Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

The theme of this year's Symposium is "Social Computing and the Culture of Teaching and Learning" and we actually used quite a few social computing tools to plan and execute this year's Symposium. It wasn't intentional -- it's just the way that the planning group has been doing business these days. When you look at the list, it's pretty impressive, so here it is.

Drupal - This web site is running Drupal, which is essentially the software that lets you make blog posts, comments, group-editable pages (like a wiki), surveys, attachments, RSS feeds, etc... It's an open source product and has a lot of modules that you can install to extend its functionality.

Flickr - Flickr is a photo-sharing site where anyone can upload photos, tag them, and leave comments. We used the tag "tltsymposium2007" for the design of the materials for the Symposium. If you go to Flickr, you'll see photos of the space we'll be using, signs we like, moo card designs, meetings, etc... If you go after Saturday, I'm sure you'll be able to see a lot more pictures of the event itself.

Moo Cards - Okay, Moo.com is not exactly a social computing service. They're a printing company that taps into social computing services (like Flickr) to let people print materials based on their existing catalog of personal images (or the icons they use, their profile pictures, etc...). If you've seen small cards (about half the size of a business card) that advertise the Symposium, those are Moo Cards.

Google Docs - We used this services to created and edit early drafts of the Attendee Guide as well as questions that the Studio 204 staff should ask to students that they were planning to interview. Google Docs lets a group of people contribute to the same document at the same time (synchronously or asynchronously). It saves a lot of time since you don't need someone to manage version changes as the document is passed around a committee.

Twitter - Twitter is a social computing service that asks "What are you doing?". It lets you have followers (who get your updates), friends (whose updates you get), favorites, and the ability to update your status from a phone, IM, web, or special client. We created a TLT Symposium account to post notices about new content. It's also used on this site to display the activities of people who are "friends of the Symposium". It should be interesting to watch that stream on Saturday.

iTunesU/Podcasting - Once we made the interviews with the speakers and students, we turned them into a podcast, which we set up in iTunesU (the educational space in Apple's iTunes application). We also talked about the Symposium a lot during the ETS Talk podcasts. Finally, we'll be recording many of this year's sessions and releasing them as part of the Symposium podcast over the coming weeks.

Skype - I don't know if I would call this a "social computing" service, but it's worth mentioning anyway. Skype is a service that lets you make phone calls using your computer. The calls can be computer-to-computer, computer-to-phone, or phone-to-computer. We used Skype to record both of the interviews with our speakers. We have set up a Skype-In number (814) 806-1855 that people can call to leave questions for the closing panel or comments about the Symposium in general. If you already have Skype, then you can connect to our Skype account through the name "ets_hotline".

If you were part of the planning process, let me know what I left out. I'm sure I didn't include everything we used. For example, I posted a YouTube video about Web 2.0 technologies and we used del.icio.us a little in the early planning process.