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!

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.