Connecting People and Ideas through PennLaunch
“Penn’s Weiss Tech House has created an online database for Penn students, staff, faculty and alumni who want to find people with specific skills for jobs or projects, or advertise their skills to others.
The Weiss Tech House put up PennLaunch the week of March 11 and began advertising it the week of March 18.” – Philadelphia Business Journal
PennLaunch was developed by “A group of individuals at the Weiss Tech House [so that] members of the Penn community can connect with each other to ‘develop projects, products, services, ideas, anything,” said Wharton and Engineering junior Abhiraj Modi, one of the PennLaunch creators (Daily Pennsylvanian).
Several members of the Penn community had discussed the idea of a collaboration platform for people with similar ideas at the “A Whole New Mind-Inspired Event entitled Creating and Collaborating across Universities” back in October. I’m really excited to see that someone has felt the need for a similar service and took the initiative to see it through – I’m especially excited to see that the initiative involves Penn students. Thanks to Mary Conger from GSE for sharing the following resource: New Penn website connects projects and people.
Higher Education Technology Events at Penn
There’s never a lack of things to do to expand one’s mind at Penn! Here are some great events coming up that are relevant to anyone interested in engaging students through technology:
The session lineup for the Penn UICONF looks amazing and highly representative of current technology trends in higher education. I’ve attended past versions and have always left with useful information that I could apply to my job.
As for the HigherEdCamp, I also had a great time at last year’s event. The unconference style allows for creative sessions that lead to unexpected positive ideas and conversations.
Hoesley Digital Literacy Fellows
We have recently announced this new program that aims to demystify technology, provide hands-on training and a website building project, and foster career connections. We w
ill accept 15 rising juniors and seniors – application deadline of March 24 – and this cohort will spend next year with us at Weigle Information Commons learning about a variety of new technologies. Our goal is to attract a cohort of Penn students who do not already have experience with these technologies.
We began designing this series two years ago with colleagues in SAS, Career Services and of course in Penn Libraries. I have enjoyed the discussions about what skills today’s Penn grads need for the workplace – and when tough cuts on training topics are needed – which skills look most important. We settled on eight broad topics but there was, and continues to be, a temptation to sneak new topics in here and there. The topics in no particular order are:
- Graphic Design and Visual Literacy
- Web Resources
- Files, Folders, Formats
- Spreadsheets
- Presentation Software (such as PowerPoint)
- Web Design Concepts
- Using the Web to enhance your job search
- Collaboration and Management
We would love to involve more people with Hoesley Digital Literacy Fellows. We need your help in getting the word out to current sophomores and juniors for the March 24 deadline. We would like to bring in guest speakers for each workshop who use one of the topic areas in their jobs so students can more easily visualize why it might be worth taking time to learn about pivot tables or HTML tags.
Designing Online Social Learning at Penn
Over the past year, the Program Development Group at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS) has developed and implemented the Penn LPS Commons, a custom-built online learning environment designed to center participants on the social interactions that drive learning communities. Built with Drupal and Moodle, the LPS Commons includes social networking, learning management and collaborative web 2.0 tools as well as robust permissions models which allow select elements of online learning communities to be shared with public audiences as institutional Open Educational Resources (OERs). In our beta year, we’ve delivered 27 blended and fully online courses to over 1400 participants from 65 counties. Whew!
As we emerge from our first year of work, we’d like to invite the campus community to come and hear us talk about our efforts both designing this new online environment and optimizing flexible instructional designs which allow student-generated conversations to drive the online course experience.
Please join us as we co-host the March meeting of the Pennsylvania Distance Learning Association (PADLA) on March 16, from 8:30-11:45 am in the Bodek Lounge at Houston Hall. Complete details about the event can be found on PADLA website. Members of the Penn community can attend this event for free, but others are asked to register in advance.
Hope to meet you there!
POSER and DAZStudio: Easy 3D Worlds and Figures
The terms “3D” and “easy” rarely go together. Modeling environments or characters in 3D programs is often time consuming and frustrating and the learning curve for most programs doesn’t seem worth the effort. Trying to incorporate 3D modeling or scenes into a class project can seem nearly impossible because it takes all semester for student to even feel comfortable with programs like Maya or 3dsMax.
But there are two easy-to-use programs (both Mac and PC) that are excellent for human and animal figure posing and animation. “Poser” (available for purchase from SmithMicro at http://my.smithmicro.com/mac/graphics.html) and “DazStudio” (available for free from DAZ3D.com) both can be used within minutes of starting and animations can be easily accomplished in just a few minutes more. Both Poser and Daz formats are popular with independent model designers and you can purchase (often for as little as $.99) thousands of models online or download many free ones (see DAZ3D.com, contentparadise.com, poserworld.com).
