Digital Commons at Penn State

The Sparky Awards is an international student video contest created by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), an international alliance of academic and research libraries. The contest requires students to create a two-minute video based on this year's theme of "the value of information sharing." This year, Penn State is proud to be one of several universities hosting this contest. The Sparky Awards at Penn State is a collaboration between Digital Commons (a service of Information Technology Services, the University Libraries, the College of Communications, and Penn State Public Broadcasting (WPSU). Prizes from SPARC include $1,000 for the winner and two $500 runner-up prizes. In addition to prizes offered by SPARC, the top Penn State student entrants will be featured on WPSU's On-Demand channel, will receive gift certificates from the Computer Store, and will have the opportunity to be featured in the annual Student Film Festival hosted by the College of Communications. The deadline for submissions is December 6, 2009.

Thousands of high-quality video tutorials on hundreds of IT topics are now available at no cost to Penn State faculty, staff, and students through a license agreement with lynda.com, Inc., an industry leader in software training. To help ease current and potential resource burdens for Penn State faculty, staff, and students in challenging economic times, Information Technology Services has secured a University-wide site license for these tutorials, which are broken down into manageable segments to accommodate busy schedules. Topics include Microsoft Office applications, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, SQL, Drupal, audio and video editing applications, ColdFusion, operating systems, and hundreds more. These tutorials are taught by industry experts and available 24/7 for convenient, self-paced learning. In order to access the tutorials at no cost, go to http://its.psu.edu/training/lynda/, where other service requirements, as well as the dedicated link for the Penn State community, are posted.

From http://centerforsocialmedia.org/resources/online_video:

From http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/white-papers/hot-team-grassroots-video/:

From: http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/faculty-fellow/cahoy-to-join-ets-as-faculty-fellow/

ETS is thrilled to announce that this Summer Ellysa Stern Cahoy, Assistant Head of Library Learning Services in the Penn State University Libraries, will join ETS as a Faculty Fellow. During her time as a Fellow, she will be exploring the topic of digital literacy acquisition in-depth and developing instructional solutions in collaboration with TLT/ETS staff expert in online content creation, including Digital Commons staff. You can learn more about her and her Fellowship by visiting her Fellowship page. We are all thrilled to have her spending time with us this Summer and we know it will lead to some very interesting outcomes.

Faculty Fellows engage with ETS to integrate technology within emerging educational projects that can be shared and implemented widely throughout Penn State. To be considered for a Fellowship please visit our Faculty Fellowship page.

On Friday and Saturday, November 7th-8th at Penn State Schuylkill campus, Teaching and Learning with Technology will be hosting the Digital Commons Tailgate, the first of a series of community-designed unconferences* aimed at exploring all aspects of digital media in teaching and learning. Topics include (but are certainly not limited to) ePortfolio, digital literacy, and design and assessment of multimedia projects, and will delve into both pedagogy and technology. Sessions will be driven by attendees and everyone's expertise will enrich the conversation. Our goal will be to collectively develop a series of best practices which will inform how we all use digital media in the classroom.

If you were able to attend the Learning Design Summer Camp this August, you'll be familiar with how this event will be run. Creativity and conversation are paramount, and the mood is intended to be relaxed but intellectually stimulating. Since this is a Fall weekend we're going with a Tailgate theme, so expect lots of good food, and dress appropriately (i.e. however you want!).

You are invited to attended this free two-day event starting with an optional day of workshops and dinner on Friday November 7th, with the main conference sessions on Saturday November 8th.

You are also invited to help design the conference! Check out the wiki at: http://ets.tlt.psu.edu/wiki/Digital_Commons_Tailgate. Anyone with a PSU access account can edit this. So if you have an idea for a session, or you want to expand on what's already been suggested, just hit the [edit] button.

Please pass this invitation along to any faculty who may be interested in this opportunity!

To register, simply jump to the Registration section of the wiki and add your name to the list.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me directly.

* Unconference @ Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconference

This is a presentation by Dr. Matt Jackson from the College of Communication during the 2008 Learning Design Summer Camp.