From the IDEA Studio

iTunesU Specialist – immediate opening, 20 hours weekly, student position (can be GRA status for graduate students), funded for Summer 2012 only

Job Description:

This student will work with IDEA Studio staff and faculty in the College of Education to design, prepare and post content for inclusion on The University of Texas at Austin’s iTunesU site. The podcasts will also be prepared for posting to blogs, websites, and Blackboard. No prior experience with iTunesU is required, but the student will need to be proficient at working with media files and have a strong understanding of the fundamental principals of instructional design.

Qualifications:

• highly proficient with the Apple OS X operating system
• ability to acquire technical skills quickly
• academic background in educational technologies and instructional design
• excellent written and spoken communication skills
• experience with audio and video editing
• teaching experience preferred

Mobile Learning Portal Researcher/Editor – immediate opening, 20 hour graduate research assistant, funding for summer 2012 only

The IDEA Studio (http://www.edb.utexas.edu/ideastudio/) is looking for summer help adding and organizing content to our online portal devoted to mobile learning. The ideal candidate needs to have some familiarity with the use of technology in teaching and learning, but even more importantly, he or she needs to be able to scan the existing literature and online resources to evaluate useful information, organize it by category within an existing structure, and summarize the information for easy access by researchers, educators, administrators, parents, and other interested parties. The online portal, located at http://www.mobilelearningportal.org, utilizes a content management system, so programming experience is not necessary, but comfort in using Web 2.0 technologies (e.g. blogs, wikis, etc.) for adding content to the site is preferred.

Qualifications:
- excellent research and written skills
- academic background in learning technologies

Preferred:
- doctoral student in Learning Technologies or Educational Psychology
- background in mobile teaching and learning
- K-12 teaching experience

To apply, send a letter of interest and a resume to kdfrench [at] austin.utexas.edu.

Educational Technology Trainer (GRA) – immediate opening, 20 hours weekly, GRA position, funded on an ongoing basis

The educational technology trainer will consult with and provide technical support to faculty members to help them incorporate technology in their teaching and will plan, design, and conduct training sessions with undergraduate and graduate students on a variety of technologies for teaching, including: Google Apps for Education (Docs, GMail, Groups, and Sites), video editing (iMovie), blogging (WordPress), web design, wikis (Mediawiki), and the Mac OS X operating system.

Job Responsibilities:
- consult with faculty on effective technology integration for teaching and research purposes
- provide face-to-face, email, and phone technical support to faculty members on a variety of technical issues (predominantly relating to programs running on the Mac OS X platform)
- plan, design, and conduct training sessions with undergraduate and graduate students on a variety of technologies
- create training materials (e.g. handouts) and tutorials on a variety of educational technology topics
- research emergent technologies and critically evaluate their benefits in educational settings

Qualifications:
- experience in related teaching contexts (K-12 experience preferred)
- broad knowledge of a variety of technologies in education (e.g. blogs, wikis, websites, video editing software, etc.) and the ability to rapidly learn new ones
- understanding of and ability to articulate and explain theories surrounding technology integration in education
- high degree of comfort using Apple computers
- excellent written and spoken communication skills
- experience working with pre-service teachers and higher education faculty a plus
- focused technical and design knowledge (e.g. HTML/CSS, web development, video production, etc.) a plus

To apply, send a letter of interest and resume to kdfrench [at] austin.utexas.edu

Web Applications Specialist – immediate opening, 20 hours weekly, student position (can be GRA status for graduate students), funded on an ongoing basis

The student technician will design and maintain websites and select web-based instructional and communication tools utilized by the College of Education’s faculty technology integration support group. The student technician will also provide face-to-face, phone, and email-based support to faculty and students using these applications.