Daz images will be used to demonstrate here but the programs are very similar in their layout and tools. Poser has more sophisticated animation capabilities.
1. Models are loaded into the program by selecting from the content folder that holds the models that come standard with the programs as well as those purchased separately.
2. Models include human of all ages and sizes, as well special humans like “The Freak” which is an oversize, muscular male that can be morphed into various monsters. Animals, plants, and props are also available.
3. Pre-designed poses can be applied to the figures or each body part can be manipulated and posed separately.
4. Switching between different views (front, sides, top, perspective) can make modeling and positioning easier. This scene is shown with 4 views and the screen can be split in numerous ways. A background image or color can be added as can complete 3D environments that allow the positioning of figures within a 3D space.
5. A final rendering, as a still image or an animation, can be produced in high quality and many different formats, including with comic book textures.
Daz3D will be demonstrated in a workshop on March 1, 2010 in the Weigle Information Commons, 10am to 11:30am. Register at: http://tinyurl.com/y8fma6f
7 Things You Should Know About
Consider this blog post an advertisement of sorts for a great resource I think anyone interested in educational technology should be reading whenever they get the chance!
Educause Learning Initiative: 7 Things You Should Know About
The “7 Things You Should Know About…” series provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.
This month’s brief examines backchannel communications, which I mentioned in my recent post on designing interactivity into live web conferences on the Adobe Connect Professional tool. While our online faculty harness the power of the backchannel to foster participation and drive lecture content, I wonder whether others here at Penn are experimenting with using backchannel tools in their face-to-face teaching.
Anyone out there using chat, IM, Twitter, or Google Wave for group participation in their face-to-face classes? If so, would you consider sharing your activity with us here?
If not, what do you think are the potential pros and cons of enabling backchannel conversations to become a part of the student experience in face-to-face classes at Penn?
Digital Nation on Frontline
In case you missed it, Frontline on PBS this week was “Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier” . The program covered a variety of topics of interest to those of us involved in technology and education, including
- students’ perceptions of their ability to multitask compared to the realities of research on the subject
- the perceived demand for classes to be more engaging and interactive than they were a generation ago
- the benefits and possible perils of immersive virtual worlds such as SecondLife
See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/ to read more about it or watch the episode online.
The Future of Video in Education
In a New Media Consortium web conference tomorrow entitled The Future of Video in Education, Dr. Marni Baker Stein, Director of Program Development at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies, will be speaking about our innovative use of open source video on the Penn LPS Commons using Kaltura.
Our “revolutionary video project” involved the delivery of over 30 hours of broadcast-quality lectures in a fully-online non-credit course to more than 1000 participants in 62 countries on 6 continents. Course participants watched the video lectures and discussed them using tools of the social web. Come hear a bit more about this and other exciting video projects:
Connect@NMC: Kaltura Inspire: The Future of Video in Education
This Webinar will explore how video and new forms of multi-media enabled learning are revolutionizing education across the country. Video in Education now goes beyond simple publishing and includes internal university ‘YouTubes’, deep learning management system integrations, collaborative video editing assignments, video for distance education and libraries, and media-powered blogs and social networks. Kaltura has developed an open source alternative to proprietary video platforms that is flexible, easy to integrate and includes custom tools specifically for education.
Join us for a showcase of revolutionary video projects. Penn State’s Chris Millet, Penn’s Marni Baker Stein, 2Tor’s James Kenigsberg, and Kaltura’s Leah Belsky.
Note you will have to pre-register to attend via http://www.kaltura.org/education-webinar-registration?ref=NMC
Over the next few months we’ll publish here descriptions of other video projects we’re working on with Penn faculty. In the meantime, why not share some information about a project that you’re involved with?
3 Tips for Interactive Web Conference Design
Faculty and staff at the College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS) have been using web conferencing software for the delivery of live lectures in online courses and web-based orientation and information sessions for the past three years. As more folks at Penn start using web conferencing tools, I wanted to share some of what we’ve learned about best practice in the design and delivery of real-time, online sessions.
1. Design your presentation mindfully; plan interactive moments.
Use the interactive features of your web conferencing software to keep your audience connected to your topic and each other.
- Provide a warm-up activity. Share a map on the whiteboard and have participants identify where they’re located, for example, or have participants play a simple word game, like Hangman. Getting participants to use the interactive features right from the start helps set the “ground rules” for interactivity throughout the session.
