Yesterday was the TLT Symposium at Penn State and I was lucky enough to attend and be on the program committee this year. The symposium is always wonderful and this year the speakers were David Wiley and danah boyd – both fantastic.  It’s so energizing to hear people speak about things that you’re passionate about and watching people becoming excited, getting ideas, and learning from each other is so inspiring. I had two ‘favorite moments’ from the day. My favorite thing yesterday was listening to danah boyd talk about social networks and then getting to meet her afterward.  My second favorite moment was hearing an older professor stand up in a session about ‘friending’ on Facebook between instructors and students and talk about how important it is to him to have those personal connections with his students.

photo by colecamplese

TLT Symposium was a wonderful event, as always. Huge thanks to everyone that worked so hard to pull it all together.

The TLT Symposium is coming up at Penn State and this year’s theme is ‘reimagine’. As we think about education and how things have changed in teaching and learning with technology, we start to reimagine the concepts of teacher/student and what exactly a ‘typical’ classroom is these days.

Leading up to the symposium, we recorded a podcast talking about our theme, the event, and the excitement that’s building.

Listen here!

You may (or may not) have heard that last Wednesday was the official opening of the PSU World Campus island in the virtual world of Second Life. We’re using this space to give our online students their own ‘campus experience’ just like students on Penn State’s other campuses. If you ask undergraduate students the one thing they’ll always remember about Penn State, you’d have trouble finding a student on a physical campus that would mention anything at all about their courses, classwork, or ANGEL. They all mention things like The Diner, the creamery, and football games. The things they take with them from Penn State, are the social/outside the classroom things where they connect and meet other students. Using a virtual space like Second Life gives us a way to provide those sort of experiences for our students, too.

On Wednesday we spent a little over 12 hours meeting with students, colleagues and co-workers in Second Life. There were students from the US, Spain, and France, all ‘meeting’ each other for the first time.  Two of our students actually learned that they live very close to each other in Virginia and had no idea!  It was a wonderful time and really helped the students feel like a part of World Campus and a part of Penn State.  They said things like, “It is incredible the way a student can be involved with this university”, “I think it is an incredible environment ..I can interact with many people that live hundred of kilometers away from me”, and “I’ve been to several colleges over the years (including another major university in Ga Tech) and they always made me feel like just a number even when I was actually living on campus…Penn State feels more like a big extended family”.

The Penn State World Campus space in Second Life is a space for all of us – not just our students.  If we think about our co-workers in extension, located all over the state, or our telecommuters working outside the Outreach Building, or colleagues located all over campus, meeting in Second Life is an incredibly convenient, inexpensive way to connect with each other.  Having a community of Outreach employees, students, and even Penn State alumni having conversations and learning about each other starts to build a community of people that truly care about their experience and about Penn State.

This Wednesday, January 28 we will be hosting the official opening of our Second Life presence at PSU World Campus island in Second Life.  The island will be staffed all day from 8am-5pm Eastern Time so if you’re in Second Life, please stop by and say hello! We’ll have a snazzy World Campus polo shirt for you and you’ll get to spend time exploring our space.

This Friday evening, January 23 we’ll also be hosting a benefit concert at PSU World Campus island in Second Life to raise money for the Penn State Dance Marathon (THON).  Second Life musician, Rich DeSoto will be performing live starting at 8PM Eastern time. Come listen to some fantastic music, dance with us, and help raise money for an amazing cause.

Next Thursday, January 29, our last THON benefit concert in January will be held in Second Life.  Jax Streeter will be performing to help us, once again, raise money for the Penn State Dance Marathon.

Today was the wrap-up of Learning Design Summer Camp here at Penn State and as I sit here now, about a half an hour after the end, I’m starting to reflect on the day. Others have blogged about the day and have talked about the amazing energy that was in the room and I agree (except for that post-lunch slump, but I’ll blame that on the carbs).

One of the people are our lunch discussion mentioned that he was enjoying Summer Camp more than he enjoys the Symposium but he wasn’t sure why. I was thinking about that comment this afternoon and I think I figured out why (for me, at least).

Summer Camp felt like an informational “general session” of a conference, but with the informality and intimacy of a breakout session.

People were participating, sharing experiences, connecting, joining twitter to take part in the ‘backchannel discussion’, voting on questions, submitting questions, taking notes, blogging… all at once, in the same session – BUT… were also participating in a face-to-face environment. All of these things combined really allowed discussion and learning to happen.

This was a large group – we’re not talking 10 people – we’re talking 75-100 people at Summer Camp, but I truly felt like everyone was heard, and that everyone learned something.

