Summer Lightning

June Calendar

This Memorial Day weekend has brought sunny hot days that end in evening thunderstorms. The flashes of lightning outside remind me to share the playlist of 16 videos from our April Lightning Round. The short clips are perfect for a tweet-out. Thanks to Chris Vandegrift for amazing video work!

Two June workshops build on Lightning Round energy. Ben Wiggins joins our intern Chava Spivak-Birndorf, creator of WIC and Dogs Timelines, for a TimelineJS workshop on June 8 and Ian Petrie presents a Scalar workshop on June 15. June has more fun topics as well, including how to get Google to notice your website.

Upcoming Events for Faculty

I wanted to spotlight three events of interest to Penn faculty and graduate students:

On Monday, April 11, Jamie Marie Estrada and I will hold a half-hour online discussion on the Philosophy of Social Media. (Register!)

On Wednesday, April 13, our panel on Library Resources for Faculty organized in collaboration with PASEF and ASEF-PSOM includes Will Noel, Dot Porter, Rebecca Stuhr, David Toccafondi, Sarah Wipperman and myself. Topics include liaison services, rare books, learning spaces, online persona and iPad apps. (Register!)

On Tuesday, April 26, our Engaging Students Through Technology Lightning Round 2016 is co-sponsored by camra, the Center for Teaching and Learning , the Graduate Student Center,  the Penn Language Center, the Price Lab for Digital Humanities,  SAS Computing and the Weingarten Learning Resources Center (VPUL) (Register!)

Speakers include:

• Stefanie Alfonso on interactive e-guides
• Etienne Benson on Using Processing in Humanities Classes
• Rick Berman on WordPress for City Design
• Lillyrose Veneziano Broccia on Project-Based Differentiation Via Canvas
• Caroline Connolly on Poll Everywhere for In Class Polling
• Delphine Dahan on Using LockDown Browser
• Julie Davis on WordPress for Prints
• Amy Durham on In-class Quizzes and Games
• Andi Johnson on NVivo
• Ethan Mollick on Looking Glass
• Kris Rabberman on Voice Thread
• Ana Reyes on Immersive Terf
• Arjun Shankar on film and multimodal pedagogy
• Catherine Turner on Topic Modelling Tool
• Ben Wiggins on TimelineJS

Join us this April as we celebrate WIC’s 10th Birthday all month!

WIC’s 10th Birthday Bash

The Weigle Information Commons turns 10 next week – check out our interactive timeline.

Join WIC’s 10th Birthday Bash on Tuesday, April 5, 5 to 7 pm.

Enjoy birthday cake, hands-on fun (young adult coloring, Makey Makey and Scratch, comics on our Cintiq tablet) and activities that help you excel academically and master digital literacy.

You will meet many wonderful people and partner organizations.

It’s a MakerSpace evening – make something in between bites of cake and win cool swag! (Photo below courtesy of Wes Martin‘s fancy lightbox!)

Swag: Bluetooth Speaker and Phone Case

(We announce the winners of our Bluetooth Speakers at the 2016 College Palooza on April 11.)

Look for our ad below in the DP and around campus next week and RSVP on Facebook.

Want to help host our party? Let us know!

 

Happy NVivo Year!

Lots of NVivo news to celebrate as we enter 2016!

Thanks to our awesome public computing support department, all the computers in Weigle and the Goldstein Electronic Classroom can once again run NVivo beautifully! Software glitches are fixed, our machines have solid-state drives that boot up faster and our network is now at 1Gig Ethernet. So come on back, and bring your friends with you!

Our NVivo User Group is off to a great start with more than 60 people on our listserv and a Canvas course for sharing databases and questions. All four sessions to date had strong attendance and handouts are posted online.

Our next NVivo Basics class will be on January 27, and our next NVivo User Group meeting on February 1 will focus on query design facilitated by Ebony Easley. We plan time for “ask an expert” consultations, so bring your team and your NVivo files along with you. On your way in, you can admire the latest student work exhibit by Rosie Frasso‘s class on how technology is changing our lives; the students used NVivo to analyze their interviews.

Symposium videos reveal our robust campus community..

Thanks to our dedicated team of sponsors and organizers and our powerful presenters, we have received wonderful feedback from the 2015 Engaging Students Through Technology Symposium. One of my favorite comments inspired the title for this blog post:

“The community of people doing innovative things with tech at Penn is actually quite robust, and I felt like I was reintroduced to it in a really delightful way. We could probably do a better job maintaining that community all year long.”

We brought together over 150 faculty, staff and graduate students from all twelve Penn schools for an intense program of speakers and discussions. Our student survey responses and student and faculty panel presenters inspired conversation.