- Design moments for guided reflection. In her undergraduate World Music course, Dr. Carol Muller plays unfamiliar music to her students and prompts them to describe in few words their initial response to that music using the direct messaging tool. As the written responses come in, she continues to speak, rephrasing student thoughts using the academic register of her field. Within a few weeks, she notices that students start to use the language of ethnomusicology in their chat sessions.
- Design question and answer sessions into your talk. While Dr. Peter Struck delivers lectures in his Greek and Roman Mythology course, for example, students are encouraged to participate in backchannel conversations with the Teaching Assistant via the chat tool. Every 10-15 minutes, he pauses his lecture, allows the TA to report on what students are commenting on in the chat, and then extends the conversations with the students via the voice and video tools before returning to his lecture.
- Design small group work into your presentation. In Academic Writing and Research Design in the Arts and Sciences, a graduate seminar, Dr. Kris Rabberman uses breakout rooms for close reading and group discussions. In these private spaces, students work with a select number of their peers on an activity aligned with instructional goals. Dr. Rabberman visits each room to provide guidance/feedback. After the group exercise, students then return to the main room to present their findings/conclusions to the larger group.
- Use polls (quizzes) to check for understanding and track participation. You can design these in advance, or create them as you deliver your content. In the LPS information session for online students, for example, we ask how many users have taken an online course before, whether or not they’ve used the web for real-time interaction, and, if so, which tools they’ve used (Skype, Google Talk, etc.). We then use that data to drive our conversations about how online courses work at Penn.
2. Create visuals that enhance your verbal delivery.
- Share your screen with users. Take participants on a web tour or show them how to use online tools. As a guest lecturer in a graduate seminar, for example, David Azzolina from Penn Libraries introduces students to key databases and resources available in Penn’s extensive library system.
- Create a whiteboard where participants can work collaboratively. Dr. Kris Rabberman uses the whiteboard to help students identify writing conventions and develop peer editing skills. She uploads samples of text to the whiteboard and asks students to use the marking tools to highlight/circle key issues.
- Pre-load images or include them in your lecture slides. In a lecture describing the history of parliamentary land enclosure in Britain in the eighteenth century for her Introduction to Romanticism course, Myra Lotto includes historic maps and images of a pastoral countryside to convey the mood of that period.
- Use PowerPoint strategically. In Calculus 2, Nakia Rimmer uses animated slides to guide students through solutions to complicated problems. Read Edward Tufte’s work if you want to learn more about the effective use of Power Point and the design of visual information. He’s bringing his one day course on Presenting Data and Information to Philadelphia on March 16, 2010.
3. Control your verbal delivery.
- Speak a little bit slower and a bit more emphatically than you might normally speak in a face-face lecture session.
- Vary the volume, rate and tone of your speech.
- Incorporate pausing to highlight key ideas, transition between points, and/or recapture the audience’s attention.
- Worried about whether or not your participants are following along? Establish techniques for collecting frequent feedback from participants. Have students use the “My Status” tools (shown on the right), for example, to let you know whether you need to speed up or slow down, speak louder or softer.
To learn more about effective practice in designing presentations using Adobe Connect Professional, visit:
RIT Online Learning, winner of the New Media Consortium’s 2008 Center of Excellence Award.
Adobe’s Resource Center provides tutorials on features and best practice advice:
- Read through the User Quick Guide or watch a video about how the web conference tool works.
Please consider sharing what you learn by submitting comments below.
Online Workshop Teaching: Shouting down a deep well
On Monday I taught my first hands-on workshop completely online using Penn Libraries’ new Adobe Connect room. I chose to teach Excel Pivot Tables under the logic that anyone interested in pivot tables would be comfortable enough with juggling multiple windows and handling sound problems. This was a good assumption – the seven participants handled the platform well.
I found it interesting – but difficult - to teach this way. I spent much time preparing handouts (sample spreadsheets of “before” and “after”) and worrying about pace and structure. I chose a traditional approach where I shared my screen and manipulated Excel and then asked participants to “watch and repeat” on their own computer.
The technology worked quite well and the participants all seemed to keep up, and be eager for more. But being the presenter, I had this odd sinking feeling that I was shouting down a deep, empty well. I have presented at several conference sessions online – but I have no expectation of audience participation when I am lecturing. It felt much stranger to conduct a small-group hands-on workshop completely online. We are planning to try this again in January and suggestions for how to structure the activity to be more interactive and less didactic would be most welcome!
