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.

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

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.