PennEduTech

Online Voting open

The Weigle Information Commons has conducted annual mashup contests for many years now. We’ve just opened up online voting for the 18 videos in this year’s Mashup Contest.

You can view the videos and vote for your favorite three mashups online through May 23.

The rules for our contest are simple – make a mashup video that is attractive, engaging, technically savvy and no more than two minutes long. All Penn students are welcome to submit entries, and the world is welcome to vote online for the Popular Choice award.

Personally, I’ve enjoyed watching the videos over the years – I find our expectations for fancy editing grow higher each year!

I first learned about Poll Everywhere from John MacDermott several months back as an alternative to clickers for situations where personal cell phones might work better. In March, I saw this in action at the ACRL annual conference where dozens of text messages scrolled away on a large lecture screen. I liked the element of suspense and surprise when a new message showed up on the big screen, and decided to try it out sooner rather than later. Chatting with Anne Schwieger, Coordinator, Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) at the Netter Center for Community Partnerships led to my first test run of Poll Everywhere at their ABCS Summit on April 29. Anne and I asked a small group of undergraduates to walk around the poster session, ask visitors for their comments and then text their responses in to the online polls. We asked two simple questions: What do you like best about ABCS? and This poster helps me by… and left each question open on the big screen in Hall of Flags for about a half-hour.

Overall, I thought the technology worked quite well! We received 19 responses to the first question and 23 to the second. One highlight was students giving “shout out” messages to their favorite professors. Another was the surprising depth and thoughtfulness of the texts received! Here are two examples in response to the second question:

“Its important for us to think about the power of the individual to solve the problems society faces. Democratic devolution is pivotal.”

“…highlighting the importance of lead poisoning testing for kids since the symptoms are so typical of other illnesses.”

I see this type of open-ended response as potentially much more powerful than the multiple-choice options that clickers offer. Texts could be sent in by cellphone or through a web form that worked well on the iPad from our Media Lab. With more than 60 people in the room at one point, and a browse-and-wander structure, the Poll Everywhere solution was also a cleaner one that trying to give out, and later collect, clickers. I think I will try this technology again.

I’m looking forward to Dan Cohen’s presentation next week here on his new book The Ivory Tower and the Open Web. It’s been almost a year since Peter Decherney first suggested bringing Dan to Penn. In that time, we have been in touch with several faculty on campus who are exploring the tools that Dan has helped to create such as Zotero and Omeka. I’ve also enjoyed the YouTube video of Dan’s presentation at the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) fall meeting.

Dan will speak in the Class of ’55 Conference Room on the second floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center on Friday February 25 from 10:30 to 11:30 am. Then he will join some members of the Weigle Information Commons Faculty Advisory Group and Program Partners Group for an informal lunch.

This will also be the Weigle Information Commons’ first event to be simulcast via a web broadcast with a twitter back channel for questions. It will be interesting to see how that works out! We are asking folks watching online to use the hashtag #dancohen to send in questions during the live lecture. Go to this page to watch the live broadcast.

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 will 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:

1. Graphic Design and Visual Literacy
2. Web Resources
3. Files, Folders, Formats
4. Spreadsheets
5. Presentation Software (such as PowerPoint)
6. Web Design Concepts
7. Using the Web to enhance your job search
8. 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.

On Monday I taught my first hands-on workshop completely online using Penn Libraries’ new Adobe Connect room. I chose to teach Excel Pivot Tables under the logic that anyone interested in pivot tables would be comfortable enough with juggling multiple windows and handling sound problems. This was a good assumption – the seven participants handled the platform well.

I found it interesting – but difficult - to teach this way. I spent much time preparing handouts (sample spreadsheets of “before” and “after”) and worrying about pace and structure. I chose a traditional approach where I shared my screen and manipulated Excel and then asked participants to “watch and repeat” on their own computer.

The technology worked quite well and the participants all seemed to keep up, and be eager for more. But being the presenter, I had this odd sinking feeling that I was shouting down a deep, empty well.  I have presented at several conference sessions online – but I have no expectation of audience participation when I am lecturing. It felt much stranger to conduct a small-group hands-on workshop completely online. We are planning to try this again in January and suggestions for how to structure the activity to be more interactive and less didactic would be most welcome!

Did you know that ISC is building a replica of the Penn campus in Second Life? Thanks to the annual IT Staff convention, I learned about this new project headed by Deke Kassabian. Deke will be giving a guided tour of the new building project here at the Weigle Information Commons at a WICshop on July 8 at noon. The new build includes several prominent landmarks on campus including the Van Pelt Dietrich Library Center.

Interest in Second Life seems to be in a resurgence at Penn lately. In March, PennGSE and Cornell University held a workshop on Taxonomies of Virtual Worlds for Education organized by Yasmin Kafai, and in May, the Wharton School held the Virtual Worlds in Academia Symposium organized by Tim Allen. In recent weeks, langauge lecturers in Japanese and Persian have been exploring Second Life hands-on. Deke has set up a new SIG (special interest group) email list called VIRTWORLD-SIG for all at Penn who are interested in exploring virtual worlds.

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.

Penn Libraries recently announced a cool new way to explore the image collection at the Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library. Here is a Michelangelo Slideshow I made in a few seconds – click the blue arrow at top to start. The CoolIris 3D software may require a plug-in download. You can create a rich browsing experience for images that you choose to include.

To make this show, I started at the image collection page, chose Michelangelo from the Artist box at right and narrowed my search to records with digital images. You can make slideshows for a particular class session and email your students the link, or use PennTags to collect them for later use. The collection also has more than 100,000 high-resolution images you can add to your PowerPoint presentations. I also foresee uses in conference presentations.