There’s never a lack of things to do to expand one’s mind at Penn! Here are some great events coming up that are relevant to anyone interested in engaging students through technology:
The session lineup for the Penn UICONF looks amazing and highly representative of current technology trends in higher education. I’ve attended past versions and have always left with useful information that I could apply to my job.
As for the HigherEdCamp, I also had a great time at last year’s event. The unconference style allows for creative sessions that lead to unexpected positive ideas and conversations.
We have recently announced this new program that aims to demystify technology, provide hands-on training and a website building project, and foster career connections. We w
ill accept 15 rising juniors and seniors – application deadline of March 24 – and this cohort will spend next year with us at Weigle Information Commons learning about a variety of new technologies. Our goal is to attract a cohort of Penn students who do not already have experience with these technologies.
We began designing this series two years ago with colleagues in SAS, Career Services and of course in Penn Libraries. I have enjoyed the discussions about what skills today’s Penn grads need for the workplace – and when tough cuts on training topics are needed – which skills look most important. We settled on eight broad topics but there was, and continues to be, a temptation to sneak new topics in here and there. The topics in no particular order are:
- Graphic Design and Visual Literacy
- Web Resources
- Files, Folders, Formats
- Spreadsheets
- Presentation Software (such as PowerPoint)
- Web Design Concepts
- Using the Web to enhance your job search
- Collaboration and Management
We would love to involve more people with Hoesley Digital Literacy Fellows. We need your help in getting the word out to current sophomores and juniors for the March 24 deadline. We would like to bring in guest speakers for each workshop who use one of the topic areas in their jobs so students can more easily visualize why it might be worth taking time to learn about pivot tables or HTML tags.
Categories: Classroom Activities, New Technologies, Student Projects, Weigle Information Commons
Tags: career services, commons, digital, Hoesley, information, literacy, Penn Libraries, SAS, spreadsheets, undergraduates, web design, weigle
Editor’s note: This blog entry was written by Lisa Minetti, Curriculum Design and Assessment Specialist at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies.
Over the past year, the Program Development Group at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS) has developed and implemented the Penn LPS Commons, a custom-built online learning environment designed to center participants on the social interactions that drive learning communities. Built with Drupal and Moodle, the LPS Commons includes social networking, learning management and collaborative web 2.0 tools as well as robust permissions models which allow select elements of online learning communities to be shared with public audiences as institutional Open Educational Resources (OERs). In our beta year, we’ve delivered 27 blended and fully online courses to over 1400 participants from 65 counties. Whew!
As we emerge from our first year of work, we’d like to invite the campus community to come and hear us talk about our efforts both designing this new online environment and optimizing flexible instructional designs which allow student-generated conversations to drive the online course experience.
Please join us as we co-host the March meeting of the Pennsylvania Distance Learning Association (PADLA) on March 16, from 8:30-11:45 am in the Bodek Lounge at Houston Hall. Complete details about the event can be found on PADLA website. Members of the Penn community can attend this event for free, but others are asked to register in advance.
Hope to meet you there!
