Hot Teams

Hot Team: VoiceThread

acr117 — 2009-07-07T14:29:52Z

A summer 2009 hot team investigated VoiceThread, a Web-based application that allows users to create a shared presentation as a media album that visitors can asynchronously comment on by text, voice, or video. The presentation can include any form of digital media. VoiceThread allows an entire group conversation to be collected from anywhere in the world and then shared for playback in one place. The application is designed to be user-friendly and require minimum technical ability. VoiceThread allows instructors to tap into the trend toward collaboration, group interaction, and teamwork that is becoming the norm in education and the modern workplace. Faculty hot team member Dan Berman used VoiceThread in his Roman archaeology course. He created instructional slides, then required students to add comments. He then had students produce their own VoiceThreads.

Download the VoiceThread White Paper (PDF).

Hot Team: Grassroots Video

acr117 — 2009-07-07T14:36:41Z

Most of the content in YouTube is grassroots video: short videos posted by ordinary people who are recording what is going on around them. Most of these videos do not have special lighting, sound, scripts, costumes, or props. In a 2008 survey of Penn State students, we found that 85 percent of them were watching videos on YouTube or a similar service and 17 percent were uploading videos of their own. That means that 14,000 students at the University are creating and uploading video. These videos are easy to search, rate, share, comment upon, and embed in other locations, such as blog posts.

How does grassroots video work and what are the implications for teaching and learning? To answer these types of questions, in spring 2009 we formed a hot team, who wrote the following Grassroots Video white paper.

Download the Grassroots Video White Paper (PDF).

Hot Team: Social Ratings

acr117 — 2009-07-07T14:38:27Z

In fall 2007, a hot team explored the concept of social ratings for content. The team looked at a couple of approaches and worked to expose some interesting use cases. Social rating systems are open systems that allow users to collectively evaluate the quality of nearly anything (e.g., books, blog posts, Broadway shows, movies, news stories, hotels, etc.). In its simplest form, this may involve applying thumbs up/down or star ratings to a resource, and this can be extended to include reviews and discussions of the resources by multiple contributors. As more items are ranked, it is possible to use the rankings to generate sets of popular or important items, by sorting by applied relevancy ranking. In order to help maintain relevance, subsets of resources, and of people, may be required in order to rank items within the context of a course, semester, or group. This approach has huge implications in a distributed environment where courses are taking advantage of the Blogs at Penn State and faculty wish to bring content into one location with ratings to help pull top posts to the surface.

An example can be found here.

Download the Social Rating Hot Team White Paper (PDF).

Hot Team: Zotero

acr117 — 2009-07-07T14:36:14Z

In spring 2008, a hot team looked at Zotero, a Firefox plug-in which allows users to capture and record bibliographic information about Web pages, images, and online journal articles, and export them as both a formatted bibliography or a text file suitable for EndNote import. Zotero is an ideal tool for teaching students basic research methodology such as finding, cataloging, and selecting data resources. The output functionality of the formatting tools can increase the quality of bibliographies in student papers dramatically.

Download the Zotero Hot Team White Paper (PDF)

Hot Team: Location-Aware Technologies

acr117 — 2009-07-07T14:43:02Z

In 2007, a hot team collaborated with a team from Purdue University to look at location-aware technologies. They explored how technologies like GPS and Google Maps can be used to create teaching and learning opportunities.The interaction between physical and digital information has the potential to greatly enrich teaching and learning in numerous ways. Location information adds context to instructional content and situates it in the physical world.

Download the Location Aware Technologies Hot Team White Paper (PDF) and please post any comments you may have.

Hot Team: Facebook Applications

acr117 — 2009-07-07T14:39:33Z

In 2007, some TLT staff and faculty from the University Libraries were discussing Web 2.0 tools in the context of the Libraries. The meeting was intended to get an idea of the types of things they are thinking about and we started discussing Facebook and the new Facebook platform opportunities. The librarians showed us what some other higher education libraries were doing in that context, and we decided to form a hot team to look at it so we could understand the potential. Part of the team’s exploration included building a simple library search application. In looking at it, the team saw some opportunities to mash up learning with the most popular Web application among students at the University.

Download the white paper to learn more about the Facebook Platform.

