in a room with technology-teaching visionaries like Allen, Jeff, and Erin, the ideas that get tossed out into that room are never the ones that call for simple cosmetic changes;  they're the ones that dismantle the foundations of systems.  And each new technological marvel only opens the doorway to others.  And there is never enough time to just learn and apply one new program (e.g., Voice Thread)...and so I find that I have to go out into the WWW and learn things on my own.  Let's see:  iMovie, Illustrator, Fireworks, advanced HTML coding, Voice Thread, GarageBand, Soundtrack Pro, Word Press, etc.  This list keeps getting longer and longer.

And at issue is that these skills don't just begin and end with my SOC 119 class.  I've been working on a fund raising project with colleagues in Pittsburgh and Haiti and Laurie and I have made several short videos using iMovie to help that project along.  It always seems like it's going to be simple when I/we begin something like that, but it never is.  So after several trips to Sparks or Pollock or Pattee we finally got some results that were pretty cool.  And my point is that these new skills that I'm learning are being put to use in so many different venues that I have very little time to reflect upon them.

Here's a video that Laurie threw together to recruit Middle Eastern students for our West Meets Middle East Project:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PoaV13P8eE

One one hand this looks like a very simple video.  And it is for someone who has knowledge of Final Cut Pro or iMovie.  But we've never made a video and we wouldn't have had the vision or the courage to jump into it without this TLT Faculty Fellowship this summer.  And that's just one video.  Here's another we made for our Haiti fund raising.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv8T3Yot3Xc

This one was a bit more complex and Laurie won't win any awards for style (it really is her work).  However, with photos I took in Haiti coupled with a song written by my cousin along with the courage to make mistakes and supported by the wonderment of a seven-year-old to figure things out, we have a video that works for our needs and we didn't have to find someone else to do it.  So rock on for that.

This entire experience has blown open my doors of experimentation and I'm ready to really have some fun in January when I return to the classroom.  But for now, it's back to work because tonight I'm trying to tweak our PSU blogs template.  There's got to be a way for me to put the World in Conversation logo up there....

I would like some help in understanding the nature of knowledge in a web based knowledge culture. I sometimes get into faculty discussions about web based plagiarism and how we have to do something about it. My sardonic response is that the work of the students has improved a lot and we should be grateful. Behind this wisecrack is an acute awareness that what I knew, or could know, when growing up was dependent on the few with whom I talked, what few books I had access to and actually read, and a few things on the radio and TV. Now I, and anyone on line, can answer almost any question in an instant. I think this subject is of great importance in education, and focusing on plagiarism just trivializes it.