"To meet the needs of the 21st century, a pedagogical shift must occur. The majority of today’s students will end up in jobs that do not even exist today, using technology that has yet to be invented. Educators must move from simply dispensing information to creating a vital, hands-on environment where students learn to access, manipulate, interpret and use data. Barriers to achieving this shift remain: easy access to technology for students, and proper training and support for teachers."

"With university endowments and public school budgets still feeling the pinch, the competition between Google and Microsoft to convert the nation's colleges, universities and schools to the companies' free e-mail and other information technology services that run on the Internet "cloud" has grown fiercer.

Stakes for the two firms are significant, as they fight to baptize a future generation of computer users with their products."

FACAC conducts this survey through the Survey Research Center and Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT). “FACAC first gave TLT the charge to collect data on technology use trends at Penn State almost 20 years ago,” said Vicki Williams, manager, assessment and evaluation research with TLT.

The data come from a total of 2,342 student respondents from most of the Penn State campuses. This information is very important and useful for educational technology development at Penn State, Williams said. The information helps them understand what students need, and want. “The data give us something on which to base decisions and make plans. It tells us who our students are and what they want and need in the way of technology,” she said. “It helps us track trends and identify patterns in technology use at Penn State.”

Williams said there were some interesting results in the survey, such as news that Macintosh use is up 10 percent from last year to 23 percent. There were some things that surprised her. “A couple of things gave me pause for thought,” she said. “In studying student use of social networking sites, 82 percent of students report having a Facebook account, and 30 percent had a MySpace account but only 16 percent reported having a Twitter account.

“Also, less than 1 percent of the students owned a Kindle, but 5 percent reported reading books or articles on their cell phones and 8 percent said they read books or articles on their computer every day. Is price the driving force or do they still want print?”

As for most popular technology device, this was no surprise to anyone watching students walking around on campus – the cell phone. “When we asked about their ownership of technology devices, we learned that almost all, 92 percent, have a cell phone and 60 percent of those have a smartphone with Internet capabilities,” Williams said. “Of those, 8 percent had iPhones and 28 percent had an LG phone.”

Williams said that faculty can find many benefits to reviewing the results of the survey. The data can help them determine what technology to use for teaching, and how to use it.

“Faculty can gain in two ways by reading the report,” Williams said. “They can learn about current student practices and may think more innovatively about their instruction.”

Williams recommends referring to the information in the survey to help answer questions. “They might ask themselves, ‘how can I use Facebook or Twitter as an instructional tool?’, ‘How can I get text messages to students and will they read them?’, and "How can I use these to engage my classes?’,” she said. “Once they have the questions, they can talk to us here at ETS for some strategies.”

Williams said that TLT and FACAC also will compare the new survey results to other surveys to help with data analysis. “We are now working on the results from the FACAC Faculty-TA survey, just closed last week,” she said. “I am anxious to see what parallels we might find in those data.”

To see the entire survey report so you can use the data to plan your teaching at Penn State, please go to http://tlt.its.psu.edu/about/reports/FACAC-Student-Report-09-final.pdf/view.

Article about how technology helps a busy former Marine juggle family, work, and studying for a degree.

Allan Gyorke, assistant director of Education Technology Services (ETS), recently traveled to Indiana University for some talks regarding how they use ANGEL and Sakai. He blogged about what he learned in two separate posts, one that covers the morning session and one that covers the lunch session.

Brad Kozlek, ETS information technology manager, recently attended training on agile software development methodologies via Learning Tree. This training has caused Brad to re-examine how ETS programmers do things. To find out how exactly, check out his blog post this week. It's good reading if you have ever managed a development project. 

There is no doubt the hype over the virtual world Second Life has died down some. However, as pointed out by Brett Bixler, ETS lead instructional designer, that doesn't mean it will soon disappear. Brett says now is not the time to abandon it if you are an educator, and issues a challenge of sorts on the Educational Gaming Commons blog. 

Also on the Educational Gaming Commons (EGC) blog, Chris Stubbs, ETS collaborative developer, posted about a recent focus group ETS facilitated for a new game, ChemBlaster. This game has been developed by the EGC and Penn State chemistry professor Mary Shoemaker. The game was well-received by the student test group - to read more about it here. 

And finally, Jeff Swain, ETS innovation consultant, has offered yet another excellent ANGEL Shorts on the ANGEL Community Hub. Five Things You Should Know about the Assessment Tool takes a look at a new feature to be available to ANGEL users January 5. To find out more about how this tool can help you with your courses, go to the link - it's a great addition.

That's all for this week - thanks for reading!

SCOLA is a nonprofit educational organization that distributes news broadcasts and multicultural resources in a variety of languages supplemented with instructional materials. Penn State faculty and students can access these resources from the SCOLA Web site at http://www.scola.org/.

By taking broadcast programs from around the world and adding transcripts, translations, vocabulary lists, images, and quizzes, SCOLA provides a complete package of materials for use in the classroom or by individual students. SCOLA materials are ideal as a language textbook supplement and suitable for use by an individual or a class to extend vocabulary, grammar, reading, and listening comprehension as well as cultural awareness.

Any Penn State community member who has an Access Account user ID and password can use the resources available at the SCOLA Web site for free. To obtain access to the Penn State account at the SCOLA site, individuals should go to http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/scola/ and follow the directions on the screen. This site also provides information on how to use SCOLA resources.

In addition to the resources available on the Web, a 24/7 SCOLA television broadcast is available to the Penn State community on Channel 29 of the Penn State network. For more information on SCOLA, email L-SCOLA@lists.psu.edu.

