PSU TLT

"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.

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.

One of my idols from my photography days, saw him speak once at Pitt. Still uses film. These two paragraphs were interesting: The only color picture in the New York exhibit was taken more recently, on Jan. 20, 2009, at one of the inaugural balls. Newly sworn-in President Obama and the first lady wave to the crowd from a brightly lit stage. All across the bottom half of the photo, the crowd waves back, with a sea of upraised illuminated smartphones. "It's an illustration about the use of cameras these days," Erwitt says. Inaugurals, graduations, birthday parties, backyard barbecues - everybody's taking pictures. Too many? "All you need is a pencil and a piece of paper to write a novel, don't you?" the Magnum photographer answers with a wry smile. But he points out that "not even with a very good pencil" will those novels necessarily become the next War and Peace. The same for photographs.

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.

Government response to social media during social unrest is paranoic. Or not? Tough ethical question for everyone not living under a rock.

well thought out and beautifully communicated vision for an educational blogging platform. Blogs@psu has had the motto, "create, reflect, connect". If I could take the liberty to translate Campbell's phrase into the lingo bandied about at PSU, it would be "reflect, meta-reflect, connect".

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.

This kind of visualization not scalable yet, but will it be soon? "Thanks to increasingly cheap, fast and efficient computing power, scientific simulations are now a crucial tool for researchers who want to ask once impractical scientific questions or generate data that laboratory experiments can't. "The human eye can pick out patterns in simulations that are are otherwise hard to describe, and they can do it better than any computer," said visualization scientist Joseph Insley of Argonne National Laboratory ."Plus, with the incredible amount of data gathered these days, it's difficult to analyze it any other way."

Outcomes from Abilene's mobile learning research.  This seems to be similar to our Faculty Fellows program, but just focused on mobile.

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.

Pretty good work-life balance piece.

The stunning things to me is that this is probably the best service I use regularly on my iPhone and they only have 5 people.

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.

"Museum of the City of New York -- New York, NY HD 51480, Improving Digital Record Annotation Capabilities with Open sourced Ontologies and Crowd sourced Workers Lacy Schutz, Project Director Outright: $50,000 To support: The development of methods and tools to facilitate the description of digitized primary sources by combining "crowdsourcing" tactics with linked open data and semantic Web technologies."

Interesting list of grant awards in the humanities. The quoted one above jumped out at me, but there are plenty of other good ideas in there. I'd be interested to see what others think.