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Just learned about this nifty thing and heard that EMS may be getting one? Lots of possibilities with this!

"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.

Desire2Learn adds Google+ to its list of profile linking tools that already includes Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

am currently reading 'brain rules' & 'how learning works,' and I think this book might be a good addition to the list.

haven't looked too closely at openstudy, might have to check it out. who wouldn't want to be a superhero? :)

Some interesting notes from Gabe Newell's keynote at Games for Change. This is interesting because it's the first time a president and figurehead for one of the biggest game developers out there has really put a stake in the ground for using games as educational tools.

Great article on Learning Analytics. I respectfully disagree with Gardner Campbell's quote, but I do see where he's coming from and that is something that universities need to be careful of.

If this doesn't paint a picture where teaching and learning with technology isn't critical I don't know what does.  Our collective challenge is to think about how we approach this moment as an opportunity.

A government commission that has been relatively unknown, but coud have dramatic effects on teaching and learning. 

This is quite the rant. I know World Campus had a social media expert and Liberal Arts has a Curator...is this trend on the upswing of the downswing in terms of hiring personnel specifically for this at PSU?

There are some good points in this article. It seems that as social media has become the norm for online interaction, it has ceased to become something that people can specialize in. I was talking to some students and they asked what Web 2.0 was and I explained that it was everything they use online: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Google Docs, blogs, user forums, etc... So while "social media expert" used to be a label of innovation, it has almost become a limiting label - just part of the picture. In contrast, I see people like Robin Smail who are moving beyond "just" social media and into areas like community engagement. Sure, some of that involves social media, but it's more about building relationships, ownership, and buy-in through openness and transparency. The other points of the article - like knowing your audience and not having inflated expectations about social media's impact on your business and customer relationships are right on target.

While about web design this is a look into how we need to think about designing learning online.

Interesting read on some of the hooks game designers use to keep people motivated and engaged, with a few plugs from educators on how we can use things like autonomy and agency to better engage.

Great piece by the late Douglas Adams in 1999.  So true in the rearview mirror!

An 11 year old text, the message of which still needs to be delivered to many people today.

"Enhance your involvement with the Student Technology Advisory Council by taking advantage of the software on your iPad 2. The preloaded apps will help you to make the most of meeting materials and presentations, share your thoughts on Blogs @ PSU and learn more on technology topics."

Page put together by Justin Miller listing the apps that the students on the student technology advisory committee will be using. Good collection of tools for other purposes.

"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.