Thank you, Allan for taking the lead on this and for allowing the entire community to be a part of the planning, discussion and learning. I am so proud to be a part of things here.

Many huge thanks to Nate Tobey and the great folks at WPSU here at Penn State for taking some video and audio footage I captured and turning it into this great video about our Virtual THON that was held at Penn State and in Second Life in February.

We’ve had some discussion recently among the local twitter community here at Penn State about how many people we all follow on twitter.. and why.  The consensus was that most of us try to follow no more than 100 people and all for the same basic reason… it’s not beneficial. At more than 100 people, conversations begin to become fragmented and you can’t really feel connected to more than that many people.  While this may not be the case for everyone, the majority of the people I’ve spoken with at Penn State feel this way.

It was interesting then, to read this post from ReadWriteWeb today discussing this very thing. An excerpt from the post here:

“Research by Robin Dunbar indicates that 100 to 150 is the approximate natural group size in which everyone can really know everyone else. “Human beings ought to live in groups of around 150 people, judging from the logarithm of our brain size; and sure enough, studies of hunter-gatherer groups, military units, and city dwellers’ address books suggest that 100 to 150 is the natural group size within which people can know just about everyone directly,” writes Jonathan Haidt in the book “The Happiness Hypothesis,” drawing on research by Dunbar.”

The post also discusses the difference between the amount of friends a person might have on Facebook as opposed to twitter and for me there’s a difference.  I feel as though I could have a million ‘friends’ on Facebook and be fine with that because it’s not conversational in the way twitter is.  It’s like the difference between a dinner party and attending a Penn State football game. I’m ok hanging around with thousands of people as long as I don’t really want to get to know all of them. If I want to spend quality time with them.. then I’d prefer the dinner party.

Today’s my post-TLT recovery day and I’m feeling like there’s so much I want to say about it, but I’m having trouble finding the words to express it.

The keynote from the event was delivered by Lawrence Lessig and was something I was really looking forward to. I did not come away disappointed as it was even more than I’d hoped it would be. The one thing that did surprise me, however, was how emotional his words were for me. I’ve found myself overcome with emotions at other times in my job.. typically when I’m trying to express something that I’m very passionate about, and I think my emotions at the keynote yesterday reflected those same things. I could hear and feel the passion in Lessig’s voice as he talked about creativity and expression and how desperately important it is that we truly *rethink* the way we look at things and create policy. I could feel the energy in the room as we all sat there, and I felt it carry through the day as we broke into our sessions and met, learned from and connected with people from all over our university.

If I had to pick one thing that I will take with me from this symposium, it’s the feeling that I now belong to a community that values the same things Lessig spoke about. People that are energized, connected, and wanting to make changes. Many of the people I connected with at the symposium were people I’d never met face-to-face, but had come to know on twitter in the weeks prior to yesterday’s event. Having met this group online, through a social networking tool added such amazing value to the symposium for me because I was immediately welcomed as part of that group when I arrived and I spent the whole day strengthening my ties with that group and connecting with others that I didn’t previously know.

In my first session, we talked about encouraging social networking for our students to allow them to make connections online, outside the classroom. As a social networks adviser, I obviously believe in the power of online connections and I have a little different perspective than a faculty member who’s considering using these tools in the classroom. There was a woman sitting in front of me who truly did not understand how using social networking in her classroom would benefit her students. She also felt that it was rude for us to sit there using twitter and text and chat to connect with others and share what was going on with our session while we were there. She felt it was more important for us to listen and pay attention to the speaker and not use these technologies during the session. It made for some very interesting discussion and that carried throughout the day. I met that same woman again in the afternoon, and she said “So if I were going to sign up for this twitter thing.. how would I go about doing that?”. I laughed, and several people around explained to her how to do that, and we all shared cupcakes and laughter and connected again. I love to think that after a day at TLT, seeing how all of the ‘twitter’ peeps were connected, conversing, and learning.. she felt that perhaps indeed there might be some value to using it. I truly hope to see her on twitter soon. I’d love to connect with her.

Online communities built through social networking are synergistic, powerful, amazing groups that have the power to change lives, policy, and perspectives. Sometimes we just have to build these communities one person at a time.. and that’s fine with me.

This Saturday I’ll be attending the TLT Symposium here at Penn State.  I’ll be presenting a poster on social networking and community building for online students and I’m psyched about meeting so many Penn State colleagues that are doing amazing and interesting things. This isn’t a symposium, it’s a party!