PennEduTech

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

I enjoyed reading the Chronicle article Cathy posted yesterday, and agree wholeheartedly that there is great value in “spending time socializing students to the type of interaction that the technology can facilitate”. I also wonder how we might better design interactions that align more closely with some of the ways of knowing and doing that the Net Gen brings to the academe. Doesn’t socialization go both ways?

Just what do the students of today look like? In Spring 2007, Dr. Michael Wesch, in collaboration with his 200 students enrolled in an Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course at Kansas State University, created a

short video summarizing some of the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.

Check out what they have to say in A Vision of Students Today. If Penn students were to complete a similar project, how do you think their findings might differ? How might they be similar?

If you’re interested in learning more about Wesch’s projects, check out his blog. What do you think about his reflections on this project? Post a comment!

… we can stop denying the fact that we are enveloped in a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where the nature and dynamics of knowledge have shifted. We can acknowledge that most of our students have powerful devices on them that give them instant and constant access to this cloud (including almost any answer to almost any multiple choice question you can imagine). We can welcome laptops, cell phones, and iPods into our classrooms, not as distractions, but as powerful learning technologies. We can use them in ways that empower and engage students in real world problems and activities, leveraging the enormous potentials of the digital media environment that now surrounds us. In the process, we allow students to develop much-needed skills in navigating and harnessing this new media environment, including the wisdom to know when to turn it off. When students are engaged in projects that are meaningful and important to them, and that make them feel meaningful and important, they will enthusiastically turn off their cellphones and laptops to grapple with the most difficult texts and take on the most rigorous tasks.

This week The Chronicle’s information technology section describes the crusade of Southern Methodist University’s dean Jose A. Bowen against PowerPoint.  You can read more here

http://chronicle.com/article/Teach-Naked-Effort-Strips/47398/

(Thanks to Ian Petrie the new Associate Director at CTL for giving me the heads up on this one.)

The gist of the article is that Bowen is removing computers and presentation hardware from SMU’s classrooms because students find PowerPoint boring. (The article also notes that this was cost effective because the computers were due for an upgrade. You might also note that professors got lap tops out of the deal.)

I have a lot of trouble ascribing what is boring about classes to technology (I took college classes before PowerPoint) but that assertion is an easy topic. Everyone reading this blog has seen technology turn the classroom into a vigorous, interactive space where students are involved, creative and energized. And we have all seen some boring PowerPoint presentations.

What is more interesting about the article and what is worth thinking about is what it says about students. “The biggest resistance to Mr. Bowen’s ideas has come from students, some of whom have groused about taking a more active role during those 50-minute class periods. The lecture model is pretty comfortable for both students and professors, after all, and so fundamental change may be even harder than it initially seems, whether or not laptops, iPods, or other cool gadgets are thrown into the mix.”

For those of us who work with faculty to help them use technology, I think this article suggests the value of spending time socializing students to the type of interaction that the technology can facilitate. I’m not sure getting rid of computers is going to solve this particular educational problem.

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.

Editor’s note: This blog entry was submitted by Erin Murphy, who works in Wharton’s Learning Lab. You can read more of her work at her blog: The Big Picture.

At today’s Distributed Learning Roundtable (April 23rd), Doug Lynch*, Lou Metzger*, and Amit Das* gave a presentation on their experience with incorporating film into distributed learning and the moral of the story happened to be an emphasis on story and design.  Doug Lynch wanted a clever way to get executives in his programs to learn how to interact with technology without being blinded by the hype often associated with it.  They chose to teach the executives how to make short educational films to prove the point that simply knowing how to use the technology doesn’t ensure a spectacular and engaging final product.  Using technology for educational purposes is more about design — it’s all about the story and the process.

Professor Amit Das was tasked with teaching the executives how to make *good* movies – meaning movies that detail a learning objective in an engaging and purposeful way.  Lou Metzger was tasked with selecting technologies that would be accessible and easy to use.  Using the inexpensive and user-friendly Flip camera paired with iMovie and Windows moviemaker (the default movie makers on Macs and PCs), Amit took the executives through several cycles of shooting, editing, and posting to get them comfortable with the technology in a traditional classroom face to face setting.  Later using Adobe Connect and Captivate online, Amit taught the executives the importance of things like story/scripting, camera angle, sound, and lighting.

At the beginning of these classes, Amit said that no one had a solid understanding of what a story was – he had to explain the importance of having a likable character who goes through some kind of conflict or struggle to receive a payoff of some sort (a “happy” ending).  He reported that engagement is all about emotion and emotion can really be evoked through story.  By the end of the classes, the executives were producing thought-provoking and emotion-evoking stories with the technology.

Doug, Lou, and Amit all did a wonderful job of conveying their experiences to the audience – and thank you to Karen Asenavage for organizing the Distributed Learning Roundtables!  I’ll have more blogs about those in the future.

I want to end with some of Daniel Pink’s thoughts on story and design, because I think they are important elements of any type of work we do in life … but they have a particularly strong relevance to teaching.  From the beginning of when I started this blog, design and story have been recurring elements in any kind of learning technology.

Excerpts from Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind (2005):
Design is a high-concept aptitude that is difficult to outsource or automate — and that increasingly confers a competitive advantage in business.  Good design, now more accessible and affordable than ever, also offers us a chance to bring pleasure, meaning, and beauty to our lives.  But most important, cultivating a design sensibility can make our small planet a better place for us all.  “To be a designer is to be an agent of change,” says CHAD’s Barbara Chandler Allen (Pink 86).

We are our stories.  We compress years of experience, thought, and emotion into a few compact narratives that we convey to others and tell to ourselves.  That has always been true.  But personal narrative has become more prevalent, and perhaps more urgent, in a time of abundance, when many of us are freer to seek a deeper understanding of ourselves and our purpose.

More than a means to sell a house or even to deepen a doctor’s compassion, story represents a pathway to understanding that doesn’t run through the left side of the brain.  We can see this yearning for self-knowledge through stories in many places — in the astonishingly popular “scrapbooking” movement, where people assemble the artifacts of their lives into a narrative that tells the world, and maybe themselves, who they are and what they’re about, and in the surging popularity of genealogy as millions search the Web to piece together their family histories.

What these efforts reveal is a hunger for what stories can provide — context enriched by emotion, a deeper understanding of how we fit in and why that matters.  The Conceptual Age can remind us what has always been true but rarely acted upon — that we must listen to each others’ stories and that we are each the authors of our own lives (Pink 115).

*Doug Lynch, Vice Dean GSE and Academic Director Wharton Executive Education
*Amit Das, Executive Director GSE Executive Education and former Professor at the Tisch School of the Arts and former director of film, video, and television program at NYU.
*Lou Metzger, IT Technical Director of Executive Educatiom

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.

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

New to social media tools and web 2.o technologies? Check out Common Craft: Explanations in Plain English.

Common Craft owners Sachi and Lee LeFever are

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?