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:

1. Graphic Design and Visual Literacy
2. Web Resources
3. Files, Folders, Formats
4. Spreadsheets
5. Presentation Software (such as PowerPoint)
6. Web Design Concepts
7. Using the Web to enhance your job search
8. 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.

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

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!

You can see what it’s all about by visiting http://www.nmc.org/cool You’ll find information about how to get & share stuff through a variety of channels.

Perhaps the coolest thing on this site so far is Posterous (http://posterous.com/) – one of the tools being used to collect recommendations for cool stuff.

Posterous makes it really easy to start a simple blog  just by sending email.  You don’t have to sign for an account; just send an email.  You can include pictures, audio, video, links etc.    Take a look at their FAQ page (http://posterous.com/faq/)  for more information about what you can do with this cool new tool

This whole metaphor reminded me of how I have experienced simulations thus far.  They are these magnificent learning tools full of potential, yet seemingly unaware of their capacity for reaching the masses and literally changing the way that we educate.  The world KNOWS that simulations have potential, but do we BELIEVE it?  I’ve been lucky enough to experience it and believe it from the first time I ever tested a Learning Lab application – completely lacking knowledge of investment terms & strategies and possessing nascent technical skills, I plunged into the world of the Online Trading and Investment Simulator (OTIS) and thought to myself, wow this thing has possibility!  Little did I know that OTIS and I were destined to become friends and that my knowledge of simulation potential would grow into a solid belief of what they can do for education.

Several years after the experience with OTIS, I have now witnessed that simulations can not only change a class session, but they can also change an entire curriculum and can have an educational impact reaching approximately 850 MBAs!  Conceived by Professors Nancy Rothbard and Sigal Barsade, developed by Forio, and carried through successfully by a number of different Wharton departments (including the Learning Lab), the Wharton Teamwork and Leadership Simulation (WTLS) for Management 652 changed the idea of simulation scale and magnitude at the Wharton School.  Equipped with approximately 180 laptops, 288 lab computers (for each wave of students), 288 headphones, and at least 120 Wharton employees, and almost the entire Forio technical and support team – the four day simulation was an overall success and an example of realized potential.

A little bit about the simulation:

“Through a business simulation that has been written by Professors Barsade and Rothbard and designed especially for Wharton students, we [the teachers] will cover both theoretical and practical aspects of leadership and teamwork.  In this class, you [the students] will take on the role of a senior management team and in doing so learn how to negotiate with and influence other team members, make team-based decisions, and deal with group dynamics and organizational change – all as part of running your organization.”

Because of the purposely ambiguous nature of simulations, I cannot offer details about the simulation’s storyline or the details of the daily activities in each round – but I confidently say that I witnessed intense engagement.  The students truly assumed their roles in the organization and really got into character – often crafting back stories about how their organization started, even though it wasn’t required.  I even heard a group tell a tale demonstrating the closeness of their company:  “Two members of our senior management team are actually married – that’s how close our company is.”  I witnessed imagination, creativity, and teamwork and found it fascinating to watch as each group seemed to have an internal leader emerge as the four days of the simulation progressed.  Not surprisingly, the leader often seemed to be the person who believed the most in the potential of his/her company and his/her teammates.

As a Psychology major, I saw countless potential for personality studies through the daily surveys and questionnaires that the students answered.  I also enjoyed (which I enjoy through Learning Lab applications as well) the experiment-like nature of running a simulation.  Perhaps WTLS was even more experiment-like than most simulations in that it was the first time carrying out such a large scale simulation project.  Running a simulation is also much like an experiment in that it is laden with a multitude of variables and random events that slightly alter the experience of the students from one classroom to the next.  After the simulation finishes, there’s usually a debrief session in which the true goals of the simulation are revealed.  I sat in on a debrief class after one of the WTLS test runs and I learned all about more concepts that pique the interest of a former Psychology major.  There is a lot to be learned about the potential of the human psyche by analyzing the way that people lead and work together as a team.

Although The Wharton Teamwork and Leadership Simulation may have been designed to teach teamwork and leadership to the students, I think every single staff member involved in the process learned valuable lessons in those areas as well.  Some emerged as leaders themselves – either by putting in extra work hours/effort to ensure the success of this inaugural simulation (I can think of a few people who deserve recognition for this!) or by signing up for a highly involved role.  There were lab leaders, lab support, classroom technical support, network connectivity monitors, software installers and testers, crisis response teams, classroom support/food/logistics/supplies, business and simulation experts, leadership fellows – needless to say WTLS was a huge group effort.  It was at once a bit scary yet extremely liberating to be a part of such a large undertaking and interacting with colleagues from different departments in a way that isn’t usually done on a daily basis at most universities.

