Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

As our 2008 Keynote Speaker Lawerence Lessig pointed out, students are communicating differently these days. Dr. Kathleen Brown, Justin Miller, and Chris Millet give us some insight on the current generation of "storytellers". Click on through to the session notes and download this Symposium 2008 podcast for more.

The Penn State Digital Commons has been a huge hit at the University. Find out how you can get in on the action by downloading this Symposium 2008 Podcast and checking out the session notes.

One suggestion I have for improving this site in the future is making the session podcasts more findable. For instance, in the agenda table, there is a link to the session notes for each session. How about a link also to the corresponding podcast? Perhaps also renaming the link "Agenda" to "Sessions" - it's a more intuitive place to look when you're going back to reflect after the conference, when you're no longer concerned about when things are taking place during the day.

Elinor Madigan, an Assistant Professor, had a class of repeat calculus students and decided to try an experiment. She wanted to record the process of solving a problem because static notes don’t provide enough information. What followed makes for a very interesting podcast from the 2008 Symposium. Have a listen, and take a look at the session notes.

Amanda Klunk, an undergraduate student studying English talks about her interest in new media as literature. She also talks about the parallels between teaching a course online and tutoring online.

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.

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.

In this interview, Norrine Sims, Advising Coordinator from the School of Visual Arts discusses her interest in podcasting in relation to student recruitment efforts and her reaction to the keynote presentation, which she describes as "inspiring".

Laura Guertin, an associate professor at Brandywine, has been using the resources at the Digital Commons to enrich her students' learning experiences.

The students were more engaged in the topics and used higher level processing skills when doing the multimedia assignments which included tasks like interviewing, scripting, video taping, and video editing.

Students had to plan their projects, determine ahead of time what video they would need, who they wanted to interview, decide which sound clips to use, and weave the sound clips with the video and narration to tell their stories.

A positive outcome (one of many) was that the multi-sensory assignments were more engaging and kept the students' attention.

Elinor Madigan, an Assistant Professor, had a class of repeat calculus students and decided to try an experiment. She wanted to record the process of solving a problem because static notes don’t provide enough information. Using a tablet computer and the help of a student, she made a narrated recording of problems being solved. These recordings were made available to a group of volunteer students to use to review for quizzes.

Quiz scores for a volunteer group were compared with scores from students taking the same class but not using the recordings for reviews. Although the quiz score results were mixed, the study was very small and informal, so no real conclusions can be drawn at this point. Student feedback indicates that all of the students using the recordings thought they were valuable and would like to have recordings like this available in the future.