Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

What do you think about having free texts for university level classes? Should we as educators move toward an open source or "open licensing" philosophy in our teachings? How difficult would it be to achieve? Download this Symposium 2008 podcast to find out. Also, have a look at an impressive notes section for this session.

Need a tool to help your students cite and manage references and sources? Look no further than this Symposium 2008 Podcast which reviews Zotero, Endnote, and Refworks. While you are at it, jump on over to the notes page to get a quick overview of the session.

Stephan Brady gives an interesting take on the integration of social networking into the lives and jobs of non-traditional students. Check out a quick set of notes on the session, take a listen and discover the meaning of "Are you hip to that Beat?"

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.

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.

Here's an idea to build upon the stickies we used this year - VW for Virtual Worlds, etc.

First, we complete the set as much as possible.

Then we order and color them in order of volatility or disruptiveness. Text, for example would be our Helium. A basic building block or element, almost always needed, but fairly stable (we know what to do with it in most situations).

Then we start to build compounds/molecules from these elements - combining them in ways that visually represent a tool or method. Blogs, for example, would be text + graphics + ....

From there we can build more complex substances - add the technological compound to pedagogical compounds (theories, best practices, etc.) to finally have a visual, colorful representation showing all the parts that make up the whole! This will also help others understand convergence of the Web 2 technologies out there - how they are being combined, mashed, and used in new, creative ways.

Elisa starts the session - these are tools to love and hate. Zotero is fairly new and an ETS white paper will be available soon.

Zotero is a free Firefox plugin

• It's always there with you as you browse the Web - sits right on your Firefox status bar, can pull metadata directly from Web resources, filling in your reference information for you including abstract and url
• one drawback right now is that refs are stored locally, so it's not great for collaboration or working from different computers though Web-based collaboration is coming
• can export citations in various formats, can export in EndNote format. (elisa demonstrates this for us - looks very easy)

EndNote is a powerful citation management software

• drawback - costs $, about 100
• Integrates very well with Word, allowing in-text citation

"Are you Hip to that Beat?" - informal session title.

Definition: "What is a non-traditional student?" Stereotypes: army ("hard-working"); executive ("task task task"); mom/parent returning to school; factory working who went straight to work after high school. Non-traditional students go back to school for themselves (goals) as opposed to traditional students who go in large part because of culture. (acknowledged as a generalization)

Point: The point was that non-traditional students may have very different drivers for social networking. If each non-traditional student is coming to this with different goals, what pulls them together: music, youtube, google mashup, google docs. "How do I mashup the vet, executive, mom, and blue collar worker with jing, google docs, youtube, etc.?"

During the Symposium, attendees can tag themselves with some stickers that we have on hand. I hope this will help to strike up conversations between people who share a common interest, but who don't know each other yet.