TLT Symposium

It All Starts Tonight

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

After close to a year of planning, the 2007 TLT Symposium kicks off tonight with a dinner for invited guests. Tomorrow things kick into high gear and before we know it, it will all be over — and planning will start for 2008.

I just wanted to throw a quick post up here to point out that we’ve worked really hard to make sure the Symposium walked the talk this year. My colleague, Allan Gyorke was in charge of this year’s event and his use of Web 2.0 tools in the planning and execution of the event is well documented over at the Symposium site. I think it is very cool that we were able to build on what we learned last year and have exposed the power of these tools to support the planning of a massive event.

From Flickr, Moo Cards, BaseCamp, Drupal, to Twitter and Google Docs the whole thing has been supported by some very powerful tools. Just the way we approved the marketing materials and tracked the events leading up to the big day using Flickr was amazing … I’m sure those stories will get told as posts or podcasts at the Symposium site as well. Speaking of that, all attendees will be able to blog and share thoughts during the event just like last year. Should be interesting and will hopefully provide a place for the conversation to continue.

I think this is even more proof that social tools have a place in the organization on so many levels. I am curious about other stories of people using these tools to support events or activities in their world.

TLT Symposium and Hubs of Activity

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The title says it all. Our annual Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium is upon us once again and it has turned most of the people I spend time with lives’ upside down. We do it to ourselves and wouldn’t have it any other way, but it is all I can think about. We’ll be up to our eyeballs in social computing themes come Saturday. If you are interested, head over and check out the Symposium site — a Drupal space that has become the hub to a ton of activity. There are blog posts, comments, podcasts, and all sorts of stuff going on over there. Take a peek and let me know what you think.

And speaking of hubs of activity, we are managing two good ones here at PSU — the ANGEL Community Hub and the Adobe Connect Community Hub. I think the whole community supporting community thing is the future of all this teaching and learning with technology thing. Stuff changes so fast, that getting smart people to help other people implement these technologies are so critical. At any rate, this is my bridge post to get me a much larger Symposium story thing I am working on. Stay tuned.

TLT Symposium is Back!

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Last year one of the big things I spent a ton of time on after arriving at ETS was the TLT Symposium. The Symposium is a full day event on our campus that serves to gather faculty and staff to look at how technology is being used to impact teaching, learning, and research. Last year I put a lot of effort into integrating an open feel to the event — I pushed to have the site come alive as a blog, we podcasted sessions and in the hallways, and more. It turned out to be a very good event and it sparked a lot of interest in the social computing space.

This year things are being taken to whole other level. We’ve moved the event to the conference center on campus, opened it up to more attendees, and have invited two featured speakers. Our own Studio 204 and podcasting groups will again be podcasitng sessions and in the hall, but we’ve added an onsite podcasting studio to the mix. We’ll also have all sorts of demo stations where we’ll be showing off social tools in a teaching and learning context. We’ll also have bloggers keeping track of sessions as they are running. Should prove to be interesting. It is isn’t for another month, but thought I’d share a brief program overview I got yesterday.

The Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology is an opportunity for faculty to gather and share the ways they are using technology to enhance teaching, learning, and research. This year’s theme, “Social Computing and the Culture of Teaching and Learning” addresses many of the concerns and opportunities presented by tools such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, and social networking sites. How does Wikipedia change concepts like intellectual property and publication? How are faculty using tools like podcasts and Second Life to teach foreign languages? How are faculty using Adobe Connect (aka Breeze) and videoconferencing tools to teach courses that are offered at multiple locations?

This year’s Symposium will be held at the Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel on April 14 from 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM. It will begin with a keynote presentation from Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, who conducts research on topics like social computing and the digital divide. The featured speaker over lunch is Bryan Alexander, Research Director for the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, who investigates emerging technologies for a consortium of colleges and universities. The Symposium will close with a Horizon Panel of our speakers and Penn State administrators and students, who will discuss their thoughts on the future of educational technologies. In addition, the Symposium has 27 concurrent sessions throughout the day for Penn State faculty to share their latest work.

I’d love to know what you do on your campus to get faculty together to share their work.

Brian Smith at the TLT Innovators Speaker Series

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I started asking faculty to present interesting things they are doing to integrate technology into their teaching after last April’s TLT Symposium. Yesterday the second presentation from the TLT Innovators Speaker Series took place on the University Park campus. The talk featured Brian Smith, Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Technology and Instructional Systems entitled “Live and Learn: Supporting Everyday Cognition with Computation.” Brian spends a great deal of time envisioning ways to effectively use the things we do when we are outside of formal learning spaces to create learning opportunities. Brian’s talk focused heavily on those informal learning spaces and ways he has found to tap into them.

