We began designing this series two years ago with colleagues in SAS, Career Services and of course in Penn Libraries. I have enjoyed the discussions about what skills today’s Penn grads need for the workplace – and when tough cuts on training topics are needed – which skills look most important. We settled on eight broad topics but there was, and continues to be, a temptation to sneak new topics in here and there.  The topics in no particular order are:

1. Graphic Design and Visual Literacy
2. Web Resources
3. Files, Folders, Formats
4. Spreadsheets
5. Presentation Software (such as PowerPoint)
6. Web Design Concepts
7. Using the Web to enhance your job search
8. Collaboration and Management

We would love to involve more people with Hoesley Digital Literacy Fellows. We need your help in getting the word out to current sophomores and juniors for the March 24 deadline. We would like to bring in guest speakers for each workshop who use one of the topic areas in their jobs so students can more easily visualize why it might be worth taking time to learn about pivot tables or HTML tags.

As we emerge from our first year of work, we’d like to  invite the campus community to come and hear us talk about our efforts both designing this new online environment and optimizing flexible instructional designs which allow student-generated conversations to drive the online course experience.

Please join us as we co-host the March meeting of the Pennsylvania Distance Learning Association (PADLA) on March 16, from 8:30-11:45 am in the Bodek Lounge at Houston Hall.  Complete details about the event can be found on PADLA website.  Members of the Penn community can attend this event for free, but others are asked to register in advance.

Hope to meet you there!

But there are two easy-to-use programs (both Mac and PC) that are excellent for human and animal figure posing and animation. “Poser” (available for purchase from SmithMicro at http://my.smithmicro.com/mac/graphics.html) and “DazStudio” (available for free from DAZ3D.com) both can be used within minutes of starting and animations  can be easily accomplished in just a few minutes more. Both Poser and Daz formats are popular with independent model designers and you can purchase (often for as little as $.99) thousands of models online or download many free ones (see DAZ3D.com, contentparadise.com, poserworld.com).

Daz images will be used to demonstrate here but the programs are very similar in their layout and tools. Poser has more sophisticated animation capabilities.

1. Models are loaded into the program by selecting from the content folder that holds the models that come standard with the programs as well as those purchased separately.

2. Models include human of all ages and sizes, as well special humans like “The Freak” which is an oversize, muscular male that can be morphed into various monsters. Animals, plants, and props are also available.

3. Pre-designed poses can be applied to the figures or each body part can be manipulated and posed separately.

4. Switching between different views (front, sides, top, perspective) can make modeling and positioning easier. This scene is shown with 4 views and the screen can be split in numerous ways. A background image or color can be added as can complete 3D environments that allow the positioning of figures within a 3D space.

5. A final rendering, as a still image or an animation, can be produced in high quality and many different formats, including with comic book textures.

Daz3D will be demonstrated in a workshop on March 1, 2010 in the Weigle Information Commons, 10am to 11:30am. Register at: http://tinyurl.com/y8fma6f

Educause Learning Initiative: 7 Things You Should Know About

The “7 Things You Should Know About…” series provides concise information on emerging learning technologies. Each brief focuses on a single technology and describes what it is, where it is going, and why it matters to teaching and learning. Use these briefs for a no-jargon, quick overview of a topic and share them with time-pressed colleagues.

This month’s brief examines backchannel communications, which I mentioned in my recent post on designing interactivity into live web conferences on the Adobe Connect Professional tool.  While our online faculty harness the power of the backchannel to foster participation and drive lecture content,  I wonder whether others here at Penn are experimenting with using backchannel tools in their face-to-face teaching.

Anyone out there using chat, IM, Twitter, or Google Wave for group participation in their face-to-face classes? If so, would you consider sharing your activity with us here?

If not, what do you think are the potential pros and cons of enabling backchannel conversations to become a part of the student experience in face-to-face classes at Penn?

• students’ perceptions of their ability to multitask compared to the realities of research on the subject
• the perceived demand for classes to be more engaging and interactive than they were a generation ago
• the benefits and possible perils of immersive virtual worlds such as SecondLife

See http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/ to read more about it or watch the episode online.