Hot Team: Pachyderm

acr117 — 2009-07-07T14:40:06Z

The Pachyderm 2.0 project is a partnership led by the New Media Consortium and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Most users are either faculty or staff at higher education institutions or museum personnel, but some grade school teachers and students use it as well. It could potentially be used by faculty who do not know Flash or do not have access to some other means of creating multimedia presentations.

Take a look by downloading the White Paper (PDF).

Hot Team: Collaborative Writing Tools

acr117 — 2009-07-07T14:40:42Z

In 2007, a hot team investigated three Web-based collaborative writing tools, Zoho Writer, Google Docs, and NoteMesh. These tools facilitate multiple authors and can notify authors when changes are made to a document. They also allow authors to annotate documents with comments. Most are easy to use. Their most intriguing application for teaching and learning is their ability to facilitate collaborative writing and group project work, such as creating a shared set of class notes or critiquing others' written work.

Download the White Paper (PDF).

Hot Team: Studiocode

acr117 — 2009-07-07T14:41:22Z

In fall 2006, some faculty from the College of Education approached TLT to talk about their use of a software product called Studiocode. We decided to create a hot team to do a thorough analysis of the tool so we could understand what it is all about.

Studiocode is a video editing and analysis package. As it plays live or prerecorded video clips, you code them with terms that you define based on your area of interest. You can use these codes to retrieve video segments and build compiled movies. For instance, if you are interested in disruptions in high school classrooms, you could build a set of codes around types of disruptions, demographic information about the students, and their position in the classroom. Once the video clips are encoded in this manner, you can search through them and pull up combinations such as “male students in the back of the classroom who throw objects.” Seconds later Studiocode would produce a customized movie composed of cases where all of those conditions were met. This movie could be saved as a separate file for later analysis or inclusion in a presentation.

In addition to the ability to code and search through files, Studiocode includes video editing, compression, and transcription features. If you transcribe a movie, the transcript becomes searchable, enabling you to compile video segments where certain words or phrases were used. This kind of integrated package has a great potential to streamline video-based research. It can also be used to provide rich feedback to students or for students to compose video essays of their own performance.

Download the white paper (PDF).

Hot Team: iWriter

acr117 — 2009-07-07T14:41:47Z

In fall 2006, a hot team investigated an application created by Talking Panda called iWriter. iWriter allows you to create interactive games for the iPod. The team also discovered you could do quite a bit more with it.

The hot team found that iWriter has potential to enhance the educational experience in a great number of disciplines, from foreign language instruction to science and technology. iWriter provides the opportunity for educators to quickly and intuitively create rich instructional media where using a mobile platform like the iPod might be beneficial. In an age where such mobile devices are becoming increasingly sophisticated, the simplicity of iWriter and the iPod interface is a refreshing combination that can be applied to many situations.

Download the PDF of the white paper.

Download a sample iWriter project created by a member of the iWriter hot team (13 MB).

Hot Team: Faculty Guide to Teaching through Videoconferencing

acr117 — 2009-07-07T14:42:12Z

In 2006, Allan Gyorke of TLT produced a Faculty Guide to Teaching through Videoconferencing white paper. The paper provides insight into the use of videoconferencing to support teaching and learning. The purpose of this guide is to be a pedagogical primer for faculty who are relatively new to using videoconferencing to teach a course. The guide contains a list of questions that have been asked by faculty along with suggestions and examples provided by experienced videoconferencing instructors. These suggestions were supported based on research in the field of distance education.

The guide does not go into technical details on operating videoconferencing equipment, since each setup has a unique set of features and controls. Information Technology Services has a good technical overview of videoconferencing systems. For a list of other technical and research resources, please see the "Additional Resources" section at the end of the document.

Download the white Paper (PDF).

Hot Team: LionShare

acr117 — 2009-07-07T14:42:36Z

In 2006, a hot team investigated a product called LionShare (http://lionshare.its.psu.edu/). LionShare is a peer-to-peer application that enables faculty and staff to share academic materials. The idea is similar to programs like LimeWire and Kazaa, except that users are authenticated and sharing can be restricted to individuals or groups of a certain type, such as all faculty at Penn State and Stanford University. The white paper developed by the hot team includes a few use cases to help people imagine how this tool could be used and there are a few interesting features (look at the PeerServer idea) and some areas for future development.

Download the white paper (PDF).