Brian and I are good friends, although he may not talk with me after I made him bring his GameBike into the talk … actually he brought it on stage and we couldn’t get the PlayStation hooked to the screen in the Auditorium, but … at any rate the talk was great and the demo was very cool. You see Brian has done a bunch of research into how you can take the mundane of playing video games and turn it into a healthy activity … we showed that off by asking a member of the audience to play a game sitting in a comfy chair eating chips and then on the GameBike doing the same (without the chips). Very effective.

Brian followed Kyle Peck’s talk by doing something a little different — he focused a lot of energy on technology and how it is used to transform everyday opportunities for learning. I thought it was really well done. He even held court at Whiskers afterwards (picking up the bill) talking to us all about some really cool things. Engaging the community in these ways has been both very stressful and very worth while! I can’t thank Brian enough! Some pictures from the event. Here is the direct link to the podcast as an MP3.

The Bike
Photo by Dave Stong. 

Trying to Engage the Community – One Event at a Time

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One of the things I have been trying to do is to find ways to get people together on a regular basis to talk. We’ve been trying new things to create opportunities to engage in open conversations. With that in mind, this week we held our first TLT Innovators Speaker Series talk featuring Dr. Kyle Peck. It was a great time and a great session. Kyle is one of Penn State’s most well respected and loved faculty members. He is the Director of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Educational Lab, Associate Dean for Outreach and Technology, and Professor of Education within the College of Education here at Penn State. Having Kyle kick off the series was a no-brainer — he brings a real passion to teaching and learning that gets people excited. This is the first of three talks in this series this semester … here are some photos of the event.

Kyle was one of the first faculty members I met when I arrived at PSU as an instructional designer back in 1998. We spent some time talking and he ended up inviting me out to his houseto discuss one of newest adventures — the creation of a new breed of charter schools. He and I talked about starting a software company that would be connected to the school and produce innovative tools to enhance the teaching, learning, and assessment experiences of students and teachers. He started the school but we never did start the company. Good thing as we now have the opportunity to work together at the Unviersity shaping what goes on.

His talk was titled, “It’s What the Student Does that Counts: Rethinking the Roles of Students, Teachers, and Technologies.” He makes a case that it isn’t about the technology, but about knowing how to connect with students. I was so proud to see the turnout — both faculty and staff showed up to share the time with us. A bunch of us (including Kyle) even headed out for an adult beverage afterwards to continue the conversation.

Direct Link to MP3 | Direct Link to Penn State on iTunes U Podcast

TLT Innovator’s Speaker Series

/ Cole Camplese / 2 Comments

One of the cool things about ETS is that we are responsible for the annual Symposium on Teaching and Learning with Technology. Last year you may recall we had a great time and tried all sorts of new things — blogging from the sessions, podcasting, Flickr photo posting, and more to try and enhance and grow our community. This year we are pushing even harder.

One of the things I was very interested in doing was seeing if we could create a series of talks leading up to the Symposium that would pull leaders from our campus out and have them give talks. I wanted it to be a first rate series … with a great room and great speakers so as to help inspire others. I think the Fall 2006 series fits that bill. We have Kyle Peck, Brian Smith, David Passmore, and Rose Baker all doing some very interesting things. The thing I like the best is that these talks all have a very student centric tone to them. It will be good. The room is a wonderful space in the union building and will add to the overall feel of each talk. Below is the announcement. If you happen to be in the area on the dates, please let me know and we’ll make sure you can attend … and yes, we’ll be delivering enhance podcasts of each talk.

Teaching and Learning with Technology is proud to announce the TLT Innovators Speaker Series. Beginning October 2006, this new series will feature Penn State faculty presenting perspectives and approaches for teaching with technology. These presentations, are designed to inspire faculty to develop their own ideas for enhancing their courses with technological components and will continue until the 2007 Symposium, to be held on April 14, 2007.

Register today!

Symposium Speakers

The 2006 TLT Symposium is Over!

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

Wow, what a day! Less than eight total hours, but what a day. The Penn State Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium is over. Looks like we ended up with over 90 posts in the blog, over 120 pictures taken by the community in Flickr, 14 podcasts, and 5 streaming videos of sessions — all in one day! That doesn’t include the pictures of all the people who stopped at the iMac with PhotoBooth running on it.

I can’t thank all the people who worked so hard to pull this off! I also can’t thank all of you out there who helped with ideas, sent me encouragement to try something different, and dropped links to it yesterday. Now the fun starts — how do we build on an event like that? That is what my team will start to look at immediately. No matter how you carve it up, it was a great day with all sorts of new things going on.