PSU TLT

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.

"Under federal rules that take effect on July 1, Bismarck State will have to seek approval to operate in every state where it enrolls students, or forgo those students' federal aid. With some states charging thousands of dollars per application, the college is weighing whether it can afford to remain in states where the cost of doing business outweighs the benefits, in tuition terms."

Under the new rules, some of the smaller online institutions may go under or need to partner with a larger institution like Penn State to continue offering online courses.

This could be altered to create a heck of an eLearning design workflow.

how to stop worrying and embrace the google docs......

Brad and Matt: can the two of you talk? When Matt and I discussed this, I suggested that we could give something like this a try with our Hot Team white papers as a test to see how the pieces would fit together.

Very good write-up and comparison of several eportfolio options that are out there. Also discusses institution vs student centered, which ones have phone apps, etc.

Article about how Bhutan is struggling to reconcile Buddhist principles with the modern more secular West within the education system.

Really interesting article. I've become fascinated with the inherent tension between local & global communities as the transmission of culture happens faster & in more abundance. It's become part of my dissertation. It also fits in well with Michael Elavsky's work and summer camp.

I have long been intrigued by Bhutan's gross national happiness concept. This article really gets at the heart of wondering what should be in the curriculum and what the goals of education really should be. Thanks so much for sharing.

Today Diigo released a Chrome Style browser for iPad.  Hmm.  I like Diigo, I like Chrome, I like the iPad.  This may be good. Of course I also like martinis, roller coasters, and fire. But I'd never combine the 3.  Or maybe I would . . .

jeff, I was very interested in this article and went looking for the "mountains of research" regrading success rates in online & f2f environments. after not having much success, I noticed that the author of the piece posted the 3 articles he used to support his argument in the comments section. you can draw your own conclusions from them, but I'll just say that I'm unconvinced of the 50%/75% gap that he mentions. retention & quality control are real issues in online education, and they are legitimate points to discuss. in terms of useful data, controlling for learner type would seem to be obvious; working adults are more likely to take online courses, and more likely to drop out. conflating these two findings is not all that useful, in my opinion, because working adults cannot always prioritize education the same way full-time 'traditional' students can.

haven't read the book, but it might have some good stuff...

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.

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

Lessons for the TLT website?

The Libraries' Citation Tools team has created a new page to help the community choose a citation tool. There's also a comparison between Zotero, endnote, endnote web, mendeley & refworks

Thank you, Emily ... this is a great resource!

Very nice! Emily, does Zotero now work with resources behind PSU authentication? I tried to use it a couple years ago with little luck. I typically use Google Scholar, then hit the "Get it from Penn State" link(s). Once I landed on a resource, Zotero had trouble saving it.

A huge change in how domain names can be created

I've honestly wondered how long it was going to take until we moved past the URI as the way to get to websites ... sort of reminds me of the evolution behind how we call someone -- from having to use the operator, to various forms of phone numbers, to Skype, and FaceTime names. Interesting stuff.

Scott does really interesting work and his move to UK will have implications for our field in more ways than one.  A key to consider, is it OK for a tenured Associate Professor to set up shop at a major University and not live there?  Teaching I can working well, but that is only a piece of what one does as an academic at a place like UK or PSU.

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.

Best practices for using blogs to supplement coursework and enhance student learning.

This reminded me of Cole Camplese's comments on the instant crowdsourcing of video recording the sessions at the 2011 TLT Symposium, Clay Shirky's example of that socially-written mathematics (?) paper, and a bit of Chris Long's posts on using digital tools in research.

The socially-written paper was about "P vs NP", which is a computer science/mathematics problem. A fairly simple explanation is here: http://www.claymath.org/millennium/P_vs_NP/ But yeah - crowdsourcing stuff like this is great when you have a community of people who really care about it. It's like having an army of amateur archeologists.

"With OS X Lion, we've challenged the accepted way of doing things by introducing new features that change the way you use a computer"

I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the new OS. It's interesting to see so many iOS ideas moving to the desktop/laptop environment.

Thoroughly addictive habit. Transformation to sublime when adding Irish cream to your beverage. Definitely a go to device for The Rapture.