A complimentary continental breakfast consisting of bagels, pastries, and beverages is included for registered attendees.
Cognitive Surplus, Collaboration, and Social Learning
Join a group of your peers for an informal round table discussion about Online Learning Communities: Do they hold the potential to meet a wide variety of student needs? Bring your experience, questions, and ideas on this topic to share with others.
The College of the Liberal Arts (http://laus.la.psu.edu/) is home to 30 academic units, 27 institutes and centers, and more than 6,000 students, faculty, and staff. Building a culture of engagement and community in this diverse collection of audiences and interests is a daunting challenge. In this session, the presenters will showcase the strategies and tactics that have been employed within the college that incorporate digital and social media to advance the educational mission of the college, cultivate communities of learning, and reach out to current students, prospective students, and alumni.
Technology has become an indispensible tool of trial lawyers to educate and persuade jurors at trial. This session will demonstrate how law students use trial technology to present their cases to jurors drawn from the external community. The session then will address how faculty in all disciplines may use these trial technologies to engage their students.
John Harwood will moderate a panel of representatives from Barnes and Noble, Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson. The panel will discuss the innovative work that their companies have been doing related to trends and technologies that are shaping the educational environment at Penn State. Examples include electronic textbooks, e-readers and mobile devices, course management system integration, online supplemental materials, student response systems, and more. Later in the afternoon, the publishers will provide an opportunity to see some of these technologies first-hand in a demonstration room.
Join a group of your peers for an informal round table discussion about Collaborative Learning Spaces (like the new Knowledge Commons). Bring your experience, questions, and ideas on this topic to share with others.
David McCarthy will provide results from etextbook research conducted last fall in several Penn State classrooms. The sessions will focus on learning and educational trends in the evolving world of elearning materials. Steve Falke will provide the perspective of working faculty and students as they used digital materials and the role of the bookstore in that transition.
An understanding of science is critical to an informed understanding of everything that happens around us. Yet many students will receive degrees without enough baseline scientific experience to make informed evaluations of the "scientific” claims that bombard us daily. SC200 was created to inspire a passion for science in students who had given up on the field. By using tools such as Blogs at Penn State and Poll Everywhere, we have allowed the students to teach themselves the value of science in their lives in meaningful ways.
Join a group of your peers for an informal round table discussion about Electronic Textbooks. Bring your experience, questions, and ideas on this topic to share with others.
The presenters will reflect on how storytelling allows students to (1) connect new knowledge to prior knowledge; (2) be self-creative with new knowledge, (3) practice meaningfully with feedback and critically reflect on learning. Students in the Civic and Community Engagement minor produced and promoted storytelling. They helped raise awareness of the necessity of preserving stories and blending artifacts from historical events, specifically the Holocaust. They created a video presentation that featured personal interviews. This will be an interactive session and attendees will receive course rubrics, storyboard examples, and assignment handouts.
In August 2009, Penn State formed the eLearning Strategic Committee, charged with developing a strategy for sustaining a common e-learning environment across the University. This included the evaluation of alternatives to ANGEL. Over 2010-11, the LMS pilot team worked with instructors, students, designers, technologists, and support staff to explore the capabilities of Desire2Learn, Moodle, and Blackboard at Penn State. This panel will discuss the experiences of faculty participating in the pilot. Panelists will share thoughts on each LMS including pedagogical capabilities and limitations, content and grading options, and communication options.
Visit the demonstration areas set up by Barnes & Noble, Cengage, McGraw-Hill, and Person. See what their companies are developing in the areas of electronic textbooks, e-readers and mobile devices, course management system integration, online supplemental materials, student response systems, and more.
Join a group of your peers for an informal round table discussion about Mobile Learning. Bring your experience, questions, and ideas on this topic to share with others.
Baker-Doyle uses video clips, online texts, and course documents to describe the development and outcomes of a hybrid-structured service learning course. The design of the hybrid structure and its impacts on the students' engagement in service learning activities and peer collaborations are examined. Implications for hybrid course design, mechanisms for online collaborations, and community engagement practices are discussed. Baker-Doyle frames her presentation with a literature review on social network theory and research in education.
Visit the demonstration areas set up by Barnes & Noble, Cengage, McGraw-Hill, and Person. See what their companies are developing in the areas of electronic textbooks, e-readers and mobile devices, course management system integration, online supplemental materials, student response systems, and more.
Student desires and disappointments with educational technology are often different from what faculty and staff might suppose them to be. A similar disconnect can occur between faculty and staff regarding their views on the adoption of educational technologies. How can we surface those differences in a meaningful way, one that is more constructive than @AngelSucks? During this session, the panel will offer responses to questions sourced through a Twitter backchannel conversation. The goal will be to surface and hopefully bridge divides between faculty, student, and staff opinions regarding educational technology.