Project Demonstrations
Deborah Alexander
Deborah will demonstrate examples from the range of Immersive 3D environments being used in research and higher education. These applications can run the gamut from medical simulations to educational design and development in virtual worlds. Some examples involve forward-looking faculty and staff at the University of Minnesota, investigating teaching and learning in 3D virtual space.
Maria Damon
Maria will discuss her collaborations with poet and “do it yourself” publisher, mIEKAL aND as well as VG:Voices from the Gaps. Maria and mIEKAL have completed a series of online poetry projects and have also written several essays on online poetry collaborations such as the Flarf Collective (a group of poets devoted to writing cloyingly “incorrect” and “bad poetry” mostly derived from Google searches) and the work of Alan Sondheim, a polymath cult figure whose theoretical and artistic enterprises flood the cyberwaves.
Aaron Doering
Aaron Doering, Ph.D. University of Minnesota, is one of the world’s leading experts in the area of adventure learning. His research involves the design, development and evaluation of online learning environments, technology integration in K-12 preservice and inservice settings, and the innovative use of technology to support teaching and learning. Most recently, his research and projects have focused on hybrid online adventure learning environments, online scaffolding environments, and online community-building environments. He has also continued his research in content, cohort-specific technology integration within preservice teacher education programs.
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| Sandra Ecklein | Amanda Rondeau |
Sandra Ecklein, portal manager, and Amanda Rondeau, technology enhanced learning coordinator, work in the Office of the Vice Provost for Distributed Education and Instructional Technology. They will present a poster session about the University of Minnesota’s learning technology platform, a strategy to integrate many independent applications into a unified system to support teaching and learning.
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David Ernst is the Director of Academic Technology at the University of Minnesota’s College of Education and Human Development where he is responsible for learning technology initiatives. He has worked in the field of teaching and learning with technology for nearly 15 years, including positions in K-12, higher education, and corporate environments. He received his undergraduate degree in Physical Sciences Education and a M.S. in Education. He holds a Ph.D. in Learning Technologies from the University of Minnesota.
Brad Hosack is currently the New Media Developer for Academic Technology Services in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota where he collaborates with team members to produce web-based educational software tools to support learning and research at the post-secondary level. Hosack is co-inventor and lead developer of VideoANT, an online video annotation tool designed to engage learners by supporting interactions between students, instructors, and their video content.
Douglas Geers
Douglas Geers is a composer living in New York City and Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is an Assistant Professor of Music Composition and Director of the STRUM Electronic Music Studios at the School of Music of the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities), where he founded and directs the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts. Geers specializes in electro-acoustic and multimedia musical works, including various combinations of live musicians, actors, video, dancers, and computer-generated sounds.
Krista Kennedy
Krista Kennedy is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Writing Studies, where she teaches courses in Internet studies and scientific & technical communication. She has received numerous awards for teaching in digital environments, as well as an IAP Fellowship for her work on authorship in blogs. Her dissertation research compares aspects of authorship and ownership in the 1728 Chambers Cyclopaedia and the English-language Wikipedia.
John Logie
John Logie will provide preliminary reflections on his recent collaborations with the Uptake, a Minnesota-based experiment in citizen-based media that is currently focusing on providing Internet-based alternative accounts of the 2008 election. The Uptake is contributing to a broader movement that is documenting, interpreting, and critiquing U.S. electoral politics without adhering to or honoring the conventions of traditional broadcast media. At root, this demonstration will address the question of how and why a fatigued, poorly-lit professor talking about the South Carolina primary into a laptop webcam sitting on a South Minneapolis kitchen table ended up being (momentarily) one of the top-watched segments of political criticism on YouTube. Further, this demonstration speaks to the emergence of a loosely organized communicative network that is both responding to and satisfying a small but significant demand for alternative approaches to journalism, analysis, and criticism.
Cristina Lopez
Cristina Lopez is an Educational Technology Consultant in the Digital Media Center, OIT. She leads the TEL Seminar series and the Digital Teaching Workshop, and is involved in various projects for which she investigates and writes about the educational potential of emerging technologies. Her poster demonstration “Privacy Online: An Exploration of Perspectives, Definitions, Issues” considers that while privacy is commonly considered to be a right worth protecting, “privacy” is not easy to define and in different contexts (institutional, social, cultural) takes on different denotative and connotative meanings. While online privacy has been a concern since the advent of personal computing, Web 2.0 technologies, characterized by openness, formation of communities and sharing many kinds of information, seem to produce particular anxiety about privacy. Managing privacy becomes an issue as educators and universities consider adopting Web 2.0 technologies, many of which are not created for or managed by educational institutions. Primarily, instructors and the institution are obligated to protect specific rights to privacy under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and may find that virtual environments outside the university aren’t always accommodating. But also, definitions of privacy derived from academic writing and discussions in online communities can provide insight on attitudes about social interaction and the formation of community, two significant elements to consider when creating learning activities that take place online.
Charles Miller
Dr. Charles Miller is a Postdoctoral Associate in Learning Technologies. Through collaboration with faculty in Curriculum and Instruction and Educational Psychology, his work involves bridging the gap between learning, aesthetic design, and research-driven development to generate opportunities for transforming the nature of instruction.
Ali Momeni
Ali Momeni is a faculty member in the new Interdisciplinary Program for Collaborative Arts and the Department of Art. The focus of this project demonstration is the form and function of art in our present day environment. This project is a hands-on study of the practice of making public art as well as a historical and theoretical study of present day public art. Our primary medium is mobile sound and video; the primary dissemination tool is three mobile broast units. Each of these units will be made up of a specially designed bicycle, a generator, a laptop, a powerful projector, a control interface, a generator, a battery-powered sound system, and a laser-pointer-motion-detector combination that allows us to draw on buildings from far away. The mobile units will allow us to project visuals onto our urban environment (walls, buildings, streets, trees) as a way to create a form of ephemeral art. The goal of the project is to facilitate social engagement by students in university and outside communities, to diffuse beauty and to amplify the voices of those without access to means of dissemination of media.
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Utilizing open source and low-cost technologies, co-seminars connect students, faculty, and invited community members between collaborating institutions to co-construct new knowledge, create new meanings, and provide individuals open, intellectual spaces to shape their personal futures. Working from a common starting point, each institution develops its own syllabus, with separate readings, outcomes, etc. –yet collaborating together to ensure each syllabus remains complementary to the others. This approach stimulates not only learning, but also new knowledge production as new ideas are shared, critiqued, and sometimes implemented in cross-cultural contexts.Our operating philosophies are multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary and postdisciplinary in that co-seminars encourage conversations between disciplines, among disciplines and the creation of new disciplines (at the individual level). They are also multicultural, transcultural and postcultural in the recognition and honoring of cultural differences, and strive to build co-constructivist relationships among participants. Our model for engagement embraces open source philosophies, utilizes freely available technologies, and provides a structure for replication elsewhere.During Spring, 2008, in the College of Education and Human Development, we are using co-seminars to link the University of Minnesota, three faculties of Latin American social science (FLACSO-México, FLACSO-Ecuador, FLACSO-Chile), the Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja (Ecuador), Anqing Teachers College (China), Northeast Normal University (China), La Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and thought leaders at SRI International.View a recent presentation on a past co-seminar experience.More information will be posted in time for the symposium at the CE+HD LeapFrog Institute.
Gill Roehrig & Joel Donna
Joel D. Donna, Doctoral Candidate at the University of Minnesota, and Gill Roehrig, associate professor at the University of Minnesota, coordinate the Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics Mentorship Program (STEMMP). It is an online induction and mentoring program for beginning secondary science, mathematics and technology teachers. Funded through the Minnesota Department of Education, STEMMP served over 50 beginning teachers last year. The goal of the program is to increase the retention of highly qualified teachers in the state of Minnesota and to increase novice teacher performance. To combat job dissatisfaction caused by isolation and a lack of support STEMMP utilizes both synchronous and asynchronous technologies to connect novice teachers with content specific mentors. In addition, STEMMP connects these novice teachers to a community of their peers. Activities targeted towards the needs of novice teachers are also provided to help improve problem solving and pedagogical content knowledge. There are both private and public places for discussion on the site where teachers may request help.
Julie Sykes
Julie Sykes is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Minnesota where she specializes in Hispanic Lingusitics, New Media Literacy, and Second Language Acquisition. She also holds a graduate certificate in School Technology Leadership. Julie’s most recent project entails the creation, implementation, and evaluation of the first synthetic immersive environment for learning Spanish pragmatics, Croquelandia (see screenshowts below). Sykes has presented extensively and published various articles on the use of new digital media for language learning and serves as an expert consultant with the New Media Language Education Group.
George Veletsianos
George Veletsianos is a doctoral candidate with the Learning Technologies program at the University of Minnesota. The rise of the 3D web, networked video games, and advanced electronic learning environments has changed the way we “view” the user. Increasingly, users represent themselves as virtual personas that they themselves design. These users play different roles. They are teachers, students, government officials, salespeople, musicians, and even strippers. In a world predicted to involve seamless transitions between “real” and virtual life, how do users design themselves? How should users portray themselves? How do virtual (yet real) individuals interact with each other? How do virtual representations influence people’s interactions? In this demonstration, symposium attendees will explore these and related questions that have to do with digital representations of humans, gaining insight into their own perceptions about embodiment.Simply put, we will ask: What’s in a face? What’s in a body?
