Over the past few weeks, Brian Young and I have been consulting with faculty on the use of lecture capture, as part of our Echo360 pilot.  It's been very interesting doing this with Brian, firstly because he's smart and really understands education, but also because he's been responsible for much of the pedagogical side of our Clickers implementation at Penn State.  Because both lecture capture and clickers and very much classroom-based technologies, we've had several conversations about how we, as an institution, think about classroom technology from a teaching and learning perspective.  And as we adopt more tech like this, this conversation becomes more and more important.
I should start by saying that by classrooms, I literally mean the rooms with chairs and desks and podiums that are scheduled for classes every semester (design of other informal learning spaces is a different discussion).  Penn State has done very well with providing the baseline technologies to support teaching and learning in our classrooms.  We have 356 "technology classrooms" supported by central ITS (and many more outside of ITS) that have podiums equipped with computers, microphones, projectors, and network connections.  As anyone who's involved in facilities management knows, just doing this much is a massive and costly logistical challenge.  Much of the cost here comes from retrofitting rooms that were originally built 70 years ago (think asbestos abatement and running wires when there's only a dirt floor).  Because of the cost, we have to think of the absolute most important technologies to support teaching, and make sure those things (computers, audio equipment, projectors, networks, etc.) are highly reliable and easy to maintain.  But these "baseline" technologies afford enormous opportunities.
Think of this type of room as a blank slate for learning designers.  The forethought of our classroom tech and network designers allow us to be very flexible and to try new things.  Clickers and lecture capture integrated pretty seamlessly.  This frees us up to think about the affordances of these systems and how they relate to how faculty teach, manage their classroom, and interact with their students.  I suggest that educational technologists refocus our attention on these spaces, and as a community identify the kinds of teaching and learning we want to see more of and to develop recommendations for future classroom investments.  Clickers are a good example of having identified a clear need for more and easier to administer formative assessment and then persuing a technology that enabled that (I'm not sure if that was the actual process, but it can be).  Lecture capture enables classroom flipping, where static lecture material moves out of the classroom to videos so we can incorporate more active learning during scheduled class time.  What are our other classroom needs?  What compelling technologies have you seen to meet these needs?
FYI - we're looking to make Classroom Technologies a prominent theme in our upcoming TLT events.

You can find my Abilene Reflections Part 1 here.
I had the pleasure of getting to spend a lot of time talking to Kyle Bowen from Purdue University. Kyle is the Director of Informatics at Purdue, and manages the group responsible for some very innovative educational technologies that you may be familiar with, including Hotseat , a tool used to facilitate in-class discussion, and Mixable, which ties together a number of social media sites like Facebook and Dropbox to create a learning environment that leverages a student's existing social network and the capabilities of sites they are already familiar with, to engage in learning activities. 
Kyle's presentation at the Abilene Connected Summit was focused on another tool his group created, called DoubleTake. DoubleTake is a mobile video solution that essentially streamlines the video capture, submission, and peer feedback process for students. It includes an iOS app, which allows students to authenticate using their Purdue credentials, capture video, and then submit that video to a course they are enrolled in. There is then a web-based component which allows students to see their peers' submitted videos and provide feedback. One of the use cases Kyle discusses for DoubleTake is in facilitating classroom assessment. An example of this would be in teacher education, where students would capture one another teaching and provide targeted feedback. I think there's a variety of other uses, basically any learning that requires video and peer collaboration. 
On a technical note, the back-end architecture of Doubletake is pretty interesting. Purdue takes advantage of system called Condor to distribute video encoding jobs to idle computer lab machines. This enables them to make student videos available within 5-7 minutes of them being submitted. This is critical for making Doubletake useful within the context of the class session. And it's financially responsible as it makes great use of existing computing resources on campus. 
As an aside, I have to say that Purdue does an excellent job marketing products like Doubletake.  Good marketing obviously leads to awareness and adoption amongst faculty.  And Kyle does some good assessment as well, so while he's making sure people know about these opportunities, he's also ensuring that they're resulting a positive impact on learning.
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In my next post I'll share some of what USC is doing around mobile journalism.

The opening session and conversations so far have been, while not surprising, good to hear. Some comments reflected the need to go beyond working only with the 2-3% of early adopter faculty that some ed tech departments see, and to take the message out to faculty that perhaps wouldn't come to us on their own volition, people who might be great teachers but don't know what we do or how we can help them. We are doing some of this with faculty brown bags and participating in faculty research groups, and those activities have always yielded great opportunities that we might have have come across otherwise.