I want to include a quote that I read about teamwork in the Pfeiffer Book of Successful Team-Building Tools by Elaine Biech (2008) because I think it describes something that both the students learned as well as the faculty and staff that made the event successful:

“Probably the key advantage of teamwork is a better end result.  Organizations find that teams can be more responsive to the changing needs of the marketplace.  Teams can be closer to the customer’s needs, more informed about advanced technology, and faster to respond than traditional hierarchies.

A team working together has more and better input than individual’s working alone.  If everyone who works and in the process is involved, it is less likely that steps will be missed.  This results in better ideas and decisions and higher quality output.”

Those words speak to the success of the teams, but what about the people who rose as leaders through the entire experience?  Taken from Volume IV of What works, what matters, what lasts by Alexander and Helen Astin from the University of California (2007):

“We believe that leadership is a process that is ultimately concerned with fostering change.  In contrast to the notion of ‘management,’ which suggests preservation or maintenance, ‘leadership’ implies a process where there is movement – from wherever we are now to some future place or condition that is different.  Leadership also implies intentionality, in the sense that the implied change is not random – ‘change for change’s sake’ – but is rather directed toward some future end or condition which is desired or valued.  Accordingly, leadership is a purposive process which is inherently value-based.

Consistent with the notion that leadership is concerned with change, we view the ‘leader’ basically as a change agent, i.e., ‘one who fosters change.’  Leaders then, are not necessarily those who merely hold formal ‘leadership’ positions; on the contrary, all people are potential leaders.  Furthermore, since the concepts of ‘leadership’ and ‘leader’ imply that there are other people involved, leadership is, by definition, a collection group process.”

In essence, everything that I have just said culminated into a story of realizing potential:  recognizing one’s own potential, recognizing the potential of teammates, recognizing and then taking action on the potential of an idea (as Professors Barsade and Rothbard have done with the simulation), and recognizing potential of the tools in an environment that can lead towards success (such as using simulations for education).

The funny thing about potential energy in physics though is that it really means nothing unless it becomes kinetic energy, and kinetics implies some kind of motion – the same way that “‘leadership’ implies a process where there is movement”.  The actions of everyone involved in the simulation took something with potential and transformed it into a movement that not only taught the value of leadership and teamwork, but it demonstrated it.

I decided to wait before posting about this tool until it had a few months to mature, and until I had time to really kick the tires.  Now that I’ve done that, I agree that it can be a powerful tool and that faculty in certain fields should be aware that it exists, but I don’t think that it’s going to make homework obsolete.

Since Wolfram Alpha is based on the computation engine of Mathematica, that’s where it does best.  If you enter “integrate x sin^2 x dx”, you get

But a link also appears to “show steps”, which explains each of the steps in the solution, essentially doing the students’ homework for them.  This isn’t really new, since sites like http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ have offered step-by-step solutions for some time, so people who teach courses that assign these types of problems are probably already aware of these resources and take them into account in their teaching.  But so far, mathematical problems are the only type of input that results in a solution with steps, so instructors in other fields need not worry.

On the other hand, Wolfram Alpha employs a wide variety of data sets, so if an instructor thinks that an assignment will send students to the library or to a particular electronic resource where they’ll have to hunt for information and interpret it, they may be surprised.  For example, how did the Consumer Price Index change between June 2008 and June 2009?  Just enter “consumer price index june 2009 / consumer price index june 2008″ and you get the result:  98.57%, or a drop of 1.43%.  And if you have a large data set, Wolfram Alpha will curate it for you – see http://www.wolframalpha.com/participate/structureddata.html

There are a million other things that Wolfram Alpha can do, too, like:

• balancing a chemical equation:  enter “C3H8 + O2 —> H2O + CO2″ and you’ll get You’ll get the result, but you won’t get the steps required to get there, so students can check their results but it won’t do the work for them if the assignment requires that you “show your work”.
• calculating the nutritional value of my favorite smoothie recipe (which makes 2 servings):  enter “calories in 1 banana + 3.5 cups strawberries + 0.5 cup milk + 0.5 cup orange juice + 3 teaspoons sugar + 1 teaspoon lemon juice” and you get the full nutrition information in a format that looks very similar to the panel on all packaged food products.  You also get a place to choose what type of milk you want to use and to make other ingredient choices.

I’ve used Wolfram’s Mathematica software for more than 10 years now, and I’m very interested in the ways in which it might make a positive contribution to engaging students with course material.  If you’d like to talk about ways that you might use it in your course, please contact me!

