Presentation: January 2010 Archives

For the third year in a row I will be on the program with an accepted presentation at the Educause Learning Initiative annual meeting. This year I am doing a session with friend and colleague, Allan Gyorke, titled Incidental Openness, Exploring Stories of Education in the Open. As always I am really looking forward to sharing stories from PSU and having a the chance to expose some of the work our faculty are doing is really a treat! Below is the description of the session:

Incidental openness can happen. Institutional mandates typically create initiatives that are weighed down by policy and inefficiencies. At Penn State we have seen an explosion of openness due to the implementation of new platforms for use in teaching and learning. With these platforms in place, we have worked to rethink concepts such as e-portfolios, faculty development, collaboration, OER, and course management systems. During this session, we will describe what Penn State has done, show examples of the impact on teaching and learning, and provide an open forum to discuss our approach and practice to generating open teaching, design, and learning.

I have been invited to do a keynote presentation at Stevenson University focusing on harnessing the power of disruptive technologies in teaching and learning. I'll be speaking primarily to faculty from Stevenson, but I am told staff from across various offices will also be present. My talk will be titled, "Enabling the New Campus Conversation" and will cover some of the points I have been working to extend in the last year or so. I plan to integrate some new data from our freshly released 2009 FACAC student survey to help highlight how our students are adopting the services we are implementing on our campus. It should be a fun and engaging event that I have been looking forward to for quite some time.

I've been invited to speak to a group of faculty and staff at Penn State Abington to kick off the new spring semester. The talk will focus on how social computing can impact teaching and learning. The idea is to help faculty rethink the role of the open social web as to begin to see value in the approaches emerging across the Internet. I'll be sharing some thoughts that I hope will resonate with the group and perhaps push some of them to take advantage of many of the technologies we have available here at Penn State.