As our photo album shows, our audience stayed active and engaged throughout a very long Friday. I welcome you to browse the recently-posted presenter slides and videos and share with colleagues.  Highlighted tools include Twitter (with Alain Plante and Emily Steiner), the LightBoard (with Phil Gressman), wikis (with Joe Farrell), Panopto lecture recording (with Peter Fader) and a variety of apps and web resources. The playlist below includes 22 videos!

Save the date: The 2016 Symposium will take place on Friday, October 28!

Student Survey: Looking for Volunteers!

942 responses to our student survey surprised us this October! We posted a summary in advance of our symposium student panel. (Event videos will be online soon. Photos and a great DP article by Stephanie Yang are up now.)

We would like to assemble a team of volunteers to help analyze the results. We expect it will be a fun project!

As a  teaser, below are five student responses to our question: This year’s theme is Ed Tech 2020. What technology can you imagine in use for Penn courses in 2020?

• “An iPad like system that automatically has the slides on it and the notes that the professor takes are automatically synched into your iPad.”
• “Laptop, phone, lecture chats to ask questions such as a Slack or a better form of GroupMe.”
• “Touchscreens and smart boards should replace whiteboards and chalk for more functionality and student interactivity available to the teachers.”
• “Ungraded coding workshops for people who want to learn but not sacrifice their GPA! /  / 3D printing, modeling workshops, excel tutorials, bloomberg terminal info.”
• “make use of the ever-growing field of tech devices worn on the wrist/head.”

Interested? Please email me for details.

How do you read?

Your thoughts for a cup of coffee!

Update 10/21/15: We have closed our survey after receiving 942 responses! Thanks to everyone who shared their ideas.

Please take a minute for our undergraduate student survey. We ask about reading online, note-taking, receiving feedback from professors and technology-intensive course assignments. Bring your confirmation to the WIC desk to receive a “free coffee” coupon for Mark’s Cafe!

Your answers will inform faculty conversations at the 2015 Engaging Students Through Technology Symposium. We expect that understanding individual experiences of Penn students will be useful for our faculty as they consider how to make their teaching as effective as possible.

Design, Bared

Posters in Mark’s Cafe

Tuesday’s workshop on graphic design with Marjan Gartland and William Hodgson was such a treat! I’m sure you have seen many of Marjan’s wonderful designs all over campus. I see them every day on crowded boards such as the one pictured here at Mark’s Cafe in Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center competing for the attention of the Penn campus.

Marjan is the Visual Project Manager on the University Life Administration Team in the Division of the Vice Provost for University Life (VPUL). She helps create beautiful graphics for many purposes and audiences, serving the many departments in that division including the cultural resource centers and campus safety.

She brought dozens of posters to show us, and we enjoyed looking at them displayed on the walls of the Collaborative Classroom. Marjan and William shared their insider tips-and-tricks with us, and Marjan did a live demo of creating a graphic using PhotoShop and Illustrator. We talked about using tablets like our new Cintiq and tools like InDesign and Kuler.

Often, when I see a powerful poster, I have little understanding of how it came to be. What I found most helpful about the workshop was watching a graphic take shape one step at a time, one tool at a time. Marjan started with a photo of a face and created a complex graphic in minutes!

I am looking forward to facilitating an online workshop in October with William on logo design and I hope you will join us.

Re-Imagining Spaces

ARCH 208 Active Learning Classroom

At the request of Jeanne Narum, John MacDermott and I recently authored a “snapshot” for the Learning Spaces Collaboratory as an update to the webinar I presented last summer. Ours is one of several snapshots on the LSC Webinars page.

The snapshot emphasizes the importance of reflection and iteration on how we manage learning spaces. We discussed how comments from faculty and students inform our decisions to launch new programs. We reflected on the focus group sessions we created this past spring with our colleague John Merz from College House Computing. Through the process of listening to students, we gained a deeper understanding of how they experience different study spaces over the course of their days. We brought in lessons learned from our colleagues Bruce Lenthall from the Center for Teaching and Learning and Deirdre Woods from Open Learning about the growth of active learning classrooms around the Penn campus.

Our thanks to Kim Eke, Eric Janec, Sara Leavens and Vickie Karasic here at Penn Libraries for their assistance with this snapshot.

Brainstorm 2015: We need you!

Help design the 2015  Engaging Students Through Technology Symposium! We will identify broad themes as well as new technologies to feature. Click on a date below to register for one of three brainstorming sessions or email us:

• Wed. July 15, 3 to 4 pm
• Tues. July 28, 2 to 3 pm
• Thurs. July 30, 10 to 11 am

Our annual symposium is designed for faculty. Last year, we brought together over 130 people from all 12 Penn schools, and students shared their ideas on technology integration.

Save the date: Friday, October 30, 2015. We plan a faculty panel, an undergraduate student panel, and several threads for afternoon workshops. Below are the faculty remarks from last year: