Professor Regina Austin has written to us about an upcoming event at Penn Law School on Friday, October 17 that should be of interest to public interest lawyers, entertainment lawyers, law students, law professors, ITS specialists with public interest organizations, documentary filmmakers, and members of the Penn community who are interested in nonfiction video production and social justice issues. Presenters include:
Michael L. Wong, Penn Law Class of 2009; co-producer and co-director of the documentary short “Shmul Kaplan”
Dr. Gretchen Berland, Yale Medical School; producer and director of the documentary “Rolling: Life in a Wheelchair”
Dr. Carolyn Cannuscio, Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania
Professor Carol Jacobsen, School of Art & Design, University of Michigan; producer and director of the documentary “From One Prison”
William M. DiMascio, Executive Director, Pennsylvania Prison Society
Margie Smith, Partner, Thinktank Films
Mark Eyerly, Associate Dean for Communications, Penn Law School
Editor’s note: This blog entry was written by Lisa Minetti, Curriculum Design and Assessment Specialist at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies.
dedicated to building a library of videos that are focused on helping influencers and educators create change through better explanations. Our videos are short, simple and focused on making complex ideas easy to understand.
Want to learn more about wikis? blogs? podcasting? social networking? You can find the free, online versions of their videos on The Common Craft Show.
Check out this four-minute video on wikis, for example. Ed Dixon describes how he uses wikis in his classes. How might you use wikis in your instructional practice?
Several Penn folks from different schools have been meeting every so often to discuss Second Life and other virtual worlds. Here at the Weigle Information Commons, we have rented some space on a library-focused island – this SL space looks much like the real commons with a central conference area suitable for a class or meeting of up to 20 people and two data diner booths with six seats each. Three video screens in the space can play any quicktime video on the web. We welcome interested folks to join the Penn Libraries group and start to hold events in Second Life.
So far, we have held several beginner workshops (how to walk, chat and fly in Second Life) and one building workshop by the builder of our space, Tim Allen. There seems to be broad interest in Second Life as people try to figure out what role it could play at Penn. Our online resource links to some educational resources.
This Halloween, we will try our first SL event – an avatar contest to go with the Penn Reading Project’s Inner Fish activities. Do you have suggestions on how to reach students who may be interested in Second Life avatar building?
I have begun exploring push technologies recently and wanted to share my experiences. Keeping up with new developments in my areas of interest has often been difficult, especially since instructional technology always seems to have new trends. I began by creating an iGoogle page where I added feeds of interest to me including the Penn Calendar and NMC Campus Observer. I explored Google Gadgets such as “Your Daily Al”. I created my own Google Gadget – surprisingly easy. I added RSS feeds from blogs I read occasionally – now my home page has headlines of new posts.
One aspect I love is the creation of customized alerts. You can make your own at Google Alerts (Beta) and put in phrases – topics, names of people, organizations. You will then receive daily or weekly alerts when web content containing your phrase is posted. You may get too many hits with a common phrase, but I have found this effective with targeted search terms. For example, my Google alert for the phrase “Weigle Information Commons” led me to a new architectural website that I may never have learned about otherwise.
Editor’s note: This blog entry was written by Lisa Minetti, Curriculum Design and Assessment Specialist at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies.
As we increasingly need to collaborate with each other across space and time, getting together with peers and colleagues gets more and more complicated. We’ve got a free tool that might make your life a bit easier: Yugma.
Yugma, whose name in Sanskrit means roughly “the state of togetherness”, is a free web conferencing tool that’s been gaining popularity in both business and academic worlds. Its key features include:
Desktop Sharing Allows you to share your computer screen with others, no matter what application, software or operating system you’re using at the time. You can also share mouse and keyboard controls at anytime, so creating slides or reports together flows smoothly.
Presentation Tools Highlight what you’re presenting and brainstorm your ideas using intuitive whiteboard drawing tools. You can save it all in a digital format you can review later or share with others.
You can use the free version of the tool to collaborate with up to ten people at a time. Click here to learn more and set up an account.
The College of General Studies hopes to receive a number of education accounts (with additional features such as recording) to share with faculty, students and administrators in the Penn community. Contact me if you’d like to try out a version of the tool with more features.
How could this tool help YOU? Have you used any similar tools you’d like to share? Have any ideas for how you might use the tool to improve engagement?
