Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

Brian Smith and Bart Pursel in the College of Information Sciences and Technology ask students to investigate the design and potential of video games and online virtual worlds for use in education and business.

In Pursel’s “IST 110 Information, People, and Technology” course, students explore the virtual world Second Life (http://secondlife.com/), developing objects and evaluating how the environment is being used for business purposes. He said that by creating items such as interactive signs and even full-scale buildings on the college’s Second Life island of “Istania,” they learn to use scripting language and 3-D modeling tools. He said, “We’re throwing the kitchen sink at Second Life to see what it works best for.”

I'm pleased to announce that the improved version of Lessig's keynote address is now available.

Lawrence Lessig Keynote

In this interview, Pierre Cintas from Penn State Abington, talks about a presentation he saw about a house that records the activity of its inhabitants, the importance of having good content, the intricacies of teaching a foreign language, and transferring ideas from Math instruction to French instruction.

In this interview, Marcela Borge talks about her work with collaborative tools and using them to help people learn to work together online. She is using case-based libraries to provide examples of the though processes of experts in the field.

Amanda Klunk, an undergraduate student studying English talks about her interest in new media as literature. She also talks about the parallels between teaching a course online and tutoring online.

In this interview, Cathy Holsing from the College of Liberal Arts talks about using the Symposium to get ideas from other people from around the university. She also talks about having students participate in collaborative activities to learn from each other and create something better than what an individual can produce.

In this interview, Gregorio Convertino from Information Sciences and Technology discusses the poster that he is presenting on using case studies and collaborative tools to help students work together synchronously.

In this interview, Michael Montalto-Rook and Beth Raney talk about the keynote presentation and the aspects of this year's Symposium that drew them to the event.

In this interview, Scott McDonald from the College of Education, talks about his reactions to the Symposium and the back-channel communication. He's using video in his teaching and was one of the people we profiled in the faculty stories.

Keith Bailey from the College of Arts and Architecture talks about his reaction to the keynote and his presentation on open educational resources (which was rather popular from what I saw -- standing-room-only). He also talks about his group's work to develop open source tools and use Drupal (an open-source content management system) to share educational content.