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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.

"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.

another ipad app for screencasting. as far as I know, this is the first example of an app from one of the big established screen capture software companies.

I downloaded it (for free). It's very nice. I tried ShowMe before, which also lets you write and record what you're saying, but there is too much of a time delay between your drawing and it showing up on the iPad. ScreenChomp is much faster. Another advantage is that you can see your recording before posting it.

we had the same delay complaint with showme. also didn't like that there were no export options outside of posting to their site.

He demonstrated the cloud-based SlideRocket slide-show tool and the CoverItLive live blogging software. He explored cloud-based storage with Dropbox and Pogoplug. He created an easy, cloud-based recording with Screencast-O-Matic, which is billed as "the original online screen recorder. He demonstrated the cloud-based mind-mapping application Mindmeister. And he explored advanced classroom applications of Google Earth.

"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.

Average age of gamers continues to rise (now 37). Female population continues to rise due to casual/mobile games (42%). Who buys most games? 41 year olds (was 39 last year). Males average 13 years of gaming, females 10 years. Lots of good data points, but they ALWAYS fail to answer a huge question about methods: how do you define a gamer? Depending on how you define a gamer dictates who is included/excluded in these types of studies and drastically impacts all the age/gender data.

Interesting read regarding the game Portal being used in a freshman humanities course, alongside classics like Gilgamesh and readings about Aristotle.

aimed at k12 readership (as far as I can tell, anyway), but brings up some interesting points.

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

This FF extension lets you read ePub files right in your browser...this way the file is processed for you without additional software/devices/

anyone familiar with Learning Catalytics? sounds like it's invite-only, but might be worth a look.

an engagement initiative seems like a good idea. many of the approaches are implementations of active learning strategies, and I think having faculty from multiple disciplines exploring and sharing is a good way to test the effectiveness of various approaches. we just met with faculty from architectural engineering who've been flipping since 2008. one observation they made was that they flipped to allow student teams to work on group projects during class time. I had always thought that was a good idea for logistical purposes (especially in a team-heavy college like engineering), but they made a point I had not thought of: using classroom flip in that manner also allowed for the teams to have access to faculty advice and guidance while they were meeting to work on their projects. that seems like it may have huge benefits, especially at key points in a group assignment. all a long way of saying, there's much to learn. the blended learning initiative was essentially a 'classroom flip' approach as well, so some of the ways faculty adapted instruction for those courses might be relevant here too.

Angela: Let's talk about it. Gary: Tapping into first-hand experience would be great. I know a bit from the National Conference on Academic Transformation conference. The example that comes to mind is a flip where students learn about math through some short (5 minute) video tutorials and then attend "class" in a lab environment to work in teams and get access to the GA and faculty. It taps into a lot of the features of "student engagement" as measured by the National Survey on Student Engagement with factors such as increased student-student work, collaborative problem solving, immediate feedback, and increased student-faculty contact. Overall, an excellent design.

A lot to think about here - How the practice of so many disciplines are changing due to changes in media How open Education doesn't just mean some pages put up on the web - Actually open people, not just open content. How the existing communications systems out there are the fertile ground that communities of practice sprout from, not institutional management systems. The future will be found at the confluence of these trends.

very interesting development. we've been holding off on ipads in engineering because of a lack of streamlined screencasting workflow. I wonder if other example-heavy STEM disciplines at PSU (chem, math, stats, etc) might be interested in a pilot of some kind?

I'm having conversations along these lines on several fronts. I asked Hannah to look into a system that could replicate the Kahn Academy stuff. Carol McQuiggan has some faculty who are interested in the model. Chris Lucas and I may talk about it as well, related to creating open training resources. I've also brought Chris Millet into the mix because this could line up with some of the work he is doing with lecture capture (not capturing lectures per se, but a lot of the software options have the ability to let faculty create screen capture tutorials and have them automatically upload to a server along with their voice annotation.