1-1 with El, Kate and Patty

List of courses and their statusWhat’s going on?Academic Leadership Academy (ALA)prep for Sept sessionfirst speaker: John Cheslock, Assoc. Prof Ed Policy Stds Higher Ed., Zeke will train John on eLivepriority: develop course module, awaiting outcomes, materials, etc.do we need to…

List of courses and their status

What’s going on?

  1. Academic Leadership Academy (ALA)
    1. prep for Sept session
      1. first speaker: John Cheslock, Assoc. Prof Ed Policy Stds Higher Ed., Zeke will train John on eLive
      2. priority: develop course module, awaiting outcomes, materials, etc.
      3. do we need to verify with HelpDesk about live session 9/17?
    2. everyone’s busy this week, GA’s have tests
    3. full eLive training for Bob, scheduled to happen before end of Aug
  2. NURS courses
    1. running for FA ’11
    2. Wanda – unknown future since Jeff Hand doesn’t want the program, still being budgeted out of the “non-credit” budget
  3. ID Position Search Committee – phone interviews begin next week, 8/24

What’s coming down the pike?

  1. SPAN courses – awaiting assignment of faculty, access to all sections
  2. MGMT 100
  3. VLN courses? – unclear involvement, will touch base with Lynne
  4. 2011 TLT? – Allan invited me to be the Outreach rep for the program committee
  5. Learning Lunch: iPad? – proposed by Stevie and Wayne to discuss/initiate sharing around technology that’s being tested/reviewed
  6. iFrames + Our.Outreach – spoke to Stevie about a solution to provide better ways to share/edit tabular data on the intranet

What’s on hold?

  1. Deafblind courses – still no word since Shubha’s email 8/11 and f2f soon there after, faculty not happy with curriculum being dictated, Ed says there’s a planning retreat, unknown reaction from PATTAN
  2. School Finance course (CE@UP) – no word since email 7/19

Where do I need some assistance?

  1. Vacation Sept 5-17: 9 work days or two weeks
  2. SPAN courses – potential edits
  3. ALA eLive session
    1. eLive rooms for participants
    2. cover for the live session, 9/17 @ 9-12 PM (ET) to provide morale support for GA
  4. NURS 6012 presentation
    1. slides need to be redone
    2. review once we receive new audio, new audio may need to be imported via Adobe Presenter

A tough time for Outreach

I was in a “VP Awards” meeting this morning with Craig Weidemann, the VP for PSU Outreach. I was a little surprised at first that he began the meeting with a question about morale around Outreach in the context of…

I was in a “VP Awards” meeting this morning with Craig Weidemann, the VP for PSU Outreach. I was a little surprised at first that he began the meeting with a question about morale around Outreach in the context of these awards. One of the things I like about working with Craig is that he wanted to hear what everyone in the room had to say about the topic.

We had a pretty frank discussion about the recent organizational-change impacts here at Outreach. We agreed that recognition and awards are important in this time of transition for Outreach. Craig followed-up with an accurate analogy that stressed the importance of tradition and recognition of the things that mean a lot to us in spite of what is a stressful time for many.

Someone was brave enough to share some personal and professional reflections on the effect of a few lay-offs around the organization and a message they had received that it would be a good idea to “seek other employment.” They asked the question to consider the impact of getting an award while you’re standing in the unemployment line.

After some discussion, my response was that “good work is good work” and that recognizing someone is not dependent on whether they were laid-off. Craig added something to the effect that lay-offs are different than firings.

Here in the World Campus, many things haven’t changed since before the RESET. However, I work a lot with others from different units. Some of these units don’t exist anymore. Some don’t have job descriptions yet. It was interesting to note that it appeared that 4 of the 11 of us in the meeting have either been laid-off or have dealt with the impacts of loved ones that were laid off. Since my wife doesn’t work right now, I can’t even gauge the impact of me losing my job.

So when I hear “I’m so busy,” I can’t help but think “be happy to be so ‘busy’ and more importantly what can I be doing to do my best, push my own boundaries, and make life/work better for others?”

Not having taken the Authentic Conversations training yet, I don’t yet understand the connection between us being “authentic” with one another and new changes to our culture (can true cultural change be mandated?), since I never saw that as an operational problem in the committees, cross-functional teams, and in my day-to-day work. If someone had just come by and asked me, I would say that we have other problems, but talking is one of them. People here love to talk. All one has to do, simplistically speaking, is listen, ask questions and take action-planned, collaborative, and timely. But I shouldn’t get ahead of myself before the training.
<!–Saying good bye to colleagues
OHR has helped to place 7 of the 8 PSPB workers that were laid-off
4 of 11 have either been laid-off before or have been effected by it
i am the only one working in my family
craig: difficult balance between living in the numbers and focusing on our great work
awards look good on a resume
people falling through the cracks
are we at square one?
wake-up call this morning–>

Conference Report: Madison DE ’10

–OVERVIEW–This was my first time in Madison. Unfortunately, I fell ill with the flu during the second day of the conference. I missed the afternoon sessions of the second and third days of the conference. Having said that, I enjoyed…

–OVERVIEW–

This was my first time in Madison. Unfortunately, I fell ill with the flu during the second day of the conference. I missed the afternoon sessions of the second and third days of the conference. Having said that, I enjoyed the parts of the conference I was able to see. The location was wonderful and the audience was overall energetic and engaged.

–PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS–

• Using VoiceThread (VT) to improve educational outcomes
– discussion: What is VT? It is a web-based, multimedia-enabled, social-media sharing platform. What does it look like? VT features a main panel that displays images or movies; a control panel below for playback, commenting and navigation; and finally, two panels along the sides that graphically display avatars for the presenter and visitors. How does it work? VT’s roughly playback like movies except that anyone, generally speaking can interject comments along the way. Why is it significant? VT provides a platform for deep interaction between individuals-at-a-distance.
– examples: The examples ranged from internally and externally generated VT’s, and VT’s from the K-12 to the higher ed domains. They provided a valuable look at what can be done and the pedagogical implication of various strategies. VT is a powerful tool to motivate students to design and deliver their own content to the public. VT even integrates with ANGEL and other LMS’s. It would have been nice if the presenters asked us to find VT’s and share them with the group.
– hands-on workshop: We practiced using VT by importing already-existing content into VT. From there we narrated our VT’s using audio and video annotations. It would have been nice if we had time to visit other people’s VT’s and commented on them during the workshop. I think a good way to use VT would have been to publish out a screencast/VT of the didactic portion of the presentation before the workshop. This might have freed time up during the workshop to get our hands dirty using the tool. On the other hand, people rarely come prepared to workshops like this.
URL: https://sites.psu.edu/kent/2010/08/04/madison-10-voicethread-vt-pre-conference-workshop/

• Getting started with casual games: Justification, design, and development
– What is a casual game? They are developed for the average person, they spread like a virus, they are smaller in scope, they are developed around a unique business model (the game is developed, then it is marketed to certain portal sites, advertising pays for the portals that in turn fund the developers after the game has been released)
– development calculator: a simplistic graphing tool to help visualize how much work a particular project may incur.
URL: https://sites.psu.edu/kent/2010/08/04/madison-10-casual-games/

–SESSIONS OF INTEREST–

• Blended courses and higher ed: On mission or off course? An institutional-specific look at how blended learning benefits one particular school. The presenters closed with a 10 min open discussion on the definition of blended learning and it was not surprising how varied some of the responses were. It just goes to show how important it is to be as explicit about how we use the term blended learning or hybrid learning when addressing adult learners.

• Integration of virtual environment, Web 2.0, and cloud computing technologies: A great session that walked through the use of SecondLife in a particular online course. The instructor focused on finding educational and entertaining locations to bring her students to. This was a great look at why it’s important to search for locations like these for potential use in our “Games, Sims, vWorlds” research team pilot.

• Using 3D virtual world models in e-economics instruction: Another interesting look at how SecondLife is being used to create immerse learning environments, in this case for an economics course. It seems possible to import graphics and convert them into 3D models for use in SL.

–MAIN TAKE-AWAY’S–

• VT is a powerful multimedia platform that fits nicely with distance education pedagogy: faculty presence, engagement and motivation, and stimulates higher orders of learning.

• games are best used with learning when the learning outcomes are captured by the game mechanics (see: http://www.its.umn.edu/GridlockBuster/)

• many objects in SecondLife can be copied and are good to keep in your inventory for future building projects

• no one is willing to talk about the entire costs (development time, money, research, resources, hardware, training, etc.) associated with games and virtual worlds, is that because people know the ROI fails to justify these kinds of projects?

–CONTACTS–

• John & LeeAnn Orlando (presenters) – made a personal connection with them as they live in Vermont. We knew people in common. We’ve committed to future networking through a Yahoo! Group social networking site dedicated to developing materials in Voicethread.

• Jon Aleckson (presenter) – Penny and I spoke with Jon and his colleagues about our “Games, Sims, vWorlds” research team and hope to share our findings in the future.