Through my experience with the simulations, I’ve come to realize that game theory in general is a particularly useful concept to understand and can be applied to different segments of life that one would not ordinarily associate with game theory.  In fact, I’ve been following a blog online (Mind Your Decisions blog) that is entirely dedicated to game theory and how it can be found in interesting places.  In this particular post from several months ago, the author details how game theory played a role in significant events like the financial crisis all the way to more trivial daily activities like waiting for the bus in the morning.  It is also being used to predict political events – see Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on TED.com using game theory to predict the future of Iran. 

Technology (especially simulations) is great at capturing game theories because they often deal with the actions/interactions/and negotiations of two or more players in a closed system.  As Bruce Bueno de Mesquita mentions in his TED talk, computers successfully keep track of these actions/interactions/and negotiations much better than people and we can then analyze the data to predict a player’s future actions.  On that note, I’d like to discuss two of the most frequently used game theory types in Learning Lab applications.

• Tragedy of the Commons:  The notion of tragedy of the commons developed from an article of the same title written by Garrett Hardin in the journal Science in 1968.  “The article describes a dilemma in which multiple individuals acting independently in their own self-interest can ultimately destroy a shared limited resource even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long term interest for this to happen”(Wikipedia, 2009).  The tragedy of the commons scenario can be used to demonstrate the effects of any group’s actions on a limited resource in a closed system from specific things like oil or TUNA to more complex resources like the environment.  
• Prisoner’s Dilemma:  “A game frequently displayed in television police dramas. Two partners in crime are separated into separate rooms at the police station and given a similar deal. If one implicates the other, he may go free while the other receives a life in prison. If neither implicates the other, both are given moderate sentences, and if both implicate the other, the sentences for both are severe. Each player has a dominant strategy to implicate the other, and thus in equilibrium each receives a harsh punishment, but both would be better off if each remained silent. In a repeated or iterated prisoner’s dilemma, cooperation may be sustained through trigger strategies such as tit for tat” (GameTheory.net, 2009).

For more information on game theories, check out gametheory.net. 

First, Anu Vedantham and Peter Decherney represented Penn admirably with their presentation “Mashup Video Projects for Classroom Creativity”  This ties in with Anu’s most recent post here about the Seltzer Family Digital Media Awards, but the presentation also covered ideas and tips for how to incorporate mashup video projects into courses not directly related to film.  Peter also generated a lot of interest with his part of this well-attended presentation, discussing copyright and related issues in mashups.  I encourage you to check the link above for more information about this great presentation.

The other session that I thought provided a lot of information that would be of interest to readers of this blog was the one titled “Your Video Projects Suck, but That’s OK ’cause So Do Your Papers: Moderating Student Expectations When Teaching New Media” by Jared Bendis of Case Western Reserve.  Anyone who has ever been to an NMC event knows that Jared is always a popular speaker, and this was no exception.  But this time he had a lot of practical tips for instructors who are assigning video projects to students who have never done any such thing before.  Of course he recommended the usual things like having several smaller “due dates” for storyboards, etc. before the completed project is due.  But he also pointed out that the “type A personalities” often end up with incomplete masterpieces, while the “slackers” set realistic expectations and often get the assignment finished with respectable work.  He also had a very interesting perspective on getting signed releases:  everyone must sign a release, including people who appear in a video and the student making the video, because the university has no control over where the video might be posted or shared after it’s submitted.

You can see the rest of Jared’s tips and some good sample videos of what to do and what not to do at http://fc.case.edu/newmedia/video/  The release form that he uses is linked in the middle of that page.

Also, a video of each session will be posted at http://www.nmc.org/2009-nml-symposium/program by March 30th if you’d like to watch it.

Now a word about SecondLife:  I had played with SecondLife briefly, but this was the first time that I ever attended a scheduled event, or even spent more than 10 minutes at a time in this virtual world.  The software has definitely become more stable since I last used it a year ago, but I did have it crash once, when I was attending a session where a video was being shown on a “screen” in SL.  And I use a computer that’s less than a year old and has a lot of RAM.  Other than that, I had a very positive experience.  I admit that I was a skeptic going in, but that’s why I wanted to register for this conference.  And it really was more engaging to watch an avatar on the screen give a talk, and be able to move around the room or change views, than it is to watch a ‘talking head’ in a rectangle of video for the same amount of time.  And I only embarrassed myself once, when I arrived at the “room” and had my avatar sit in what appeared to be an empty seat – but it turned out that the video world hadn’t fully loaded on my screen, and I was sitting on someone’s lap!  But the person was gracious, we both had a good laugh, and I ‘met’ someone I might not have.  

So that’s my report ‘from the field’.  Please let me know if I can answer any questions about it.