Our  “revolutionary video project” involved the delivery of over 30 hours of broadcast-quality lectures in a fully-online non-credit course to more than 1000 participants in 62 countries on 6 continents. Course participants watched the video lectures and discussed them using tools of the social web. Come hear a bit more about this and other exciting video projects:

Connect@NMC: Kaltura Inspire: The Future of Video in Education

This Webinar will explore how video and new forms of multi-media enabled learning are revolutionizing education across the country. Video in Education now goes beyond simple publishing and includes internal university ‘YouTubes’, deep learning management system integrations, collaborative video editing assignments, video for distance education and libraries, and media-powered blogs and social networks.  Kaltura has developed an open source alternative to proprietary video platforms that is flexible, easy to integrate and includes custom tools  specifically for education.

Join us for a showcase of  revolutionary video projects. Penn State’s Chris Millet, Penn’s Marni Baker Stein, 2Tor’s James Kenigsberg, and Kaltura’s Leah Belsky.

Note you will have to pre-register to attend via http://www.kaltura.org/education-webinar-registration?ref=NMC

Over the next few months we’ll publish here descriptions of other video projects we’re working on with Penn faculty. In the meantime, why not share some information about a project that you’re involved with?

1. Design your presentation mindfully; plan interactive moments.

Use the interactive features of your web conferencing software to keep your audience connected to your topic and each other.

• Provide a warm-up activity. Share a map on the whiteboard and have participants identify where they’re located, for example, or have participants play a simple word game, like Hangman. Getting participants to use the interactive features right from the start helps set the “ground rules” for interactivity throughout the session.

• Design moments for guided reflection. In her undergraduate World Music course, Dr. Carol Muller plays unfamiliar music to her students and prompts them to describe in few words their initial response to that music using the direct messaging tool.  As the written responses come in, she continues to speak, rephrasing student thoughts using the academic register of her field. Within a few weeks, she notices that students start to use the language of ethnomusicology in their chat sessions.

• Design question and answer sessions into your talk. While Dr. Peter Struck delivers lectures in his Greek and Roman Mythology course, for example, students are encouraged to participate in backchannel conversations with the Teaching Assistant via the chat tool. Every 10-15 minutes, he pauses his lecture, allows the TA to report on what students are commenting on in the chat, and then extends the conversations with the students via the voice and video tools before returning to his lecture.

• Design small group work into your presentation. In Academic Writing and Research Design in the Arts and Sciences, a graduate seminar, Dr. Kris Rabberman uses breakout rooms for close reading and group discussions. In these private spaces, students work with a select number of their peers on an activity aligned with instructional goals. Dr. Rabberman visits each room to provide guidance/feedback. After the group exercise, students then return to the main room to present their findings/conclusions to the larger group.

• Use polls (quizzes) to check for understanding and track participation.  You can design these in advance, or create them as you deliver your content. In the LPS information session for online students, for example, we ask how many users have taken an online course before, whether or not they’ve used the web for real-time interaction, and, if so, which tools they’ve used (Skype, Google Talk, etc.). We then use that data to drive our conversations about how online courses work at Penn.

2. Create visuals that enhance your verbal delivery.

• Share your screen with users. Take participants on a web tour or show them how to use online tools. As a guest lecturer in a graduate seminar, for example, David Azzolina from Penn Libraries introduces students to key databases and resources available in Penn’s extensive library system.

• Create a whiteboard where participants can work collaboratively. Dr. Kris Rabberman uses the whiteboard to help students identify writing conventions and develop peer editing skills. She uploads samples of text to the whiteboard and asks students to use the marking tools to highlight/circle key issues.

• Pre-load images or include them in your lecture slides. In a lecture describing the history of parliamentary land enclosure in Britain in the eighteenth century for her Introduction to Romanticism course, Myra Lotto includes historic maps and images of a pastoral countryside to convey the mood of that period.

• Use PowerPoint strategically. In Calculus 2, Nakia Rimmer uses animated slides to guide students through solutions to complicated problems. Read Edward Tufte’s work if you want to learn more about the effective use of Power Point and the design of visual information. He’s bringing his one day course on Presenting Data and Information to Philadelphia on March 16, 2010.

3. Control your verbal delivery.

• Speak a little bit slower and a bit more emphatically than you might normally speak in a face-face lecture session.
• Vary the volume, rate and tone of your speech.
• Incorporate pausing to highlight key ideas, transition between points, and/or recapture the audience’s attention.
• Worried about whether or not your participants are following along? Establish techniques for collecting frequent feedback from participants. Have students use the “My Status” tools (shown on the right), for example, to let you know whether you need to speed up or slow down, speak louder or softer.

To learn more about effective practice in designing presentations using Adobe Connect Professional, visit:

RIT Online Learning, winner of the New Media Consortium’s 2008 Center of Excellence Award.

• Student Engagement Strategies
• Best Practices and Technical Tips

Adobe’s Resource Center provides tutorials on features and best practice advice:

• Read through the User Quick Guide or watch a video about how the web conference tool works.

• Best Practices for Delivering Virtual Classroom Training

Please consider sharing what you learn by submitting comments below.

I found it interesting – but difficult - to teach this way. I spent much time preparing handouts (sample spreadsheets of “before” and “after”) and worrying about pace and structure. I chose a traditional approach where I shared my screen and manipulated Excel and then asked participants to “watch and repeat” on their own computer.

The technology worked quite well and the participants all seemed to keep up, and be eager for more. But being the presenter, I had this odd sinking feeling that I was shouting down a deep, empty well.  I have presented at several conference sessions online – but I have no expectation of audience participation when I am lecturing. It felt much stranger to conduct a small-group hands-on workshop completely online. We are planning to try this again in January and suggestions for how to structure the activity to be more interactive and less didactic would be most welcome!

You can see what it’s all about by visiting http://www.nmc.org/cool You’ll find information about how to get & share stuff through a variety of channels.

Perhaps the coolest thing on this site so far is Posterous (http://posterous.com/) – one of the tools being used to collect recommendations for cool stuff.

Posterous makes it really easy to start a simple blog  just by sending email.  You don’t have to sign for an account; just send an email.  You can include pictures, audio, video, links etc.    Take a look at their FAQ page (http://posterous.com/faq/)  for more information about what you can do with this cool new tool

This whole metaphor reminded me of how I have experienced simulations thus far.  They are these magnificent learning tools full of potential, yet seemingly unaware of their capacity for reaching the masses and literally changing the way that we educate.  The world KNOWS that simulations have potential, but do we BELIEVE it?  I’ve been lucky enough to experience it and believe it from the first time I ever tested a Learning Lab application – completely lacking knowledge of investment terms & strategies and possessing nascent technical skills, I plunged into the world of the Online Trading and Investment Simulator (OTIS) and thought to myself, wow this thing has possibility!  Little did I know that OTIS and I were destined to become friends and that my knowledge of simulation potential would grow into a solid belief of what they can do for education.

Several years after the experience with OTIS, I have now witnessed that simulations can not only change a class session, but they can also change an entire curriculum and can have an educational impact reaching approximately 850 MBAs!  Conceived by Professors Nancy Rothbard and Sigal Barsade, developed by Forio, and carried through successfully by a number of different Wharton departments (including the Learning Lab), the Wharton Teamwork and Leadership Simulation (WTLS) for Management 652 changed the idea of simulation scale and magnitude at the Wharton School.  Equipped with approximately 180 laptops, 288 lab computers (for each wave of students), 288 headphones, and at least 120 Wharton employees, and almost the entire Forio technical and support team – the four day simulation was an overall success and an example of realized potential.

A little bit about the simulation:

“Through a business simulation that has been written by Professors Barsade and Rothbard and designed especially for Wharton students, we [the teachers] will cover both theoretical and practical aspects of leadership and teamwork.  In this class, you [the students] will take on the role of a senior management team and in doing so learn how to negotiate with and influence other team members, make team-based decisions, and deal with group dynamics and organizational change – all as part of running your organization.”

