Be sure to sign up for the 2013 Learning Design Summer Camp!  Here’s more about this great, free event:

The annual Learning Design Summer Camp, held at Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium, University Park, is an informal, community-designed gathering of people from across Penn State who are interested in big issues related to the learning design process. The event is of interest to instructional designers, faculty, librarians, students, multimedia developers and education technologists.

This year’s theme is “Mindful Design.” The program will focus on increasing mindfulness in the design process in order to help us better define problems, identify patterns and see all possible solutions.

Attendees discuss issues such as student engagement, assessment, digital literacy, MOOCs and open educational resources, educational uses of social media, gamification and the impact of disruptive technologies on the learning process.

Members of the Penn State community are invited to register for Learning Design Summer Camp, to be held July 18-19 in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium, University Park.  To register, fill out the brief online form on the Register page. For any questions, email kem32@psu.edu.

• A link to the University Libraries Citation Guide is front and center, making it easy to learn how to cite all types of media.
• You can now search for all types of media using the Creative Commons Search at the top of each section.
• NASA is now featured in all sections since the site has been expanded to a full Media Archive.
• SpinXpress joins CC Search and NASA in each section as a new all-media resource
• Vimeo’s Creative Commons browser has been added to the Video section.
• SoundCloud’s CC search and browser has been dropped into the Audio section.
• Google Image Search is now searchable by level of Creative Commons license you require for your project!
• Descriptions have been updated and fleshed out across the board, making choosing a resource easier.
• The new, three column layout makes it easy to find out about the CC licenses you’ll find.
• And if you still need more sources, we now link to the Creative Commons Content Directory which has hundreds.

We’ll be adding more resources as we find them this summer, but check out the newly refurbished Free Media Library today to get started on your own hunt for great audio, images and video!

On May 7th, 2013, the Educational Gaming Commons held the 2nd annual GameDay Event, in the Knowledge Commons on Penn State’s University Park Campus! The event was a great success (and of course a lot of fun) and we’d like to extend our thanks to all of the presenters and attendees who made it possible. Stay tuned for media from the event, our survey, and of course information on GameDay 2014.

For those unfamiliar with the event, “Game Day” is a chance for members of the Penn State community to come together to learn more about what Educational Gaming is, how to best utilize it to improve student learning, and hear how it is being leveraged across Penn State for teaching and research. Designed for both educational gaming “noobs” and seasoned veterans, Game Day is a great opportunity to learn from, share with, and connect to members of the Penn State community around games in Education.

Learn more about the EGC and the Game Day event at gaming.psu.edu!

Penn State Behrend professor Anne Campbell wanted to find a way to get her students more engaged with the community this Spring as well as boost their public speaking skills for CAS 100H.  So she signed up for the Mobile Media Pilot and received 12 iPod touch devices that her students used to create interviews with both campus and local service organizations, charities and the like.  These interviews were then shown in class as a compliment to persuasive speeches meant to raise awareness about each community group profiled.

And, the results were even better than she’d hoped.  Anne shared her excitement with me by email:

“I think that going into the community and filming the interview made the students more passionate about their organization.  Not only were the speeches more persuasive than previous semesters without the device, but the class collected $200 for the organization of the most persuasive speakers …”

Campbell and her students divided the $200 raised between the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life ($150) and the Therapeutic Riding Equestrian Center ($50), extending the awareness raised by the project through charitable donations.

“I really like[d] it because [the iPod's] super portable and user-friendly. I wasn’t distracted with the technology and the mobility is good for the type of interview we’re looking to achieve.” – Camille M

Anne plans to continue assigning these video interviews and has already begun mapping out a project for the Fall 2013 semester with me.  I can’t wait to see what her students come up with next.  You can see more student videos and learn more about the project by visiting her Mobile Media Pilot profile page.

- Nick

The instructor for this class, Professor Toni Vanino, and I have been planning and coordinating for this project since the Fall. I worked with her students on four occasions providing iMovie and Scholarly Storytelling support, as they worked on their projects throughout the semester.

All of the student’s hard work came to fruition yesterday, when the class had their end of the semester iMovie Project Viewing Party.

They invited me to come see their final projects, and I couldn’t have been more thrilled to be there. We previewed all the groups projects. Many of the students said they had already used the videos they had created in their student teaching classrooms, and that they were very well received by their students.

Here one the projects completed by the students about the Declaration of Independence. Enjoy!

- Carla

This past Tuesday, the Mont Alto campus Library collaborated with Media Commons and Advanced Learning Projects to offer faculty, staff and students a preview of the One Button Studio facility that’s coming this Fall.

Justin Miller from ALP and I met with Lisa White, Peggy Angelovich, Tom Reinsfelder and Andrea Pritt to offer up a session that demonstrated the technologies in the room and provided attendees with ideas of how they could be used in conjunction with a variety of classes.

Around 25 attendees – including the campus DAA, Dr. Doncheski and Mont Alto IT staffers Doug Prowant, Staci Grimes and Shawn Albright – stopped by during the open house for demos of the OBS, free refreshments and discussion of their ideas for the space.  All left with project interest forms and free flash drives (with one button added by Library student workers) to use this Summer and Fall.

Looking forward to the great projects to come from Mont Alto’s One Button Studio!

- Nick

Beginning yesterday, April 17th at around 10:00 am, Media Commons hotline services were disrupted due to an infrastructure upgrade and maintenance work at University Park.  After becoming aware of the issue, MC consultants began working directly with Telephone & Network services to restore the hotline.

As of the morning of April 18th, services remain affected.  Users calling the hotline may encounter errors with call routing when choosing options from the phone menu as well as disconnected extensions resulting in either silence on our end or being routed straight to voicemail.  TNS predicts this problem will be more prevalent for our clients calling the hotline from non-campus phones.

Media Commons will continue to test the hotline at regular intervals while TNS staff attempts to correct the underlying problems.  We hope to restore service to full functionality as soon as possible and appreciate your patience and understanding.  Our apologies for any inconvenience this has and is causing.  Consultants remain available by email atmediacommons@psu.edu.

Media Commons hosted a new kind of event at the Greater Allegheny campus last night.  Entitled “Dinner & A Movie”, the evening get together was an effort to use a film as the starting point for a conversation with faculty and staff about digital media in the classroom.

Hannah Inzko and I started things off with a brief introduction to the evening’s main feature, PressPausePlay.  Then, participants spent 80 minutes exploring the conundrums of signal vs. noise, craft vs. radical democratization and other implications of the digital media revolution that has steeped our current cohort of students.  When everyone has the tools to make art at their fingertips (through spaces like Media Commons and at home), what does it mean to be an artist?  And how do we engage with these creators in the traditional classroom?

Conversation followed over a tasty dinner spread provided by the campus catering staff and included faculty from History, Art, Criminal Justice as well as the Library on campus and at Penn State Beaver.  Greater Allegheny’s chancellor, Dr. Curtiss Porter also made an appearance and we had a great discussion about upcoming project ideas for his Civic Engagement course.

Dinner & A Movie was a fun collaboration between Media Commons and head librarian at Greater Allegheny, Courtney Young (to whom we are so grateful).  It’s also an offering that we’d love to try out at other campuses across the Commonwealth this coming Fall semester.  Let us know if you’re interested!

- Nick