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). 

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.