"Students at the University of Michigan are performing a concert using nothing but their iPhones. They call themselves the Mobile Phone Ensemble. The group was the brainchild of engineering and music professor Georg Essl. The ensembles' first concert is Wednesday night in Ann Arbor."

NPR Morning Edition story on an interesting musical concept - cellphones as music instruments. Take a listen - they offer some samples of this new form of music.

For a brief overview of the key differences between ANGEL quizzes and assessments, see the latest issue of ANGELshorts at http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/angel/. To learn more, faculty can attend a free Winter-Fest workshop on the assessment tool to be held January 7 at 10:00 a.m. To register, visit http://its.psu.edu/training/. Tutorials and documentation on the new tool are available in the ANGEL Help & Information Guide. They can be found by selecting Courses, Lessons Tab, then Assessments on the left.

For any questions, contact ANGEL support at angelsupport@psu.edu.

"In a weak job market, it’s good to have a tech diploma. Tech grads may have to look harder and cover a wider geographic area than in recent years, depending on their areas of specialization, but demand is strong relative to most other fields."

How can Penn State and other universities ensure these graduates have the applicable skills once they graduate?

Dave Stong, ETS graphic designer, has a great post where he urges a re-thinking of what software training should be. He believes training shouldn't be limited to simple memorization of how to do a task, but it should also involve the development of critical thinking and creative data use. Read more of this idea here; he makes plenty of excellent points. 

Cole Camplese, ETS director, is quite a prolific blogger. He really likes it, and leaves a link where you can follow his blog posts on this new platform via an RSS feed. 

If you are a developer/system admin and have dealt with Plone, you know there can be installation issues. Erik Rose, WebLion programmer/developer, has some solutions to make Plone installation reliable again. He has found that "many sysadmins are looking for a way to easily and, most importantly, reproducibly deploy Plone on servers, without being subject to the day-to-day shifting of Python package dependencies." Read more about his solutions here. 

Lots of social media types are Ninging it. Okay, bad pun. Please don't let that keep you from reading Erin Long, ETS instructional designer, who has an excellent blog post this week on using Ning in the classroom. Like everything she posts, it's a very thorough read that leaves no stone unturned. 

That's all for this week's BuzzLion. Thanks for reading!

eSchool News' coverage of the speech yesterday by Education Department's new director of education technology, Karen Cator. Among subjects covered is the announcement that a first draft of the Obama administration's educational technology plan will be unveiled next month.

“I have two daughters in their 20s and none of this stuff would be overwhelming for them,” Ebken said. “But for those of us in our 40s and 50s who have not grown up with technology, a lot of that has to be learned and taught.”

So, Ebken had to turn somewhere for help, and found it via the Technology Learning Assistant program (TLA). She was assigned a TLA named Gavin Grisamore, a senior in supply chain management and Information Sciences and Technology’s information technology integration option. 

Working with Gavin has been a very positive experience, Ebken said. For example, she said that because of her inexperience, she will often not recall what he had taught her in previous sessions. “I will have no memory of what he did before, so I have to say okay, Gavin, I need to write everything down,” she said. “But next semester I will say, oh no, I totally forgot what he told me. However, he’s very patient with me. And he’s not rushed when he’s here, and I feel that he will answer any question that I have.”

Along with the help with ANGEL and getting her exams set up for e-testing, Grisamore has also suggested trying out social media. “For my Drugs of Abuse and Mental Health Issues course, he has got me thinking about having students write a blog and that whole thing,” Ebken said. “But I haven’t quite got there yet. That’s for the future, though.”

Ebken said that faculty in the school of nursing, being able to use technology has become a vital skill due to the mandate they received. “I was not using testing services at all for my major nursing course, so we were really kind of pushed into doing all that right away,” she said. “There really wasn’t much leeway for us.”

“It’s really important that we are able to get a hold of someone right away because we in nursing and those of us who are instructors in nursing are often in a clinical setting,” Ebken continued.  “So we have had full days where we are not here, therefore we have a limited amount of time to get a hold of someone.”

Therefore, Ebken said, the faculty appreciates the flexibility of Grisamore and the rest of the TLAs when it comes to scheduling. “He’s really good, he’ll say just email me when you are here, and he’ll plug in when he can come,” she said. “Our time is limited, so it’s really important for us to get a hold of someone right away to rescue us when we get stuck.”

Ebken said along with their expertise, TLAs are skilled at putting faculty at ease. She said that often many are nervous and insecure about not knowing technology. “It’s really important for the TLA to be understanding, not talk down to us in any way and not make us feel like we are total idiots when we don’t remember something from last semester,” she said. “Gavin’s really good with that.

“I haven’t even approached Gavin with some of the tech stuff that I am sure he is equipped to teach me, because I’m kind of overwhelmed with everything I need to do. But I am sure he could bring a lot more into my courses if I could access his help.”

With all the technology she has learned, Ebken said the TLA program has helped round out her skill set. This, she said, complements her other skills. “Our field is also a very practice-oriented field, so many of us have the practice component and may not be that skilled on a computer technology component,” she said. “But, we have to be. So it is critical for us to get into all that.”

To learn more about the TLA program and how you can get help with learning an educational technology, go to http://tlt.its.psu.edu/tla. To read the first part in this series, go to: http://tlt.its.psu.edu/about/news/2009/TLAPart1

For more details and to register, visit http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/. The Symposium is sponsored by Information Technology Services.

The question is whether students will pay for the convenience of getting instant access to what is free in the library. What do you think?

A fun one for this day before Thanksgiving. Do you agree with this list? How would a similar list look with a higher education focus?