TLT Fellows

I "LIKE" this

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:11:26 -0500

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.

Gamification in the Classroom

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 09:10:35 -0500

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:

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?
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:

Design and implement a game-like system that encourages students to write high-quality blog reflections about current events.
Assess the impact of that system on student attitudes about learning.
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.

Designing Mobile, Location-aware, Socially Networked Learning Assistant

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 12:39:53 -0500

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.

A Student-centric Ecosystem

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 10:18:43 -0500

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.

Welcome the 2011 Fellows

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 13:33:43 -0500

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).

Sam Richards TED Talk

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 10:53:43 -0500

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."

Fire out - what's next?

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 21:39:45 -0500

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.

Thinking about Outcome. It's about time!

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:07:57 -0500

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.

There Are No Intersticies With TLT

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:46:36 -0500

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....

Web Epistemology

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 07:54:15 -0500

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.

There is more knowledge on the web that is more available, and instantly available, to more people than ever before in history. The web is the primary, and often only, resource for knowledge for many people. The need is to teach good usage of the web in both the assimilation and the production of knowledge. How do we do this? How is it the same, and how is it different, than earlier treatments of knowledge?

With a Google Reader assignment (that I have just created), I am concerned with the abilities to search, choose, organize, synthesize, and reference web-based knowledge. But what are the metrics for doing this? With the portfolio (and blog) assignment on Google Sites (that I have just created), students will be learning how to create an effective professional presence and how to contribute knowledge to the web. Again, how do I grade these things, are they different than before? [In both cases I use design as a venue, but the skill sets are universal.]

Any ideas?

Update

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:32:05 -0500

Not being a blogger, remembering to do it is the first challenge, but I have been busy.

Unfortunately, the path to a pedagogy of convenience is complicated largely by my impulse to change everything.

Brad, Audrey, Matt, and Jeff are all giving me new ideas, ie, new to me. Audrey redid my course website on Google Sites using the Sites templates to good effect and cross linking in ways that will be very helpful to the students. My student assistant Kiersten is now helping me do the content. Matt has shown how using Forms (in Docs) for surveying users is a great way to get the product design data that the students always did manually in the first design project. Jeff (and Carla) have inspired me to add a blog to the portfolio that I had just begun to require. It looks like a great way for students to develop a dynamic professional identity in design. Brad has shown me how to use Google Reader to organize RSS feeds, which tackles knowledge acquisition and development in the age of the web. This contributes to so many things, including the portfolio, it will take a separate blog. I now have a small Reader assignment and many required uses.

On the side I am revisiting how I represent the design process and must now integrate that into the course and the assignments. I am also expanding my use of mindmaps (FreeMind, Mindmeister), but use Google Draw for flow charts now.

All of which means the summer is too short and the first day of classes looms. Sigh.

The SOC 119 Army and Section-Based Course Blogs

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 11:00:54 -0500

With Sam and Laurie's faculty fellow project, we reconceptualized their Race Relations Project and have gotten back into the design of their SOC 119 course. It's a massive undertaking. They aren't teaching it again until Spring, so we have some time to work things out.

There are 720 students in the class. Last year, 2/3 of them participated in small group (about 15-person) discussions and the other 1/3 didn't have groups. Instead, those 240 students were asked to participate in the course blog. As we've been talking in our team meetings, we kept coming up with good ideas - but ideas that would work best within the small group discussion sections. So I asked if there was another way of setting up the course so all students could be in discussions sections.

The main problem is simply a matter of logistics and finding enough group leaders. As the class has been run before, there were 32 sections of the course, each with two discussion leaders who participate in two different discussion groups. So that means they need to coordinate the work of 32 discussion leaders to cover 2/3 of the class. Bump that up to covering all students would mean that you need 48 sections and 48 discussion leaders.

Another model that we discussed to cover everyone would be to only have the groups meet every other week - so team leaders A and B would work with four sections:

Week 1: no meetings
Week 2: Sections 1 and 3
Week 3: Sections 2 and 4
Week 4: Sections 1 and 3
Week 5: Sections 2 and 4
...

We also talked about reducing the class size from 15 to 12, to make it easier to get everyone involved in the conversation. Then, during the weeks that those students aren't meeting, they would be doing something online that is both personal and related to the class such as posting a picture of their neighborhood to a group blog for their small group section.

So with the reduced class size and the one-on, one-off structure, we would actually need 30 group leaders. Math as follows:

720 students/12 students per section = 60 sections
(60 sections x 2 discussion leaders/section)/ 4 sections per discussion leader = 30 discussion leaders

[Yay - Math to the rescue. Now I feel good about my engineering degree.]

There are actually other people involved as well. Currently, they have five people who visit the discussion sections randomly to do a kind of quality control. Sam was thinking that he might want to increase this to 10 people - so he has some people available to monitor the group blog spaces.

So how does Sam afford a staff of 40 for one course? All of them are doing this work as part of a higher-level sociology course. It's a fantastic idea that I've seen work elsewhere, like in BBH 146 (intro to human sexuality) and through several examples presented at the NCAT conference, which is about large course redesign. It's a great educational experience for the students who act as peer mentors, combining a leadership opportunity with higher-order thinking about the content and issues that come up in the discussion sections.

Another consequence of this design is that we now have an interesting use case. The idea is to use the Blogs at Penn State platform to manage 60 section-based group blogs. So automatic (once-daily) syncing with course section membership would be necessary, along with the ability to add additional people like the group discussion leaders, who would have admin access. None of these should be run out of students' personal space, so we'd need to set up departmental space for these sections as well. And they should be semester-specific, so students who participate in Spring 2011 continue to have access, but don't interfere with students in the same section number who are taking the course in Fall 2011.

