PSU TLT

As I was looking through my feeds this morning, I noticed a post from Karl Kapp in which he mentions a presentation by the Chapman Alliance, which talks about development costs for an hour of Elearning based on a survey.

Announcing AWS GovCloud, a new AWS Region designed to allow U.S. government agencies and contractors to move more sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. Previously, government agencies with data subject to compliance regulations such as the International Trade and Arms Regulation (ITAR), which governs how organizations manage and store defense-related data, were unable to process and store data in the cloud that the federal government mandated be accessible only by U.S. persons. Because AWS GovCloud is physically and logically accessible by U.S. persons only, government agencies can now manage more heavily regulated data in AWS while remaining compliant with strict federal requirements. The new Region offers the same high level of security as other AWS Regions and supports existing AWS security controls and certifications such as FISMA, SAS-70, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS Level 1. AWS also provides an environment that enables agencies to comply with HIPAA regulations. AWS resources deployed from AWS GovCloud such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) are available on-demand and agencies pay only for what they use, allowing the U.S. government to benefit from the flexibility, scalability and low pay-as-you-go pricing of AWS. Customers who are interested in learning more about the AWS GovCloud should contact their government sales representative by filling out the Contact Us form on the AWS GovCloud website.

This short article outlines some ideas about an open source, online platform for making books, based on WordPress. My thoughts here come out of our experience building Book Oven

Google has announced a new initiative to increase accessibility for visually challenged users on its major Web services. In advance of the upcoming school year, Google is rolling out accessibility improvements to Docs, Sites and Calendars. Google is hosting a live webinar for enterprise customers - which include educational institutions - on Wednesday, September 21 at 12:00 p.m. Pacific time.

At Penn State University, Director of Education Technology Services Allan Gyorke said the former student staple is now rarely spotted in dorm rooms. "The desktop PC is dead," Gyorke said, estimating that 95 percent of students now bring a laptop or tablet media device to campus instead of using a traditional PC in their dorm room. Those newer devices, he said, are easier to store and easier to set up.

What would you say if I told you that there's a new introductory biology textbook being published that is affordable, lightweight and never goes out of date?

To record and share case studies for faculty development purposes To interview students about how they learn or their reactions to different kinds of course activities To create audio and video content for hybrid and online courses To create just-in-time video tutorials for things like solving difficult math equations To document the design of learning spaces and reactions of faculty and students who use those spaces To capture guest speakers so their presentations can be seen by future students To record the stories about diversity from LGBT and minority students To collect evidence of the impact of a campus on its local community through efforts like service learning projects To record student presentations in ESL and foreign language courses so students can hear their speech I am impressed with the breadth of proposed projects and the creativity of these designers. I’m also hoping

To record and share case studies for faculty development purposes To interview students about how they learn or their reactions to different kinds of course activities To create audio and video content for hybrid and online courses To create just-in-time video tutorials for things like solving difficult math equations To document the design of learning spaces and reactions of faculty and students who use those spaces To capture guest speakers so their presentations can be seen by future students To record the stories about diversity from LGBT and minority students To collect evidence of the impact of a campus on its local community through efforts like service learning projects To record student presentations in ESL and foreign language courses so students can hear their speech I am impressed with the breadth of proposed projects and the creativity of these designers. I’m also hoping

To record and share case studies for faculty development purposes To interview students about how they learn or their reactions to different kinds of course activities To create audio and video content for hybrid and online courses To create just-in-time video tutorials for things like solving difficult math equations To document the design of learning spaces and reactions of faculty and students who use those spaces To capture guest speakers so their presentations can be seen by future students To record the stories about diversity from LGBT and minority students To collect evidence of the impact of a campus on its local community through efforts like service learning projects To record student presentations in ESL and foreign language courses so students can hear their speech

Simply Speaking is a series of brief videos created by Teaching and Learning with Technology that explain technology topics in everyday language and with a little humor. They are modeled after the "... in plain english" videos that explain more general technologies such as Google Docs.

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this: 1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; 2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; 3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

In other words the cost of connection is rapidly approaching zero, and for a very simple reason: the value of the web increases with every single additional person who joins it. It’s in everybody’s interest for costs to keep dropping closer and closer to nothing until every last person on the planet is connected.

Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for ‘productivity.’

If kids can get the lectures, can get the content delivery and skill modeling as well (or often better) by computer lecture than in person, why do we have use precious class-time for this purpose?  Why do we, in the status quo,  replicate in person in our classrooms what is easily available elsewhere, the content delivery/skill modeling, and then have kids apply their learning to difficult problems at home, without us there to help? Increasingly,  education’s value-add is and will be in the coaching and troubleshooting when students are applying their learning, and in challenging students to apply their thinking to hands-on learning by doing and teaming:  so let’s have them do these things in class, not sit and listen.   We know that collaboration is a critical skill set which can’t be developed easily either on-line or at home alone– let’s have students learn it with us in our classrooms.   Let every classroom be a collaborative problem solving laboratory or studio.

According to Cathy N. Davidson, co-director of the annual MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Competitions, fully 65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet.

For those two-thirds of grade-school kids, if for no one else, it’s high time we redesigned American education.

What she recommends, in fact, looks much more like a classical education than it does the industrial-era holdover system that still informs our unrenovated classrooms.

The learning commons, sometimes called an “information commons,” has evolved from a combination library and computer lab into a full-service learning, research, and project space. As a place where students can meet, talk, study, and use “borrowed” equipment, the learning commons brings together the functions of libraries, labs, lounges, and seminar areas in a single community gathering place. The cost of a learning commons can be an obstacle, but for institutions that invest in a sophisticated learning commons, the new and expanded partnerships across disciplines facilitate and promote greater levels of collaboration. The commons invites students to devise their own approaches to their work and to transfer what they learn in one course to the work they do for another.

My sense, from my marketing experience, is that those providing some product or service too often wish to be the ones defining what a product is or how it is used. They forget that it's the user, and it can only be the user, each individual independent user, that defines a product's value. Therefore, whatever products, services, means, TLT hopes to provide to students and faculty is, to a great extent, out of our control. The final use, the final value, can only exist in the mind of the person served. Likewise the resulting network isn't something that's defined in advance, but one that develops from each person participating in conversation.

While certain metrics are valuable and have their place, number of workstations, number of log-ins, number of postings and comments on blogs, those things are and will remain items that are only important to TLT itself. What is more important, and much more difficult to define and measure, is how value in the mind of faculty and students is satisfied.

Students are allocated 110 subsidized sheets each semester, paid for by the Information Technology fee. You may purchase more sheets at any time.

Here is a chart of how many sheets we charge for different types of print jobs.

“The key thing is to use existing architecture where possible. Institutions develop institutionalized approaches. Like locking themselves into inefficient, inappropriate and expensive software systems,” says Worth “Twitter granted me access to the discourses that I wanted to listen to, learn from, and engage with.”

“That ideological program is pushing an out-moded model of learning, where more time in the classroom listening to a teacher’s broadcast is the goal. Thinking creatively about teaching demands an emphasis on engagement. Leveraging social media technologies to extend learning beyond the classroom is central to engagement.”

The classes are centered around experimentation with – and use of – social media tools, because Worth believes them essential to his students’ future career. In the internet age, the photographer is not only a producer, they are also distributor and publisher. Getting the University to adopt services like Flickr, Soundcloud, Audioboo, Twitter and Google Docs was essential to eliminate any barriers to entry, but it was a difficult battle to wage.

Textcast turns any text — documents, web pages and entire blog feeds — into personal podcasts you can listen to right on your iPod and iPhone.