Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

In this quick on-the-street interview, Jonathan Redding talks about how today's students are using technology in surprising ways. He is planning on using technologies like podcasting and blogs to go to where they are.

Hannah Sloan interviews Kathleen Brown about her use of iPods (with recorders) and blogging software to turn her students into reporters. Her students interviewed three generations of people to create intergenerational conversations about why we fight. You can watch the streaming version of the video below, or subscribe to the Symposium feed in iTunesU.

Brett Bixler of Education Technology Services at Penn State interviews Priya Sharma and Ying Xie, from the College of Education's Instructional Systems program about their research into educational uses of blogs. You can watch the streaming version of this interview by clicking the preview image below or you can access the feed through iTunesU.

I had to get a list of links together for the ITS Event and I want to show people what a blog looks like, so I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone. This list isn't in any way complete, but does serve as an example of each of these technologies in action:

Blog Examples:

• Blogger.com: Commercial Blogging Site http://www.blogger.com

• Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu
• Education Technology Serviceshttp://ets.tlt.psu.edu
• ANGEL Community Hubhttp://ets.tlt.psu.edu/angel
• Penn State Blogging Pilothttp://blogger.psu.edu

Wiki Example:

• Wikipedia: Example Commercial Wiki http://wikipedia.com

List of RSS Aggregators

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.

It has never been easier and more important for faculty to try out new technologies, or to acquire and share new ideas and experiences in teaching and learning today. As awareness and concern about the Web technology continues to grow, University communities, in particular the faculty and instructional design/support staff are committing to becoming more technologically responsible.