Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

The 2008 Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology is just around the corner. It will take place on Saturday, March 29 from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at the Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel. Here are a few notices and recommendations that may help you to get ready for the day. All of the recommendations are optional. We are making them to give people the opportunity to try out some of the technologies that our presenters are discussing and to allow people to take a more active role in the Symposium if they choose to do so.

1. Registration is Full
2. Schedule for the Day
3. Read Faculty Stories
4. Bring a Laptop
5. Share your Photos
6. Blog the Symposium
7. Tweet your Activity
8. Get Help with the Above Activities

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.

Cole had a Flickr slideshow running with photos from today's event. He wanted to start by thanking everyone for coming out.

We tried some really interesting things today, and some words have emerged in Cole's mind to describe what's going on out there:

• Create
• Teach (We heard lots about tech, but not as much about teach)
• Learn
• Community (Creating this can be hard, but that's one of the goals of an event like the symposium.)
• Collaboration
• Bold (Take some risks, check out the "cluetrain manifesto")

This is our community. He would love to see everybody back here next here with some great examples of applications of these new technologies for teaching and learning.If you (faculty, staff, etc.) want to collaborate, come find us (Teaching and Learning with Technology)

Everyone is invited! http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu

Over 90 posts created by all of us -- the community.

Thanks for spending a Saturday here, doing great things, and sharing them with us. Here is a link to Cole's slides from the wrap-up session.

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.

We have decided to create a common tag for use with Flickr so we can create an online archive of digital images from this year's event. Flickr is a free photo storage and sharing tool that enables users to post their pictures and tag them with key words (categories). By tagging photos with an identical tag, we can create a "living photo album" made up of any Flickr photos that share our tag.

We've decided on the tag tltsymposium2006 for use with Symposium related photos. You can visit Flickr to see photos currently tagged with our shared tag. Also, if you are interested, you can subscribe to the RSS feed to receive automatic updates to the Flickr photos.