PennEduTech

I recently participated in a 3-day workshop hosted by the Learning Spaces Collaboratory (LSC).  This group “…is an emerging community of practice making the case that spaces matter to learning.”  See http://www.pkallsc.org/ for more about the LSC and its ongoing work. I came away with much to think about, so I’m taking the time for a little reflection. Read more…

I recently created my first .epub file. This is a type of e-book file that can be read on Android devices, the Nook, Sony Reader, and portable Apple devices among others. The files are a little odd in the way they need to be formatted. Here are a few resources I found helpful when creating my first document.

http://calibre-ebook.com/
Calibre is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books. This program allows you to convert between several different formats.

http://code.google.com/p/sigil/
Sigil is Google’s free multi-platform WYSIWYG ebook editor.

Adobe TV ebook creation using InDesign
This is a link to a series of three videos on Adobe TV about ebook creation using InDesign. These are what I primarily used to get started, and they helped a lot, although you need a little bit of an InDesign background to get started. You also need to be using InDesign CS4 or CS5 to export the .epub file.

Spring break offers the opportunity to spend a few minutes checking out interesting (and sometimes even useful!) new software.  Here are a few things that I’ve tried and liked:

• Evernote is a very popular utility for keeping track of notes, to-do lists, snippets from web pages, documents and just about anything.  It is available for Mac and Windows PCs, but its real advantage comes when used on a mobile device.  It’s free, easy to use and a real productivity booster.  Lots of people love it; I’m a little late in getting to the party, but I am not starting to use it on a daily basis.
• Sigil is a free, open source utility for creating documents in the ePub format for display on iPad, Kindle and other readers.  Available for Mac, Windows and Linux, easy to install; good documentation available.  Jutoh  is another inexpensive ($40) option for creating ePubs.
• Google Document Viewer is a free utility for presenting PDF documents in the format the Google uses for its online books.    It’s not really all that useful, but it’s dead simple to use and lets you claim the moral victory of having published something in an electronic book format.
• Sophia is a brand new system intended to help people easily share tutorials and other instructional materials in brief “packets.”  It’s an intriguing tool and I’ll be curious to see if it gets much traction.  Be sure to read the Terms of Use carefully before posting any content, or inviting your students to do so. When posting content to the site, you are effectively giving the site operators license to your material.  From their Terms of Use statement: “… we ask that you not send us any User Generated Content that you do not wish to license to us, including any confidential information or product ideas.”
• CMap Tools is  a free, intuitive tool designed to generate concept maps.  Concept maps are a good way to visualize complex relationships among a variety of factors.  It is available for Mac, Windows and Linux, and include collaboration features. The CMap site includes good information about the tool itself, and the theory of concept mapping in general.  After just a few minutes of playing around with CMap, I was able to generate this simple chart which I’m using to help me understand how to get better outcomes from technology initiatives (click the graphic below to expand to a bigger size).
  

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.

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!

Editor’s note: This blog entry was written by Lisa Minetti, Curriculum Design and Assessment Specialist at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies.

Consider this blog post an advertisement of sorts for a great resource I think anyone interested in educational technology should be reading whenever they get the chance!

Educause Learning Initiative: 7 Things You Should Know About

The “7 Things You Should Know About…” series provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

This month’s brief examines backchannel communications, which I mentioned in my recent post on designing interactivity into live web conferences on the Adobe Connect Professional tool. While our online faculty harness the power of the backchannel to foster participation and drive lecture content, I wonder whether others here at Penn are experimenting with using backchannel tools in their face-to-face teaching.

Anyone out there using chat, IM, Twitter, or Google Wave for group participation in their face-to-face classes? If so, would you consider sharing your activity with us here?

If not, what do you think are the potential pros and cons of enabling backchannel conversations to become a part of the student experience in face-to-face classes at Penn?

Editor’s note: This blog entry was written by Lisa Minetti, Curriculum Design and Assessment Specialist at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies.