–CLOSING COMMENTS–

It was difficult to take notes on my laptop for many of the sessions because a number of the rooms only offered seats. Thankfully the WiFi worked well for all of the sessions. There were plenty of opportunities to network. In preparing for the conference, I found the digital library associated with this conference and found dozens of articles that will be useful for our “Games, Sims, vWorlds” research team.

ePortfolio Meeting

ePortfolio isn’t necessarily for anyone elsecreate a narrativeconsider who our potential audience is – SRDP process, our reports2/month at a minimum = 24 for a year2 distinct phases of developing an ePortfolioCollect & ReflectSelect & Presentthis project is about the…

ePortfolio isn’t necessarily for anyone else
create a narrative
consider who our potential audience is – SRDP process, our reports

2/month at a minimum = 24 for a year

2 distinct phases of developing an ePortfolio
Collect & Reflect
Select & Present

this project is about the artifacts and the blogging is the narrative that wraps those artifacts

artifact = your published articles and presentations
Louise is using an “Artifact” cateogry to indicate the presence of an artifact

Kent – try a VT post
Patty – are people checking other people’s blogs? RSS readers

Mike – when you finish a post end with a well-written prompt to your audience

Use TrackBack’s by grabbing the tbURL from another blog into your “Outbound TrackBack URLs” field on the edit page.

Madison ’10: Casual Games

What is a casual game? marketed toward a mass market, found on Kongregate, Yahoo! Games, mobile phones; played in short bursts… etc. see hand outs – goal accessible by as many people as possibleMy Questions? Why do people develop free,…

What is a casual game? marketed toward a mass market, found on Kongregate, Yahoo! Games, mobile phones; played in short bursts… etc. see hand outs – goal accessible by as many people as possible

My Questions
? Why do people develop free, casual games? Marketing? Establishing yourself (to the community)? Loss-leader for future paid games?
? So, what’s the cost of developing these games? $, time, resources, etc.

Some of these projects started as items for courses and then spun off into a casual game

Win-win: sponsor pays developers (link and branding gets added to the game), public gets to play games, website then sells advertising on their websites

In higher ed we can exploit this to advertise vocations, programs, etc. – interesting business model, see “Gridlock Buster”

What’s the process of gamifying a simulation model – adds objectives, goals, rewards, progress through levels that get more difficult (each level adds a new chunk of information), add a narrative and characters, break down information into digestible chunks

Develop with the least number of interface controls, don’t make people start over – allow them to pickup where they last left off

Mochi – online scores, tracking, marketing, reporting

The mechanics of the game (the verb) is supposed to be the educational value… Gridlock Buster is about understanding patterns

Any good game teaches you something… it might not be practical, but you will learn something

The focus is on 2D for cost purposes

Games can be engaging with out being fun… think movies

When developing, begin with the variables that comprise the system you’re trying to get your learners to engage

How do you get started? Find the model, research on the internet

? What does it take to develop a gaming engine?
? How do you scope a game? Game Calculator

Madison ’10: Voicethread (VT) Pre-Conference Workshop

Raw Dump:Presenter Introduction: John Orlando (Norwich University, Vermont) began using VT to solve a problem: he had to cancel a f2f, RI course and decided to use VT to supplant a lecture and create a lecture.John is showing us the…

Raw Dump:

Presenter Introduction: John Orlando (Norwich University, Vermont) began using VT to solve a problem: he had to cancel a f2f, RI course and decided to use VT to supplant a lecture and create a lecture.

John is showing us the interface of VT. He’s using the “Roadrunner” VT example to demonstrate commenting.

LeeAnn: also consider debate, the public arena inspires the students to elevate their performance for a wider audience. Use VT to go deeper into f2f interactions.

My questions:
? Is it possible to export a VT for mobile/off-line viewing? yes, use “Export” but there is a fee for each export!! 🙁
? OAL time display?
? Are there email notifications if someone comments on your VT or a VT you’ve commented on?
? Since VT is Flash-based, can you upload interactive Flash models?
? Do you use a rubric to assess the student’s comments? the same rubrics you’d use in a discussion board?

John: wonderful way to learn, use photos and add your own voice to narrate the story; public vs. private… there are concerns and make your own decisions; FERPA allows us to assign public

Discussion: no ability to Close Captioning capabilities (synchronous captioning)

John: works well within ANGEL and Moodle, opens within the CMS to give the impression that everything is integrated

Discussion: Wacom tablets might be a good option for lots of pen annotations

Example: interactive art (photography) exhibit-Chernobyl

Discussion: code used to “embed” a VT into a website

<frameset rows="100%,*" border="0">
<frame src="http://voicethread.com/share/657268/" frameborder="0" />
<frame frameborder="0" noresize />
</frameset>

Discussion:
? Problems uploading PPT’s? Export slides as pictures.

John: he’s seeing more interaction than he’s gotten in a f2f course; possibility to cluster and reorder comments? hmm…

Example: students like to use VT over traditional discussions and offer more information through non-verbal cues, makes them feel more like they are in a classroom, a greater sense of instructor presence “Voicethreads for Teaching and Learning”

How many comments? “unlimited” but we don’t

Discussion: download VT’s are possible as static movies; there are multiple VT accounts possible – waah, i’ve reached my three free VT limit

LeeAnn: anchor your VT’s in a central question or prompt

John: use Copy to create a Master so that you can reuse it without comments, think future sections of the class

Tip: Use “My Identities” to add additional people to one account!