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). 

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.