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.

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.

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!

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.

We encourage you to visit http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/instructional for more information about technology support services.   SAS Instructional Technology grants are available to SAS faculty to facilitate activities which require special support. Grants can be used for a variety of purposes, such as

In cases like this, pre-recording a short computer demonstration may be the solution.  Using software for PC or Mac, you can create a click-by-click “screen movie” of the demonstration, and add audio narration and/or text captions.  We’ve found this to be very helpful in efficiently disseminating training to users, and we can imagine a wide variety of ways that faculty might use the tool to help their students use applications.

When you’re creating these demos, try to imagine that you haven’t used this particular tool or technique before.  Pause after each click to give the viewer a few seconds to take in what has changed on the page, or any other result of the click.  Point out any significant things to notice or options when you do the narration or text captions.  If you’re taking the viewers through a web page, read out the web address so it’s perfectly clear and there are no confusions between “ell” and “one”, for example.  

In Multi-Media Services’ Resource Room, the software to create screen demonstrations is available on PC and on Mac, and you have access to all of the software that is installed in labs.  Please see their website at http://www.sas.upenn.edu/computing/mms/mmr for details.  If you’d like more tips about how to do this, just contact Elizabeth Scheyder in SAS Computing.

To make this show, I started at the image collection page, chose Michelangelo from the Artist box at right and narrowed my search to records with digital images. You can make slideshows for a particular class session and email your students the link, or use PennTags to collect them for later use. The collection also has more than 100,000 high-resolution images you can add to your PowerPoint presentations. I also foresee uses in conference presentations.

He also discusses his experiences in the Center for Teaching and Learning’s Teaching with Technology Seminar.  These seminars are discussion groups aimed exclusively at faculty where they can discuss why they use technology in their classes.  There are people on hand who help with questions about how to use the technology but the real focus is how technology can benefit student learning. These events are a useful place to send faculty who are interested in using technology or who want to use technology more effectively to engage students. I would advocate sending any faculty who use PowerPoint to the upcoming event on PowerPoint (Monday October 20 from 2:00-3:30 in the seminar room of the Weigle Information Commons). I used to malign PowerPoint but after the conversation with Drs. Mike Kaplan (Biology) and Jay McInerny (Classical Studies) I have come to see how it can be a great tool for engaging students (rather than letting them sleep in the dark while the slides pass by).