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Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology 2009 Thank you for joining us at the 2009 TLT Symposium Once again, we had a record number of participants at the 2009 Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology. Nearly 400 faculty, staff, and students came out to spend a Saturday discussing the ways that technology can be used to enrich teaching, learning, and research. If you missed the keynote presentation, we have it available now along with other videos about the Symposium:

Low-Threshold Applications and Activities (LTAs) An LTA is an activity or application of information technology that is reliable, accessible, easy to learn, non-intimidating and incrementally low-cost in time, money, and stress. 

Why IT Investments Often Don't Improve Educational Outcomes At least three basic problems have dogged most attempts to translate technological investments into improvements in educational outcomes.

When times are tough, institutions are under more competitive pressure than ever to do well for their students. Unfortunately this is the precise time when cash is in short supply, faculty workloads may have increased, and development/support staff and budgets are often slashed. For institutions that want to do a more effective job of competing and meeting external demands for quality, it's time for a more frugal approach to innovation. One approach to frugal innovation: help faculty share low-cost, low-risk, easy-to-explain improvements in teaching and learning with each other.  That's really two ideas, and they go well together: Faculty helping each other improve their courses (with a slight assist from staff to help them get together) Low Threshold Activities and Applications (LTAs) -- small steps toward improvement -- that each faculty member can grasp quite quickly and try safely, easily, and inexpensively and that promise real rewards if successful, e.g.  better learning, time-savings.  (For on LTAs, click here.)  "Frugal": These kinds of improvements are a good fit for peer-to-peer assistance because LTAs can be communicated quickly and easily: e.g., in: a casual conversation among faculty, a 5-15 minute workshop scheduled as an agenda item in a departmental meeting and led by a faculty member, a page-long description written by a faculty member and appearing on the web or in a newsletter, an eClip (brief video clip online that explains how to do something or why it's worth doing), or just a few sentences in an email or on a web page.