Last week, several of us attended the IRT e-Learning 2.0 Conference, themed Technology Use in Teaching and Learning, held here at Drexel.  Gary Childs, Larry Milliken, Tim Siftar, Jay Bhatt and I gave a talk about using web-conferencing technologies to mitigate the distance for online and distance learning students.

There were several other interesting sessions, and here’s a few comments from Meg Finney and Gary Childs, who offered to share their thoughts with the rest of us.

I was really impressed by Christina Jenkins’ presentation, “Saturation Powerpoint.” She was definitely the anomaly at the conference and raised a bit of a scandal by dismissing Blackboard as an “inauthentic learning experience.” I thought she was fascinating.

Essentially, she posed this question: When does technology help educators and when does it inhibit them?

She was coming from a K-12 teaching environment, so it was an odd fit for the eLearning Conference, but she still had some great ideas. She identified four problem areas related to technology in the classroom:

1. Technology being used to replicate analog processes (resulting in redundancy, “tech for tech’s sake”)
2. Technology being used too much for “entertainment” or fluff rather than in more constructive ways
3. Notion of technology being inherently good/to be approached passively as an end-product
4. Over-reliance on the notion that “digital natives” (i.e., recent generations) really understand technology and/or appreciate it

Among her ideas to rectify those problem areas, she offered:

1. Crowdsourcing (building digital artifacts from the ground up, using the community)
– E.g., Christina used a social network/wiki to allow students to roleplay the Revolutionary War
2. Using games to educate like LittleBigPlanet, where you create your own levels/objectives
3. Encourage students to use the computer actively, with software such as those based on Logo
4. Teachers should consider what would change if they had to produce all their own materials, rather than simply re-distribute what has already been made. Try making teaching materials by hand.

Links to her page with Parsons, including her thesis on the subject:

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The other session Meg took away some helpful info from was the IRT session on open-source alternatives to rich media software, titled “Building an Open-Source Rich Media Workbench.”

They presented three different pieces of software:

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program)
– Comparable to Photoshop, etc.
*Meg uses GIMP myself extensively, and thinks it is a great program.

Audacity (audio recording and editing)
– Comparable to Sony Soundforge, Adobe Soundbooth, etc.

AVIDemux (video editing)
– Comparable to iMovie, Windows Move Maker, Adobe Elements, etc.

All these programs are completely free, and are supported by robust communities. Complete user manuals in multiple languages as well as tutorials are available in some manifestation for all three.

These two applications were mentioned Paul Evangilista’s talk, Lowering the Bar: Simple Tools for Online Blended Courses.

Pixie
“Pixie is a utility made especially for webmasters and designers. It is a color picker with few extra goodies.
Run it, simply point to a color and it will tell you the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values of that color. You can then use these values to reproduce the selected color in your favorite programs. Pixie will also show the current coordinates of your mouse pointer. ”

Kuler was nice as well.  It suggests color themes.

Now that we have access to Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro here at the library (via IRT), here’s a few minor tips for using it successfully.

• Check your system requirements beforehand.  There is a page that helps you do just that, here.
• Make sure you have a camera/headset if you want to be seen and heard.
• Practice!  There are many, many options, and practicing before a presentation is extremely useful.
• Remember that you have an option to record your session. It’s useful to review, and we can always delete it if you don’t want to keep it.

For those who are new to this tool, it’s a virtual meeting room software, similar to Wimba, but a little easier to use.  It has many, many features which can be really useful if explored thoroughly.  You can share your screen, upload presentations and documents, and conduct online polls and discussion on-the-fly.

Here are two recordings that Tim Siftar, IST Librarian, made for intro courses at the iSchool:

INFO Systems and Technology Research Tips (09:18)

INFO Introduction to Gartner Research (06:22)

Here’s the link to the Drexel version of Adobe Connect, the login screen.  If you want to know more, please let me know!