Currently Larry Johnson is showing us Horizon Project Navigator (http://navigator.nmc.org). I think is will be a good place for Penn State to share some of our pilot projects and to find solutions or strategies others have already invested in finding. While budgets are getting reduced, this seems smart both from a pedagogical and financial perspective.

More reflections soon...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Austin, TX

I was recently invited to speak at Abilene Christian University's Connect Summit, held February 28th-March 1st on the university's campus. The conference was focused on all aspects of mobile learning, covering everything from pedagogy to technical and logistical elements of mobile technology implementations. I came to share about Penn State's efforts around mobile learning, including our iPads in English project and several Media Commons projects including our iPod Touch pilot and Kaltura. 
I thought that instead of doing one big, monolithic travel report on my visit to Abilene Texas, I'd break this into smaller, more readable chunks around some specific topics. I'll start with reflections on the Media and Mobility track, where I presented and spent most of my time. 
My presentation started by challenging my audience to think broadly about mobile learning, to go beyond just thinking about mobile devices, to include consideration of learning space design and cloud-based services in mobile learning strategies. For instance, if we are expecting students to learn outside of classrooms and computer labs, to use mobile devices to access educational material and to collaborate with peers, then we need to design learning space to accommodate these sorts of activities. Likewise, if students are moving from device to device (laptop to phone to tablet) , they need to be able to access a common store of information (think Google Docs or Kaltura). We should be designing instruction to explicitly factor in these things. Our instruction shouldn't lock students into doing their work in a specific place or platform that isn't conducive to mobility, but rather encourage them to explore their environment and engage with their learning and their peers however/wherever works best for them. 
Next I talked about the mobile media workflow that myself and the Media Commons team have been working on. I'll post some more detailed information about this on the MC site, but in short we are looking into using the iPod Touch and a series of apps to support an entirely mobile video production workflow, where one can shoot video, edit, and publish, all on the iPod, without need for a laptop at any stage or production. The pedagogical implication here is that this workflow allows for a high degree of immediacy, where students can do creative intellectual work right in the moment. This removes the need to leave the place where the "action" is happening, possibly causing a person to lose their train of thought, but rather capture spontaneous reactions and to immediately encode those into a form they can share. We are currently piloting this with three courses (2 in IST and 1 in Education), and assessment of this pilot will focus on students ability to complete video tasks with these devices, and determining if they are able to actually do qualitatively different work this way. 



In my next post, I'll discuss presentations by my colleagues at USC's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, who have been doing some great work around iPads and mobile journalism, as well as DoubleTake, a mobile video platform developed Kyle Bowen's team at Purdue University.
See: Abilene Reflections: Mobile Track/Part 2 (DoubleTake)

The Media Commons Tailgate is part of a continuum of "Learning Design" events that TLT organizes, and as such, I wanted the focus of this event to be on learning and how technology can support learning, and not on technology and it's potential applications for learning.  There's a subtle distinction there in what comes first, the discussion of learning or of technology.  In my job, I feel that the former is much more important (the latter leads to a lot of shoehorning of technology into instruction).  At the Tailgate, I'm very happy to say that just about every session, aside from the unabashedly tech-centric lightening talks, was decidedly learning-first, and was aimed at understanding students and making effective choices about space and technology design.  With that said, here's some of my reflections on individual sessions..

Keynote

Many educators have a certain anxiety about technology that can be summed up with the question "Is Google making us stupid?".  Many people that work in the field of educational technology would probably respond along the lines of "No, it just makes us think differently."  Chris Long points out that this is actually a form of a very old question, dating back to the invention of writing.  Obviously writing has been critical in the development of our civilization, and we haven't all become devoid of the ability to remember things.  Society adapted and built on the new capabilities this technology provided, as it will do with the Internet, given time.  But how that adaptation plays out, particularly how we emerge from the growing pains we're feeling right now in education, hinges on a deeper understanding of issues such as how social media impacts students' "reading, writing, and fulfilling life" as Long does an excellent job of describing.  He points out that "many of the skills and abilities of traditional literacies remain the same...and that new possibilities and dangers arise with the emergence of the social dimension" of new media literacies.  