In a New Media Consortium web conference tomorrow entitled The Future of Video in Education, Dr. Marni Baker Stein, Director of Program Development at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies, will be speaking about our innovative use of open source video on the Penn LPS Commons using Kaltura.

Our “revolutionary video project” involved the delivery of over 30 hours of broadcast-quality lectures in a fully-online non-credit course to more than 1000 participants in 62 countries on 6 continents. Course participants watched the video lectures and discussed them using tools of the social web. Come hear a bit more about this and other exciting video projects:

Connect@NMC: Kaltura Inspire: The Future of Video in Education

This Webinar will explore how video and new forms of multi-media enabled learning are revolutionizing education across the country. Video in Education now goes beyond simple publishing and includes internal university ‘YouTubes’, deep learning management system integrations, collaborative video editing assignments, video for distance education and libraries, and media-powered blogs and social networks. Kaltura has developed an open source alternative to proprietary video platforms that is flexible, easy to integrate and includes custom tools specifically for education.

Join us for a showcase of revolutionary video projects. Penn State’s Chris Millet, Penn’s Marni Baker Stein, 2Tor’s James Kenigsberg, and Kaltura’s Leah Belsky.

Note you will have to pre-register to attend via http://www.kaltura.org/education-webinar-registration?ref=NMC

Over the next few months we’ll publish here descriptions of other video projects we’re working on with Penn faculty. In the meantime, why not share some information about a project that you’re involved with?

Editor’s note: This blog entry was written by Lisa Minetti, Curriculum Design and Assessment Specialist at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies.

Faculty and staff at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS) have been using web conferencing software for the delivery of live lectures in online courses and web-based orientation and information sessions for the past three years. As more folks at Penn start using web conferencing tools, I wanted to share some of what we’ve learned about best practice in the design and delivery of real-time, online sessions.

1. Design your presentation mindfully; plan interactive moments.

Use the interactive features of your web conferencing software to keep your audience connected to your topic and each other.

• Provide a warm-up activity. Share a map on the whiteboard and have participants identify where they’re located, for example, or have participants play a simple word game, like Hangman. Getting participants to use the interactive features right from the start helps set the “ground rules” for interactivity throughout the session.

• Design moments for guided reflection. In her undergraduate World Music course, Dr. Carol Muller plays unfamiliar music to her students and prompts them to describe in few words their initial response to that music using the direct messaging tool. As the written responses come in, she continues to speak, rephrasing student thoughts using the academic register of her field. Within a few weeks, she notices that students start to use the language of ethnomusicology in their chat sessions.

• Design question and answer sessions into your talk. While Dr. Peter Struck delivers lectures in his Greek and Roman Mythology course, for example, students are encouraged to participate in backchannel conversations with the Teaching Assistant via the chat tool. Every 10-15 minutes, he pauses his lecture, allows the TA to report on what students are commenting on in the chat, and then extends the conversations with the students via the voice and video tools before returning to his lecture.

• Design small group work into your presentation. In Academic Writing and Research Design in the Arts and Sciences, a graduate seminar, Dr. Kris Rabberman uses breakout rooms for close reading and group discussions. In these private spaces, students work with a select number of their peers on an activity aligned with instructional goals. Dr. Rabberman visits each room to provide guidance/feedback. After the group exercise, students then return to the main room to present their findings/conclusions to the larger group.

• Use polls (quizzes) to check for understanding and track participation. You can design these in advance, or create them as you deliver your content. In the LPS information session for online students, for example, we ask how many users have taken an online course before, whether or not they’ve used the web for real-time interaction, and, if so, which tools they’ve used (Skype, Google Talk, etc.). We then use that data to drive our conversations about how online courses work at Penn.

2. Create visuals that enhance your verbal delivery.

• Share your screen with users. Take participants on a web tour or show them how to use online tools. As a guest lecturer in a graduate seminar, for example, David Azzolina from Penn Libraries introduces students to key databases and resources available in Penn’s extensive library system.

• Create a whiteboard where participants can work collaboratively. Dr. Kris Rabberman uses the whiteboard to help students identify writing conventions and develop peer editing skills. She uploads samples of text to the whiteboard and asks students to use the marking tools to highlight/circle key issues.

• Pre-load images or include them in your lecture slides. In a lecture describing the history of parliamentary land enclosure in Britain in the eighteenth century for her Introduction to Romanticism course, Myra Lotto includes historic maps and images of a pastoral countryside to convey the mood of that period.

• Use PowerPoint strategically. In Calculus 2, Nakia Rimmer uses animated slides to guide students through solutions to complicated problems. Read Edward Tufte’s work if you want to learn more about the effective use of Power Point and the design of visual information. He’s bringing his one day course on Presenting Data and Information to Philadelphia on March 16, 2010.

3. Control your verbal delivery.

• Speak a little bit slower and a bit more emphatically than you might normally speak in a face-face lecture session.
• Vary the volume, rate and tone of your speech.
• Incorporate pausing to highlight key ideas, transition between points, and/or recapture the audience’s attention.
• Worried about whether or not your participants are following along? Establish techniques for collecting frequent feedback from participants. Have students use the “My Status” tools (shown on the right), for example, to let you know whether you need to speed up or slow down, speak louder or softer.

To learn more about effective practice in designing presentations using Adobe Connect Professional, visit:

RIT Online Learning, winner of the New Media Consortium’s 2008 Center of Excellence Award.

• Student Engagement Strategies
• Best Practices and Technical Tips

Adobe’s Resource Center provides tutorials on features and best practice advice:

• Read through the User Quick Guide or watch a video about how the web conference tool works.

• Best Practices for Delivering Virtual Classroom Training

Please consider sharing what you learn by submitting comments below.

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!

Like Facebook, 2nd Life (SL) is a social network that can provide students with online collaborative spaces for extra language practice outside the brick and mortar classroom. With the assistance of Deke Kassabian of ISC and designer Claudia Rossini, the Penn Language Center is building a virtual reality based on Williams Hall on Penn’s campus. Although the exterior of the building resembles the actual site, the interior of Williams Hall is quite another story. Upon first entering the building one sees traditional looking classrooms but that impression soon changes as blackboards transition with one mouse click from blank surfaces to displays for streaming video, images or Powerpoint presentations. Upon going up the stairs to the second floor of Williams, the eye immediately gravitates to an area in a far corner of the room that is attractively furnished and conducive to conversation. Avatars, the residents of 2nd Life, can sit on comfortable chairs and couches around a table in a setting filled with objects and perceptual stimuli, that lend themselves to conversation and promote language practice. The illustration below is an example of such a space in Williams.
Returning to the ground floor, students can use the building directory to teleport themselves to areas beyond the traditional looking spaces in Williams to more whimsical and fanciful spaces based on specific culturally identifiable settings. Alongside the typical classroom one finds dedicated language areas such as the Persian courtyard and Japanese tea room where students can meet, talk and acquaint themselves with cultural settings that they might later encounter in the real world. There is also the Wirtshaus “Max und Moritz” where students can sit around a German “Stammtisch,” chat, read a menu and order a meal. Within these hybrid fantasy settings, instructors can design assignments that extend conversational practice beyond the face-to-face meetings of the classroom. In this way, SL can be used to align homework assignments more closely with classroom activities where the goal is to develop the students’ conversational competence.
This pilot project will help to determine in part to what extent virtual realities and personal learning environments can be used to not only enhance the students’ language learning experience but also to change the nature of homework from that of an exclusively individual exercise to that of a more collaborative activity. In contrast to workbook exercises that provide students with individualized practice for studying vocabulary and grammar and improving listening comprehension, SL can provide students with opportunities to work with each other in communicative activities that promote language usage through written and verbal practice. The big difference here is that situations in SL have the potential to encourage language practice through usage, i.e., through communication and interaction rather than only through memorization and study. See below for other examples of 2nd Life in Williams.

Japanese Tea Room

Persian Court Yard

German Wirtshaus