TLTR rises again!

Friday, September 21, OHSU re-instituted one of what I have always thought was one of the coolest groups on campus: the TLTR, or Teaching, Learning and Technology Roundtable. These roundtables are encouraged by EDUCAUSE and other like organizations focused on technology in learning environments, particularly in higher education.

The many questions and resources covered at this meeting include the following. I would like to the OHSU TLTR site, but it will likely be overwritten for future meetings.

Tom Boudrot, Instructional Technology Manager, led a discussion on web conferencing and touched on the following issues:

• What does web conferencing look like?
  
• What hardware and software is required to conduct a successful web lecture or meeting?
  
• What software can be used to enhance the design and production of online events and training?
  
• What are some best practices in designing, producing and facilitating online courses, meetings and events?
  
• What are the current web conferencing pilots at OHSU?
  
• How do I get involved with web conferencing?
  

Select resources mentioned in the session:

• eLearning Guild
  
• Adobe Presenter User's Guide
  
• Getting Started with Adobe Presenter (PowerPoint)
  
• Adobe Captivate (rapid e-learning authoring)
  
• TechSmith: Camtasia Studio
  
• insyncCenter: 101 Tips to Motivate the Online Learner
  

Of course, it was a bonus that I won as a door prize a copy of The Synchronous Trainer's Survival Guide by Jennifer Hofmann. I still haven't had time to look at it yet (between helping launch our library's first attempt at providing an online Library 2.0 class to library staff and various conferences), but I'm looking forward to reading it.

SecondLife and Information Island

I have so much mulling about in my brain that's its hard to know where to begin. I should probably start with the groovy SecondLife (3-D virtual world) demo I saw at a recent gathering of the Portland Area Information Literacy group.

Michael Brown (Portland State University) and Donna Cohen (Information Management Consultant) led the group through a tour of SecondLife, particularly focusing on an area called Information Island. Information Island is an "archipelago" of dozens of "islands" (aka interest areas). Some of the resources they pointed us to for learning more about SecondLife were:

• A tour of the Library in Second Life on YouTube
  
• Second Life's Education Site
  
• Second Life Education Wiki
  
• An Annotated Bibliography of Second Life Online Resources.
  

I can see a lot of applications for SecondLife and InfoIsland in the K-12 realm - can you just imagine a teacher guiding students through a unit where they all have their avatars work together to build an Egyptian pyramid or the Great Wall of China? In this way, I can see this environment greatly enhancing the learning process. Similar projects, such as University of Virginia's virtual recreation of ancient Rome, officially titled Rome Reborn 1.0, show the possibilities when technology embraces the rich content in the humanities.

So, clearly virtual worlds have a strong educational benefit (not to mention total coolness factor!), but what about how virtual worlds could be applied to non-K-12 or liberal arts environments? Aside from being able to serve as a more multi-dimensional "webinar" (i.e. where everyone's avatars gather in a central place for a lecture and through SecondLife have a more interactive experience) what purpose could such an environment serve for an academic health sciences library? One of the islands in the "Info Island" archipelago, Health Info Island, may have some answers. Health Info Island, states as one of its goals to "Experiment and develop new ways of interaction between users and libraries" and to do more outreach in consumer health. It will be interesting to see how such a virtual environment could be used as a reference and learning tool for health information as this "Info Island" develops.

Teaching, communication and technology

Interesting notes from "Confessions of a Science Librarian" (John Dupuis) on the opening day of the TEL@York Conference, a conference on Technology Enhanced Learning. In his post , he discusses the keynote speaker's (John Mitterer of Brock University) presentation of Teaching, Communication, and the Effective Use of Technology to Enhance Student Engagement. I thought a variety of his points were of interest, particularly the "chalk as technology" idea and also keeping in mind that just because "technologies" are older does not mean they are not useful in certain instances. PowerPoint can still be useful as a teaching tool when properly applied, for example. Many thanks to Dupuis for his blogging of this event!