Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

In this interview, Scott McDonald from the College of Education, talks about his reactions to the Symposium and the back-channel communication. He's using video in his teaching and was one of the people we profiled in the faculty stories.

Donna DeNoble talks about her participation in the Tag Team, her Disruptive Technologies course, sessions that she is attending, feeling "behind the curve" with social networking, generational differences in using technologies, and the ability to have a distributed conversation at a conference.

[This is one of my favorite of the on-the-street interviews.]

A group of people from World Campus, Information Sciences and Technology, and Arts and Architecture talk about their reaction to the Symposium and what happens when people who only know each other virtually meet in person for the first time: "A social networking reunion with people you've never met". They also discuss the importance of finding out what other people across the university are doing. Reactions to the keynote "A mile long slow motion slam dunk". And conclude with their reaction to the Symposium: "A pinnacle of synergism." My thanks to their group for their creative phrase coining!

The members of the group are:
Shannon Ritter
Robin Smail
Daniel Ritter
Brian Panulla

In this interview, Stevie Rocco, an instructional designer from the College of Information Sciences and Technology mentions how the social networking aspects of the TLT Symposium added a new dimension to the community's participation.

In this interview, John Dolan talks about the keynote presentation and what "book reports" are going to be like for his sons. He discusses how his oldest son is using the social network site Webkinz to interact with his friends online. His son is 7. He also talks about the use of tools like Twitter to help create and shape a community.

Graduate Student, Brandon Rubenstein, reacts to the keynote presentation and then discusses his role as part of the "Tag Team", the use of stickers, helping people use tools like Twitter, and the importance of using a tag (like "tltsymposium2008") to aggregate content.

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.

We just added a Twitter stream to this site. Essentially, Twitter is an application that asks its users what they are doing from moment to moment. You can answer through instant messaging applications, a web form, or from your phone. The interesting part is that you get updates from your circle of friends on what they're doing as well (conference sessions, new projects, mother-son movie nights, running mileage, etc...). If you would like to try twitter, go to http://twitter.com and sign up for a free account. Then go to http://twitter.com/tltsymposium to make the TLT Symposium a friend of yours. The Symposium account will "friend" you back and you'll be added to the stream on this site.