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.

In the closing panel of the Symposium, we got a group of people together to discuss the future of social computing in higher education. We had perspectives from John Harwood, Senior Director of Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State; Lee Rainie, the Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project; Jim Thomas, Dean of the Smeal College of Business; and three students: Dan Rosenbaum, Alexander Kozak, and David Gelpi. Their topics include everything from wikis to the new meaning of "friend" in the context of online social networking applications.

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.