Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

You can easily post pictures to your Flickr account from your mobile device if you can send email from it. Simply go to http://www.flickr.com/account/uploadbyemail/ ... you'll need to obviously have a Flickr account and the link I just shared will ask you to login (unless you already are). Once you setup your secret mail to Flickr address you can add tags to it. I just added tltsymposium2008 as a default tag. I can change that back after the Symposium.

Flickr Mail: Mail to Flickr

This morning while looking at my Twitter stream I was asked an interesting question ... essentially should we use Twitter "hashtags" for all of our updates on Twitter during the Symposium. I'd seen them used before, but this morning I did some quick poking around and saw that there is a whole website at http://hashtags.org/ (go there and follow them to register the use of our hashtag) that tracks the frequency and popularity of tweets started with a hashtag. Id we do this we'll end up with not only a rich Twitter stream, but also a graph that will show utilization of the all tweets that use the hashtag. Let's use #tltsymposium2008 and see what happens! Here is an example tweet with a hashtag:

hashtag: hashtag for symposium

The second presentation from the TLT Innovators Speaker Series took place on October 18th, 2006 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.

Direct Link to Podcast

On April 14, 2007 the Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology will be held at the Penn Stater Conference Center for the first time. This year's theme, "Social Computing and the Culture of Teaching and Learning", will put a spotlight on the impact of new tools such as blogs, wikis, podcasting, and tagging on the ways we communicate and learn. The symposium will act as a showcase for many of these technologies, giving faculty the opportunity to experience them first hand.

Keynote: Lee Rainie

Lee Rainie is the project director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project whose mission is to research and report on the way that new technologies are affecting the way Americans live, work, and learn. Lee Rainie's organization investigates topics such as the expectations of digital natives as they enter the workplace, demographic trends in broadband Internet access, perceptions of intellectual property, and teenagers who are becoming self-made media producers.

Featured Speaker: Bryan Alexander

Bryan Alexander is the director of the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education. In his position as director of NITLE as well as though his participation in the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative, Bryan looks at the ways that emerging technologies can be used to create opportunities for innovative teaching and learning practice. Bryan's specific interest is in the intersection of social computing and mobile learning, which he will be addressing at the 2007 symposium.

The first presentation from the TLT Innovators Speaker Series featuring Kyle Peck, Associate Dean for Outreach, Technology, and International Programs, and Professor of Education in the College of Education entitled "It’s What the Student Does that Counts: Rethinking the Roles of Students, Teachers, and Technologies" is now available for download. This presentation, which occurred on October 4, 2006, is the first of three such talks by faculty speakers this fall.

Direct Link to iTunes U Podcast | Link to MP3

Mark your calendars for the 2007 Symposium on Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State! We have secured April 14th, 2007 to host next year's event. Keep an eye on this site for details as they emerge. We will be launching a more robust web site in the coming months to support all the events being planned for this year. Looking forward to seeing you!

After the keynote I had an opportunity to sit down one on one with Henry and talk to him a little more about his talk. What an amazing guy -- talking to him just gives you that feeling that something important is about to be said. Great keynote and a great conversation. I think his talk in the morning got us all off on an amazing track. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed having this conversation.

The podcast is about 25 minutes and weighs in at about 17 MB. Here is the direct like to the podcast

I thought the best thing to do was actually do a podcast of our lunch time table discussion. The sound is a little quiet, but it is a good conversation. I hope you all enjoy. The MP3 is 37 MB ... I'll need to bump it down, sorry about that! Direct link is here.

Here is my stream of talk attempt at keeping up with Henry Jenkins from MIT. Dr. Jenkins spent the morning talking about how critical media literacy is to the future of our culture ... my thoughts in a disjointed and frantic attempt to keep up with Henry ... thinking about intellectual property and how kids these days arae pushing the limits of that because of the way they interact in our new environments. This leads to a "we" perspective as opposed to an "I" perspective as kids begin to engage in more team based work, in the rip, mix, burn culture they live in, and the media intensive spaces they spend their time in. As a matter of fact, 83% of kids under 6 engage in screen media consumption for 2 hours a day -- BTW, they spend the same amount of time playing outside. The big question though may be the how they engage in that media.

Showed a bunch of examples of kids under 20 who are changing and shaping the face of media creation, conception, and ownership. What a great point ... students are gaining these skills outside of school! Many were home schooled.

More than half of all teens who use the Internet are considered "media makers." Mostly Live Journal, photos, blogging, etc ... Henry feels that is a conservative estimate. What it tells me is that we as educators need to be ready to deal with these students as they show up in our classrooms. With that said, we also have to be prepared to deal with the ones who aren't engaged.

What it means is that we are living in a very participatory culture ... a place where we have low barriers to artisitic expression, where there are strong levels of support for creation, and where these people feel valued enough to create. This is great, but what about the 43% who are not making media? Ellen Wartella said that it is more important to close the divide via "providing the skills and content that is most beneficial ..." it isn't really only about providing the technology. She goes on to say that kids who do have access at home have more positive attitudes than those who don't. Seems obvious, but we need to move to discussing the participation gap ... Sonia Livingstone focuses on this as the divide to conquer. How do we figure out how to get teachers to encourage participation. How do we get people to realize that "Everything Bad is Goood for You?"

"Any form of knowledge sharing is cheating ..." that is the attitude all schools have. We need to move from there if we are to prepare students for 21st century literacy. What do they need? Traditional print literacy, researcg skills, technical skills, media literacy. These are important, but we need to move on to ... Play to teach the capacity to experiment with a surroundings as a form of problem solving. Play is built on experimentation and a safe place to fail. This is tied so closely to simulation. Performance ... how they adopt personal idenities ... appropriation to rip and mix media content. Distributed Cognition ... the ability to interact meaningfully with tools with expand our mental capacities. Collective Intelligence, the ability to pool knowledge and compare notes with others towards a common goal. Judgement is the ability to evaluate the reliability and crediibility of different information sources. Transmedia navigation is the ability to deal with the flow of stories and information across multiple modalities. Networking is the ability to search for, synthesize, and dissinate information. Negotiation is the ability to travel across diverse communities, discerning and repsecting multiple perspectives, and grasping and following alternative sets of norms.

At the end of the day, media literacy isn't just about a single course or discpline. It is about the total integration into our learning spaces -- schools, classrooms, at home, and beyond. Getting there is the challenge if we want to really prepare our kids for the literacy of the future. This problem is one we all need to solve.

We mentioned that we'll be using Flickr to post photos of the event. I thought it might be a good idea to just point you over there and let you know just how easy it is to use the service. Flickr is a free photo storage site that provides each user with an account and space to share their photos. The really cool thing about Flickr is that each photo you upload can be "tagged" so that it becomes grouped with other people's photos that share the same tag. For this year's event we ask that if you upload pictures to your Flickr account, you use the shared tag, "tltsymposium2006". By doing that, all of our photos will be aggregated together to create one place for us to share and comment on our TLT Symposium photos.

You can visit the tltsymposium2006 tagged photos now.