Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

Kathleen Taylor Brown at Penn State Greater Allegheny helps communications students gain a competitive edge in the industry by both grounding them in theoretical foundations and having them plan and produce podcasts and videos.

Today’s journalism, she says, is often “backpack journalism.” Communications professionals who were once supported by production crews now often carry their own cameras and microphones and record, edit, and produce their own pieces. “You may be both in front of the camera and behind it,” explained Brown. “It’s not just writing the copy anymore; it’s writing, producing, and putting that end product out there,” she said.

Greg Pierce in the Smeal College of Business reinforces concepts in his Finance 100 course by augmenting class meetings and textbook readings with podcasts and vodcasts (video podcasts). This allows students to review course material on an MP3 player or computer at any time or place.

Pierce said he decided to create podcasts of his lectures out of a “a sense that students are always on the go and could use supplemental material to enhance their learning.” In summer 2006, he signed up for the Podcasts at Penn State pilot (http://podcasts.psu.edu/) and easily learned to use ProfCast software, allowing him to record narration and synch it with his class PowerPoint slides to create “enhanced” podcasts. He posted his podcasts at Penn State on iTunes U (https://itunes.psu.edu/).

In this podcast, we explore students' feelings about Facebook including how they got started, the kind of content they upload to the site, whether they have privacy concerns, what they would feel about finding their professors' profiles in Facebook, and whether Facebook is a passing fad or here to stay.

This student interview, conducted by the staff at Studio 204, explored students' experience with and opinions on YouTube, a social computing site with user-contributed content. In this interview, the topics included reasons for using YouTube, what students watched, the differences between YouTube and television, whether students would contribute content to YouTube, and whether YouTube is a passing fad or here to stay.

Before the Symposium, the staff at Studio 204 took a trip to the HUB to interview some students about their experiences using wikis. Topics that came up: user-contributed content, questions about the quality of the information, the ability to find information quickly on nearly any topic, and the staying power of wikis.