It will be a challenging situation, but as is the case with previous faculty fellow projects, the experimental use of our tools helps to shape our thinking about how they are used and how we need to modify them.

The (camp) fire still burns...

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 22:08:08 -0500

It's been a busy week, first with the Learning Design Summer Camp, and then moving on to meetings with my Fellow team (the "Dream Team," as I call them these days). These guys (Chris Stubbs, Chris Millet, and TK Lee) are driving me nuts! They are always filled with great ideas, new directions to pursue, suggestions for a new way to use existing technologies, etc. Each meeting leaves my head spinning!

All kidding aside, this process has been a new one for me. Being at a campus, I haven't had the opportunity to work with a team. Matt Bodek (Brandywine's IDS) and Aaron Smith (the MC Campus Consultant) are wonderfully talented and have helped laid an excellent foundation to get me to where I am today with technology in/out of the classroom. Now, it's like I'm spending the summer working on a "group project" - which, for some people, sends a chill down their spine. For me, it's been just the opposite. Our meetings are filled with questions that send us on different tangents, which in this case is a good thing.

We've pretty much set out and accomplished my primary goal for the summer, figuring out how to design a "Choose Your Own Adventure" story in Google Earth. The challenge was to figure out how to create links within the pop-up windows to allow students/users to control the direction of the story. I think TK figured out how to accomplish this in the first two weeks. We then moved on to an idea suggested by Chris Stubbs. Is it possible to have students create a learning portfolio for a course all in Google Earth? It's a real exciting thought and a direction I never thought of.

Today, Chris Millet introduced the idea of integrating a blog with a Google Earth file to not only document learning in a geospatial context but increase collaboration among students. I have not used blogs for student collaboration in courses before, so I'm a little cautious but confident that this is something that be effective to enhance student learning. Time to put trust in my team to see how this pulls together.

But all this excitement and generation of "what if" and "did you think of" questions is also causing me to pause and revisit my objectives. What do I really want to do, and what do I really want to come out of the summer? The answer has always been there - my overarching goal is to increase the geographic literacy of my students by utilizing the geospatial tool Google Earth. And now, with my Dream Team, I have a plethora of new ideas and new technological approaches to make this happen.

See why they are driving me crazy? No "mindsparking" needed here!

Summer Camp Conversation Add-on Thoughts

Wed, 14 Jul 2010 13:26:10 -0500

I very much enjoyed the sessions this morning. After my talk I had the opportunity to speak with a few folks and realized that on at least one issue I inadvertently conveyed a message that is the opposite of what I believe. I did not intend to say that faculty must be "dynamic" in their classrooms. In fact, I think that instructors need to fully be themselves when they are teaching and that they need to draw on their strengths. If someone is an amazing communicator and has a way with words and language but is uncomfortable anywhere but standing behind the podium, then he or she should build on what is clearly a strength -- in this case their ability to communicate effectively.

I would say that if we want to keep students engaged, then we should not fight with what is. In our world, "what is," it seems to me, is that students will tune out after a short period of time. We can fight it or we can do something to bring their minds back into the room every twenty minutes or so (e.g., show a YouTube clip) that fits with our lesson. We can fight it or we can go with it. Moreover, and this is entirely my opinion, what works for me is to touch the edgy side of life. Students rarely respond negatively so long as it's not gratuitous. There has to be a lesson in whatever it is I do in the classroom or students will call me out. They do NOT want to be entertained; they want to learn. I have been pleasantly surprised by how many times students iterate that learning is more important than entertainment.

If there are any other issues that people would like to address, feel free to start an exchange.

Musical Play Faculty Fellows Update

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 11:25:58 -0500

We've assembled quite a team here! In addition to Ann, Elizabeth Pyatt, Jason Wolfe, and myself, Hannah Inzko and Trace Brown have joined the team, bringing their video expertise into play.

In the past several weeks, we've been meeting and lining up all our ducks. We have all our equipment needed for the study, and this week we spent some serious time making sure it was all charged up and more important, that we all know how to use it!

We spent several hours on the 5th floor of RIder testing equipment, running it, and having fun! Check out the pict I snuck:

Ann, Trace, Hannah, and Jason spent time Friday recording video off the Wii and the Nintendo DSi for upcoming presentations. It's far easier (and safer) in a presentation to show a video clip of a game in action than lugging all the equipment to the site, setting it up, etc. We purchased a Neuros:
to capture video off the Wii, and it works as well for the XBox or PS3. It's dead simple to use, and will be quite useful beyond the FF project for the EGC as we record video snippets.

On Wed, July 14, Ann will have breakout session on her work at the Penn State Learning Design Summer Camp. It will be great time for all to see what she's done and where she's headed!

On Monday, July 19, the EGC will have an open lab at the Pennsylvania Music Educator Association Conference, held this year at the Penn Stater. We'll demonstrate musical game apps from 1 - 5:30 PM, leading up to Ann's presentation on her work in this area from 4:30 - 5:30 PM. I believe this combo approach will open up quite a few eyes!

We've finally decided on an approach to the repository. Using the Blogs at Penn State, we'll build a customized solution for storing and referencing musical educational game related media and articles. Elizabeth Pyatt is leading the charge here, building some customizations to make this all happen.

The only item of concern at this time is obtaining IRB approval. Always a process fraught with unpredictability, Ann is in the process of a rewrite of the original submission and is scheduling a meeting with the great IRB folks to ensure a timely processing of the revised IRB forms. I think for future Faculty Fellows that believe they will need IRB approval, ETS should consider starting that process ASAP - maybe as early as mid-Spring semester.