Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology

Please consider this clip and invitation to help us create the 2009 TLT Symposium. This clip talks about our wiki page where you can read up on and contribute to the planning process.

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.

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.

I'm pleased to announce that the first version of Lawrence Lessig's keynote presentation from the TLT Symposium is now available. Eventually, we will also have a higher quality version of this presentation that shows his slides with a voice-over.

In this presentation, he discusses the tension between the way copyright law is interpreted for digital media and the way young people are trying to use existing media to create new forms of expression. [No description will do it justice. You really have to listen to the way he presents his argument. He's brilliant.]

Lawrence Lessig Keynote

Education Technology Services staff members Brad Kozlek and Tim Perry discuss the Blogging and Podcasting initiatives.

Dr. Miller of the Astronomy department and graduate student Stephen Redman discuss using video as a learning tool in their online Introduction to Astronomy course.

For those interested, some of Dr. Miller's videos can be found here.

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.

Bill Kelly, head of the Department of Integrative Arts, discusses his online class in the history of popular music.