I feel strongly, especially after the Tailgate, that developing an understanding what new media literacies are, and nurturing those skills in our students, is absolutely critical to our work in education.  There's a fascinating moment during the student panel later in the day when a question was posed to students about where they learn how to use social media responsibly, and the panelists all agreed that they learned "from mistakes we make, and from each other", i.e. not from us educators.  I took Long's keynote, and the discussion I had throughout the day, as a call-to-action for reforming digital literacy instruction.  It's a conversation I've had many times with Ellysa Cahoy at University Libraries, and which I was happy to expand on last weekend.

Here's Chris' keynote in its entirety:


My next post will be some further reactions on the student panel "Social Media and the Future of Student Communications".

The Media Commons team got together to reflect on some of what we saw on our first day at the Open Video Conference.   
From left to right: Justin Miller, Hannah Inzko, Chris Millet, Matt Frank (formerly of PSU, now at USC), and Ryan Wetzel.
My apologies about the audio and video quality.  We ended up having to use the hotel dining room to record this..

For the past year we've been piloting Kaltura, a web-based video authoring platform, with a handful of classes at Penn State.  Up to now, students and faculty would access this service via the Media Commons website.  Once they were ready to share their work, they would either point a link to the MC site or grab some embed code and post it to their blogs.  The latter is especially important if they needed to reflect on their work, cite sources, or enable comments to encourage collaboration. 

The Blogs at Penn State is an incredibly powerful publishing platform, and is actually quite flexible and extensible.  One of my goals in designing educational technology is to make sure the technology is easy and minimal.  So we decided to remove quite a few steps from the Kaltura workflow, and just integrate it directly into the blog system.  The result is...  well, I think it's very cool.  But see for yourself:


(or get text directions here)

Now that this integration work is complete, it should be pretty easy to add Kaltura to other systems around Penn State.  One nice feature is that this all still hosted on the Media Commons site (although that's transparent to the user), so other sites that integrate Kaltura can share one central media library, and users can move around at will (i.e. create videos in ANGEL and post to their Blogs, or vice versa).

To enable this functionality, just login to the blog dashboard, go to Tools>Plugins>Penn State Kaltura Plugin>Settings and check Use Kaltura in Blog.  Please note this is a beta service, so everything might not work perfectly (for instance, this is not working on IE at the moment).

Enjoy!

video platform video management video solutions video player

Faculty Development in New Media: The Seminar Experiment

Gardner Campbell of Baylor University, in his session "Faculty Development in New Media: The Seminar Experiment", outlines an approach to faculty development that really resonated with me.  First, I'll start by describing some things that don't seem to be working, namely what Gardner refers to as "tech churn": New hardware/software is introduced > new workshops are offered > new projects are built around that tech > churn and repeat.  Gardner reflects on these workshops: "it's like people were thinking about cars, not transportation".  The end result is that faculty get burned out by constantly adapting to new technology, while their primary role at the university is in their teaching, research, and other intellectual work.  Certainly technology supports those things.  But in the tech churn, technology becomes the proverbial cart before the horse.  Tech adoption is not driven by a fundamental understanding of needs and thus not aligned well to those needs.  This is certainly not surprising to most of us, but we (educational technologists in general) still often struggle to find the right way to involve faculty early in the process of technology evaluation and development.  
Programs like the Faculty Fellows here at ETS are a great example of how this can be done right, and it aligns with what Gardner argues in that we should lead with the intellectual discussion.  He has designed a seminar that he describes as a "seed bed" upon which students (faculty, grad students, and ed tech staff), over a 12 week period, can develop a deep understanding of technology through reflection, discussion, and debate.  In perhaps a more academic environment than a typical technology workshop, students are provided readings (which you can find in the syllabus) and then spend the subsequent session reflecting on that reading.  On interesting point about the syllabus is that it sits on a wiki and is very much a living document.  A quote from Gardner that I especially liked was: "how can I make a syllabus for students if I don't know them yet?".  Students don't just lead the individual discussions, but the entire direction of the seminar.  There is a facilitator, but it seems that role has a light touch, and is more often an integrated member of the discussion.  Gardner says: "I do my best to make this a true learning community".
Another aspect of this model, at least in how it was implemented at Baylor, is that those attending come from a variety of disciplines.  This is important as through these multiple perspectives, students can discover some of the fundamental, common ideas that underly the effective integration of technology.  This is, as Gardner says, "new media studies as a platform for integrative learning".  Tech staff also participate and benefit from the discourse, which serves as a scaffolding for their own work.  One grad student who attended noted she was treated like a peer by faculty.  It seemed that this model was very successful in developing a vital and integrated learning community.
At Penn State, I believe this type of faculty development would be very successful, especially if looked at as one element of a continuum of programs that ETS provides, that includes Faculty Fellows, the Learning Design Summer Camp and Media Commons Tailgate, faculty brown bags, Hot Teams, and other work we do with individual faculty.  There would be some questions of scale (the Baylor seminar was about 11 faculty), but Media Commons has taught me that with a little ingenuity you can scale to some point without sacrificing quality of service. Obviously the culture at every institution is different, so there would be unique challenges and opportunities.  But one of the important strengths of this model is it's academic seminar format that I believe will appeal to many faculty and thus be a more effective approach to faculty development than some of the workshop-style programs that have been implemented in the past.  I should add one caveat that there is definitely a place for faculty-focused hands-on technology workshops, especially those that have a discussion component, but they should be done in conjunction with something like Gardner's seminars.
Here's some resources referenced in this post:
Seminar discussion board:http://www.atlhub.net/baylor_nms_s10/viewforum.php?f=2&sid=6f54f67d1ae88ae61025a05ae240126b
Blog posts from the seminar:http://www.nmc.org/nmfshttp://courseblogs.atlhub.net/baylor_nms_s10/
Syllabus:http://gardnercampbell.wetpaint.com/page/Baylor_NMS_S10

Slides from a presentation by myself, Ryan Wetzel, and Matt Frank (USC):

I have spent a lot of time over the past year thinking about how digital storytelling can be used as an instructional technique.  At Media Commons we've taught quite a few digital storytelling workshops, and I've blogged about the topic.  So I was excited to attend Kira Baker-Doyle's presentation "Digital Stories as Counter-Texts: Multimodal Critical Literacy in Practice".  Kira is an Assistant Professor of Education at Penn State Berks.  She is using digital storytelling with preservice teachers who are required to "critique a text, and then produce a counter-text using only digital media".  In some cases teachers analyzed children's literature and then re-invisioned those stories, in a way attempting to improve on them based on their analysis.
Kira's approach is well-grounded in educational theory, and I think she is effectively using this technique to get her students thinking about issues they will face in teaching in a modern, media-rich and technology-rich classroom.  Analysis requires students to consider various theoretical frameworks relating to new literacies, critical literacies, storytelling, Friere's theories on using literacy for empowerment, and various learning theories such as social learning and reader-response criticism.  One area that particularly interested me was the idea of "transliteracy" or "the ability to read, write, and interact across a range of platforms, tools, and media", specifically in the context of Kira's application, the ability to consume and analyze textual stories and transform them into audio and moving images.  I think that there's significant learning that can happen in that particular mental process as it requires a fairly deep understanding of the material; you need to really understand the meaning of the content to translate each idea into a different mode of representation, or, as Kira states, to understand and use different symbol systems to communicate an idea.
In reflecting on the experience, she mentioned a few points that were key to the success of the project, many of which I agree with based on my own experience.  Students required quite a bit of scaffolding, such as modeling, and providing periodic feedback throughout the entire process of analysis and constructing their media piece.  Group work was essentially as different students brought different skill-sets to the process.  Students were also able to engage in theater and writing practice to give them grounding for their storytelling.  A detailed rubric was also provided to students.
I hope to do a more detailed case study of this project for the Media Commons website over the Summer, as I think many instructors will be interested in the work being done here.

I've been thinking a lot lately about storytelling lately; specifically the role that it plays in teaching and learning.  In a sense, storytelling, in its oldest form, has always been about teaching.  From our earlist oral traditions, we used storytelling to transmit important life lessons across generations.  The form of a story, with its particular tone, characters, narrative, and dialog communicated these lessons in an engaging and memorable way.  Early storytelling incorporated sophisticated aural and visual elements as well, intensifying the impression it made.  Once you heard a well-crafted story, you could retell it more or less from memory.  Even if you couldn't recite it word for word, you could make up some parts and still get the underlying lesson across.  So in a sense, the function of storytelling in early civilization was a form of Pea's distributed intelligence - a mechanism for encoding ideas in a particular fashion to aid in retention and recall, even in the absense of written language.  In this light, it's obvious why storytelling would be of interest to educators.  As a person who is very passionate about the role of creativity in teaching and learning, and how digital media can augment teaching and learning, storytelling as an instructional technique appeals to me greatly.
What spurred me to think about this recently was the results of a series of student focus groups Ellysa Cahoy and I ran last semester.  These students had recently completed a video project for one of their classes.  Our interviews were designed to uncover the processes the students carried out to complete their projects, and their perceptions about the experience.  We had provided a variety of training to help the students in using the required technology as well as using the library for their research.  In reviewing the focus groups and looking through the student videos, it became obvious there was a specific point where things broke down for them.  I should back up and say that my vision is to develop strategies to elevate media projects from the fluff assignments they can sometimes be to rigorous intellectual activities..  an opportunity for students to really learn the concepts they're attending to.  An example of this was that we worked with the instructor for this course on building in mid-project deliverables to ensure students were engaged in a sustained effortful learning process, including going to the library and finding journal articles to inform what they would say in their videos, then creating storyboards, and refining their ideas in stages.  The breakdown I noticed occured between this research and the actual video production.  Essentially, they weren't always able to effectively translate their newfound knowledge into the medium of video.  Their final products had some redeeming qualities, but they weren't the rich, creative expressions of new undertanding that I knew they could be and that we were trying to achieve in our approach to activity design.
Media Commons had already been doing some work in the area of digital storytelling, and we had recently hired a new consultant, Aaron Smith, who has brought in some interesting ideas about storytelling.  Conversations with Aaron and all of the MC consultants over the last few months have culimated in an idea I had to use storytelling as a way to bridge traditional, familiar processes of information gathering and communicating ideas with video. While the most common and recognizable application of digital storytelling focuses on telling of life experiences (This American Life, etc.), I'm thinking of it as a technique to meet the needs of the typical university-level course, whether that be in engineering, agriculture, or liberal arts.  It would be extremely powerful to provide students with a framework of strategies for building engaging narratives that effectively weave together visual and aural elements to elegantly communicate complex information, with the goal of producing stories that are both informative and entertaining.  Constructing these stories would force students to identify the most critical ideas to support their topic (since video assignments are typically only around 3 minutes), to leverage multiple modes of communication, and to synthesize them into a coherent whole.  But perhaps most importantly, they would have to go beyond the simple regurgitation of facts, and communicate in a way that ellicits an emotional reation from their audience.  That's hard to do.  But it's a motivating and effective way to learn.  And I think it helps us bridge that conceptual gap that keeps students from communicating effectively in this medium.
Operationally, the challenge for us now is to package this in a way that can be easily incorporated into the course of a single student activity.  One of the strategic decisions we made a long time ago was to encourage students to use simple tools like iMovie and Kaltura.  The more shallow learning curve of these tools has freed us to incorporate a broader set of digital literacies in our workshops, including concepts like fair use and digital storytelling.  So I think we're moving in the right direction, and we'll most certainly be talking more about this in the next few months.

This is the Prezi I and my co-presenters Justin Miller, Hannah Inzko used during our presentation "A Successful and Reproducible Model for High-Impact Educational Media Services".  I don't use a whole lot of text in my presentations, so this is only a glimpse into what we talked about.  I may do a full narration of this in the near future.  In the meantime, you may view the "slides", and visit the Media Commons (formerly Digital Commons) website for more information.

I'm just testing out embedding Kaltura videos created on the Digital Commons site in MoveableType.  These videos were created during one of our Digital Literacy workshops.

(this is a follow-up to Ellysa's post about our workshop)

As part of the faculty fellowship with Ellysa Cahoy, we're going to be holding a workshop on digital literacy.  As we've been meeting and planning this, we've started to come up with some really great ideas that I think will make for an engaging learning experience for instructors, instructional designers, librarians..  basically anyone involved in developing student instructional activities.  It started out as essentially the DC Digital Storytelling workshops rounded out with information about literacy, research, and utilizing library collections.  The idea we came up with last week was to wrap the whole workshop in an overarching project to develop a historical narrative.  Essentially what we'll be asking participants to do is choose an important moment in history, and use library media collections and media authoring tools (potentially Kaltura) to tell a story from the point of view of someone who was there.  Each step of the way participants would develop their digital literacy.  For example, effective research skills by searching AP videos of the event, and then identifying appropriate use given licensing restrictions and Fair Use freedoms.
The workshop will help us round out our understanding of digital literacy, especially as it pertains to literacies required by students to successfully complete digital media projects in their classes, which will factor into research studies we'll be running over the next year.
If you're interested, you can sign up for the workshop here: https://register4its.psu.edu/Public/ShowDetail.asp?scheduleid=106796