PennEduTech

Well, this isn’t really a live “report from the symposium”, but it just ended last night, so it’s fresh in my mind!  The Symposium offered a variety of interesting sessions, an it was a great way to learn about other schools’ projects and ‘meet’ others in SecondLife without having to spend money on travel.  More about the SecondLife aspect below, but first I want to talk about 2 sessions that offered content of interest to readers of this blog.

First, Anu Vedantham and Peter Decherney represented Penn admirably with their presentation “Mashup Video Projects for Classroom Creativity”  This ties in with Anu’s most recent post here about the Seltzer Family Digital Media Awards, but the presentation also covered ideas and tips for how to incorporate mashup video projects into courses not directly related to film.  Peter also generated a lot of interest with his part of this well-attended presentation, discussing copyright and related issues in mashups.  I encourage you to check the link above for more information about this great presentation.

The other session that I thought provided a lot of information that would be of interest to readers of this blog was the one titled “Your Video Projects Suck, but That’s OK ’cause So Do Your Papers: Moderating Student Expectations When Teaching New Media” by Jared Bendis of Case Western Reserve.  Anyone who has ever been to an NMC event knows that Jared is always a popular speaker, and this was no exception.  But this time he had a lot of practical tips for instructors who are assigning video projects to students who have never done any such thing before.  Of course he recommended the usual things like having several smaller “due dates” for storyboards, etc. before the completed project is due.  But he also pointed out that the “type A personalities” often end up with incomplete masterpieces, while the “slackers” set realistic expectations and often get the assignment finished with respectable work.  He also had a very interesting perspective on getting signed releases:  everyone must sign a release, including people who appear in a video and the student making the video, because the university has no control over where the video might be posted or shared after it’s submitted.

You can see the rest of Jared’s tips and some good sample videos of what to do and what not to do at http://fc.case.edu/newmedia/video/  The release form that he uses is linked in the middle of that page.

Also, a video of each session will be posted at http://www.nmc.org/2009-nml-symposium/program by March 30th if you’d like to watch it.

Now a word about SecondLife:  I had played with SecondLife briefly, but this was the first time that I ever attended a scheduled event, or even spent more than 10 minutes at a time in this virtual world.  The software has definitely become more stable since I last used it a year ago, but I did have it crash once, when I was attending a session where a video was being shown on a “screen” in SL.  And I use a computer that’s less than a year old and has a lot of RAM.  Other than that, I had a very positive experience.  I admit that I was a skeptic going in, but that’s why I wanted to register for this conference.  And it really was more engaging to watch an avatar on the screen give a talk, and be able to move around the room or change views, than it is to watch a ‘talking head’ in a rectangle of video for the same amount of time.  And I only embarrassed myself once, when I arrived at the “room” and had my avatar sit in what appeared to be an empty seat – but it turned out that the video world hadn’t fully loaded on my screen, and I was sitting on someone’s lap!  But the person was gracious, we both had a good laugh, and I ‘met’ someone I might not have.  

So that’s my report ‘from the field’.  Please let me know if I can answer any questions about it.

Stanford Cell Phone Quintet

Weigle Information Commons has just announced the 2009 Seltzer Awards competition. We expect to award $1,000 worth of equipment to five Penn undergraduates for one year for a new media project.

The announcement reminded me of the six ambitious and creative projects funded last year. One, by Nick Salvatore, introduced me to 3Dvideo – something I am eager to experience firsthand. Another, by Shawn Wang, proposed Second Life for international student-to-student exchanges. Kristin Hall proposed a video documentary about Botswana, Jody Pollock proposed a video documentary about Guatemala and Jean Lee proposed a video documentary set here in Philadelphia. And George Karandinos proposed an audio recording database. We hope to announce this year’s winners and showcase last year’s projects in mid-April.

In just a year, the technology has certainly sped up. I expect more applications for mobile, handheld projects – maybe one on cellphone music like this recent exploration at Stanford. And Second Life is getting more attention at Penn lately, especially from language lecturers.

SAS Computing and other groups at Penn offer a variety of services to help faculty use technology in their teaching.  These services can help instructors to more actively engage their students in their learning, to bring their research interests into the undergraduate classroom, or even just handle routine activities more efficiently.

We encourage you to visit http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/instructional for more information about technology support services.   SAS Instructional Technology grants are available to SAS faculty to facilitate activities which require special support. Grants can be used for a variety of purposes, such as

Many instructors want to get their students involved in contributing content to web sites for class projects; in some cases, they want the students to build a site from scratch.  IT support staff (such as myself) are typically reluctant to provision resources on University systems for such projects.  Setting up and maintaining sites can consume a lot of staff effort, plus there are concerns about system security, managing permissions, etc.

Fortunately, there are now lots of ways that instructors can have students build web sites using free services that are available to the public.  Below are links for just a few of these services.

Of course, before creating assignments that will generate publicly-viewable web sites, instructors need to make sure that the assignment will not invite students to disclose confidential or personal information.  I’ll have more about that topic in my next post.

http://www.blogger.com

It’s easy for students to create accounts and start posting within just a few minutes.
OK, a blog is not the same thing as a “web site,” but in many cases it gets the job done.  It’s one of the easiest ways to get information posted in a timely way.  Contributors can post to their blogs via email, making it possible for them update content from almost anywhere via mobile devices

http://sites.google.com/

Google Sites lets almost anyone build a site without having to know HTML.  Everything the students need to do happens in a standard web browser, so there’s no need for special software like Dreamweaver.  Many students already have google accounts, so they can get started quickly.

http://www.webs.com/

Webs  is another free service which provides an impressive array of supported features, including calendars, photo galleries, forums, various widgets, statistics tracking and much more.  Sites created through webs.com will include an advertising banner, but if you can live with that,  it’s a great resource.

http://freehostia.com/

Is an internet hosting site that offers a basic service tier for free with no advertising; there is a $10 per year fee for registering a domain name (e.g.  myclassproject.org). This is a good choice for those who want the complete flexibility for developing a site from scratch, without having to use preformatted templates, etc.  It requires that users understand how to transfer files via FTP, etc.   But it does offer a traditional Unix hosting environment for free for sites which don’t need a lot of storage space of expect large numbers of visitors; sites can be upgraded to accommodate more space and traffic for reasonable fees.