Because of the purposely ambiguous nature of simulations, I cannot offer details about the simulation’s storyline or the details of the daily activities in each round – but I confidently say that I witnessed intense engagement.  The students truly assumed their roles in the organization and really got into character – often crafting back stories about how their organization started, even though it wasn’t required.  I even heard a group tell a tale demonstrating the closeness of their company:  “Two members of our senior management team are actually married – that’s how close our company is.”  I witnessed imagination, creativity, and teamwork and found it fascinating to watch as each group seemed to have an internal leader emerge as the four days of the simulation progressed.  Not surprisingly, the leader often seemed to be the person who believed the most in the potential of his/her company and his/her teammates.

As a Psychology major, I saw countless potential for personality studies through the daily surveys and questionnaires that the students answered.  I also enjoyed (which I enjoy through Learning Lab applications as well) the experiment-like nature of running a simulation.  Perhaps WTLS was even more experiment-like than most simulations in that it was the first time carrying out such a large scale simulation project.  Running a simulation is also much like an experiment in that it is laden with a multitude of variables and random events that slightly alter the experience of the students from one classroom to the next.  After the simulation finishes, there’s usually a debrief session in which the true goals of the simulation are revealed.  I sat in on a debrief class after one of the WTLS test runs and I learned all about more concepts that pique the interest of a former Psychology major.  There is a lot to be learned about the potential of the human psyche by analyzing the way that people lead and work together as a team.

Although The Wharton Teamwork and Leadership Simulation may have been designed to teach teamwork and leadership to the students, I think every single staff member involved in the process learned valuable lessons in those areas as well.  Some emerged as leaders themselves – either by putting in extra work hours/effort to ensure the success of this inaugural simulation (I can think of a few people who deserve recognition for this!) or by signing up for a highly involved role.  There were lab leaders, lab support, classroom technical support, network connectivity monitors, software installers and testers, crisis response teams, classroom support/food/logistics/supplies, business and simulation experts, leadership fellows – needless to say WTLS was a huge group effort.  It was at once a bit scary yet extremely liberating to be a part of such a large undertaking and interacting with colleagues from different departments in a way that isn’t usually done on a daily basis at most universities.

I want to include a quote that I read about teamwork in the Pfeiffer Book of Successful Team-Building Tools by Elaine Biech (2008) because I think it describes something that both the students learned as well as the faculty and staff that made the event successful:

“Probably the key advantage of teamwork is a better end result.  Organizations find that teams can be more responsive to the changing needs of the marketplace.  Teams can be closer to the customer’s needs, more informed about advanced technology, and faster to respond than traditional hierarchies.

A team working together has more and better input than individual’s working alone.  If everyone who works and in the process is involved, it is less likely that steps will be missed.  This results in better ideas and decisions and higher quality output.”

Those words speak to the success of the teams, but what about the people who rose as leaders through the entire experience?  Taken from Volume IV of What works, what matters, what lasts by Alexander and Helen Astin from the University of California (2007):

“We believe that leadership is a process that is ultimately concerned with fostering change.  In contrast to the notion of ‘management,’ which suggests preservation or maintenance, ‘leadership’ implies a process where there is movement – from wherever we are now to some future place or condition that is different.  Leadership also implies intentionality, in the sense that the implied change is not random – ‘change for change’s sake’ – but is rather directed toward some future end or condition which is desired or valued.  Accordingly, leadership is a purposive process which is inherently value-based.

Consistent with the notion that leadership is concerned with change, we view the ‘leader’ basically as a change agent, i.e., ‘one who fosters change.’  Leaders then, are not necessarily those who merely hold formal ‘leadership’ positions; on the contrary, all people are potential leaders.  Furthermore, since the concepts of ‘leadership’ and ‘leader’ imply that there are other people involved, leadership is, by definition, a collection group process.”

In essence, everything that I have just said culminated into a story of realizing potential:  recognizing one’s own potential, recognizing the potential of teammates, recognizing and then taking action on the potential of an idea (as Professors Barsade and Rothbard have done with the simulation), and recognizing potential of the tools in an environment that can lead towards success (such as using simulations for education).

The funny thing about potential energy in physics though is that it really means nothing unless it becomes kinetic energy, and kinetics implies some kind of motion – the same way that “‘leadership’ implies a process where there is movement”.  The actions of everyone involved in the simulation took something with potential and transformed it into a movement that not only taught the value of leadership and teamwork, but it demonstrated it.