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"Rows of desks, teacher lectures, and passive learning won't lift us into the future. We need a serious, national discussion on what the 21st century classroom can and should look like, acknowledging the variety of ways that students learn, the multitude of tools they use to interact with the world, and the growing use of online learning."

Good post from Zac on design elements for game achievments.

Interesting little application for the mac that can create audio files for use on mobile devices of text content.

It makes me wonder how we might take advantage of crowd sourcing here on campus? I worn if we could open videos to transcription by students or other fiends of the university.

There may be a magic formula involving a distributed community of hobbyists here. There's a lot of interest in the Civil War. The article mentions going to historical societies for help with the transcription. Oddly enough, this is a perfect example of "Cognitive Surplus" in action.

One big message here was pretty clear: Expertise still matters, and crowdsourcing doesn't change that (despite a stunningly silly argument I saw recently online that crowdsourcing laypeople is better than a doctor at diagnosing an illness. I mean, c'mon, let's not be ridiculous.). However, there are a few things going on here - building a community of people creating something based on a shared interest, which has manifold benefits. Cole, your example of transcribing videos....working with say the National Association of the Deaf to gather volunteers would make for a fantastic project. Also, there is a lot of learning potential in something like this. If something is done wrong by the crowd, then that's a teachable moment as to why it's wrong. Then you get a better crowd.

"After carefully considering all of these, other online sources found by searching for terms such as 'tablet PC' and 'lecture recording' and presentations by others at the Teaching and Learning Symposium at Penn State I decided to purchase a powerful Lenovo Tablet PC with Windows 7, Microsoft One Note, and Camtasia Studio 7.0. I plan on taking my .docx lectures into One Note, opening the page in One Note during class, and recording the screen with Camtasia studio as I go through the lecture, writing on the tablet PC with the stylus pen as I speak to students about each topic. Then I can save my screen capture and edit it into nice 10-15 minute segments in Camtasia Studio and post them online for student review."

We're talking a lot about the "make it easy for faculty" part in the lecture capture working group. Something the research seems to indicate is that pre-recorded lectures (for example, a faculty member sitting in front of a camera and mic, recording without any students 'late night' style) are more effective than a faculty member simply recording a lecture in front of x number of students. It's much easier to hit the 'play' button and do your normal lecture in class vs. taking the time to pre-record. Hopefully we can find a happy medium. I recently spent a lot of time with Khan Academy, both looking for statistical help for myself and asking faculty about it. A group of about 40 STEM faculty took a look at it upon our request and came back not impressed. A couple said they might use it for supplemental instruction...I'm somewhat baffled why more faculty wouldn't want to use this to supplement their course.

I know what you mean Bart. I've found that to be the case with podcasting - a recording made for an external audience is more engaging because the person is talking to you. It has a very different feel than a recording of a meeting, presentation, or training session where the presenter is primarily addressing a local audience.

I'm not certain I agree with Bogost, but he does raise some interesting points (and he's approaching this from a similar viewpoint; tenured faculty at georgia tech). The most interesting dialog takes place in the comments...

It seems like he wrote this in reaction to the activity of fly-by-night business consultants. Personally, I see a lot of value in gamification in education. Stubbs and I participated in writing the ELI white paper about gamification: http://www.educause.edu/Resources/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutGamif/233416

Google is already taking some major flack about putting Games on Google+, mainly from people that don't want to re-live the Facebook spam days of Farmville and Mafia Wars. Looks like they're listening and trying to make the games transparent for those that don't want to play. Solid list of launch titles though, including Angry Birds, Zynga Poker and a Dragon Age game.

Not only does tech allow disperse communities to communicate, but it can also involve and motivate a younger generation to get involved in a minority language.

Interesting case of instructor getting a low SRDP after he tells class he has identified plagiarism. He suggests peer review instead Turnitin.

I think it's all how you approach it. Andrew and I have both caught students plagiarizing before we handled those issues privately. It never affected our ratings from the other students because they never knew that it happened. From the professor's blog post and response to this article, it sounds like he did a public witch hunt. Have you caught students cheating before? How did you handle the issue?

I would agree with you about privacy, but if enough students are caught in one incident, word will get around. Ironically, all of the incidents I had to deal with were because of collaboration gone too far. I try to warn students about what I expect ("your own words") , but I think I will be ramping up training on how to really avoid academic dishonesty issues this semester.

Reminds me of the things Chris Long and I were trying to articulate in our Hacking Pedagogy talk from last year's LDSC.  Must read.

Interesting for a few reasons. This was an IST class project in 2007 or 08, that led to 3 PSU students dropping out of school and driving across country to chase funding. They are also using the freemium model, a model that a lot of game companies adopted to turn net-loss IPs into profitable IPs the last few years. Finally, the stat "51% of business don't have a web presence" is surprising. I know a lot of small business don't have a presence (I'm looking at you, Watkins Glen hotels and wineries!), but 51% seems high.

only tangentially related: http://www.squarespace.com/ is another very impressive website hosted content management system.

"The game EteRNA, which was started by the Stanford biochemist Rhiju Das and the Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Adrien Treuille, allows researchers to farm out some of the intellectual legwork behind RNA design to 26,000 players, rather than a relatively few lab workers. Players are given a puzzle design-an RNA molecule in the shape of a star or a cross, for example-that they must fill in with the components, called nucleotides, to produce the most plausible solution. The community of players then votes for the blueprint it thinks will have the best chance of success in the lab. The Stanford researchers select the highest-rated blueprints and actually synthesize them. The scientists then report back the results of the experiments to the crowd to inform future designs. The crowd-sourcing has produced results that tend to be more effective than computer-generated arrangements. "Computational methods are not perfect in making these shapes," says Mr. Das, "and as we get to more and more complex ones, they essentially always fail, so we know that there are rules to be learned." Players are figuring out these principles on their own, says Mr. Treuille. He says that while they're more like a grandmother's instructions on baking a cake than a strict scientific formula, they work remarkably well in practice. "EteRNA players are extremely good at designing RNA's," says Mr. Treuille, "which is all the more surprising because the top algorithms published by scientists are not nearly so good. The gap is pretty dramatic.""

Interesting example of crowdsourcing to work on scientific issues.

Interesting idea ... I've seen a lot of these kinds of features proposed in the emerging eText area.

GradeGuru is specifically designed to do this. http://www.gradeguru.com/home We took a look at it. Interesting idea - ratings of quality notes and note takers with the ability for top performers to earn real rewards. They proposed a cost of something like $2/enrollment/semester though - just not a model that would work for us.

Article calls out PSU on its technology policies. Interesting to think about how we might go about fixing it or if students are just bound to be upset about the next thing instead.

I was in a meeting with housing folks when I started at SITE. They wanted to run some data to try and help figure out why so many students decided not to stay in campus housing after the freshman year. It doesn't take much data mining...you just have to look at the bandwidth limits and policy, and you have the bulk of your answer. For some reason they couldn't accept that students would move out because of a bandwidth cap.

Exploring WP as a platform to support new teaching practice.