Job Responsibilities:
- maintaining open source web applications for faculty and classes in the College, including: installation, upgrades, troubleshooting, user management, security, and other admin duties
- providing technical support to faculty and students utilizing these applications
- working closely with the Learning Technology Center’s database/security administrator to ensure that information on these sites remains secure
- maintaining the IDEA Studio section on the Learning Technology Center‘s website
- investigating new tools that have been identified by the IDEA Studio as promising for use in educational settings
- explaining technical issues to non-technical administrative and support staff
- when called upon, assisting faculty with various web, image, and video manipulation tasks and Apple OS X related issues
- documenting project progression on IDEA Studio wiki

Qualifications:
- experience designing and maintaining websites (HTML/CSS)
- web programming/scripting experience or the ability to quickly adapt experiences from other programming/database platforms (we work primarily on LAMP servers with PHP/MySQL/Javascript, but Ruby is a plus)
- knowledge of Web 2.0 applications, such as CMSs, blogs, wikis, etc.
- high degree of comfort using Apple computers
- excellent written and spoken communication skills
- experience with video editing and compression is a plus
- experience with Adobe Creative Suite (e.g. Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, etc.) is a plus
- experience administering Web 2.0 applications is a plus
- any expertise with these particular apps is a plus: Drupal, WordPress, Mediawiki,  and LimeSurvey

To apply, send a letter of interest and resume to kdfrench [at] austin.utexas.edu

Are you (or do you know) a graduate student at UT Austin who is looking for a really exciting summer job? The IDEA Studio has a number of positions available for Summer 2012. To be eligible to apply, you must be a current student at UT Austin – the individual job descriptions indicate those positions which are open to graduate students only. To apply for a job, please email the IDEA Studio coordinator with a letter of interest and resume.

Web Applications Specialist

Educational Technology Trainer (graduate students only)

Mobile Application Developer (description coming soon)

Mobile Learning Portal researcher/content editor (graduate students only)

iTunesU content developer/project assistant

Click here to see Carl’s presentation.

Presenters:

• Karen French
• Chad Fulton
• Royce Kimmons (backchannel facilitator)

For contact information, email us at:

ideastudio@austin.utexas.edu

Or visit:

http://www.edb.utexas.edu/education/centers/ltc/fac_staff/idea/ 

Copied from my personal blog…

Michelle Read's New Facebook Timeline Screenshot

Trying the new Facebook Timeline today. I have to say that as much as I dreaded it, I rather like it. But it is also a time to reflect–especially to reflect about what you want others to know about you and about posts you may have made years ago.  I’ll talk more about that in a bit…

In reading others’ blogs and comments, it appears that some don’t like the layout, but if you think of it in terms of a timeline as it is intended, it makes sense. The timeline itself runs down the middle of the page, with events, status updates, etc. positioned throughout. Right now, Facebook is letting you initiate it and then play with it for 7 days before publishing. Or, if you are ready you can “Publish Now.” Warning! You can’t go back to the regular layout. Here’s a screen shot to give you an idea of what mine looks like.

You can get Timeline by logging into Facebook and searching for “Introducing Timeline.”  Then choose “Get Timeline.” Facebook provides a Tour, which you can replay by pressing the “Restart Tour” button that shows you what the elements of the page are and what you can do with it. Essentially, the timeline goes backwards from present day to your birthday, if you are so inclined.

Three pods appeared fixed at the top: A quick update pod, your “Friends” pod and “Recent Activity” pod. I did wonder initially why there appeared to be two areas for friends. One appears in the timeline and shows all your friends (rotating their images and providing a link, like before to see all of them).  The o ther appears in your basic information area.  This smaller widget seems to show (from the viewpoint of someone else) any friends you have in common, as a number is displayed.  Below these, the pods are directly tied to the timeline and you can change their position by editing the date. In each pod are a star button and a pencil button.

For updates made directly in Facebook, you can change the date and location. You can also “Hide” this pod from the Timeline and “Delete Post” all together. If you simply “Hide” the post, it will still show up in your activity log, which only you can access anyway. For shares made at external sites, you don’t seem to currently have the ability to change the date.; however, you can “Hide from the Timeline” and “Unlike.” With the star button, you can make one of your status updates, likes, shares, or life events a “Feature” meaning it will enlarge and cross the timeline bar rather than sitting on one side or the other.

A still easy feature is adding a status update. In the same area you can add a photo, place or now a life event. Nifty for adding things to your timeline that doesn’t show—likely because it happened before you got on Facebook! Most of the Life Event categories is prefilled with background info you already provided. However specific events are included in each category such as “New Child,” “New Pet,” or “Loss of a Love One“ under “Family and Relationships.” What is really cool is that you can click on the timeline itself to add a status, photo, place or life event. A smaller bar, sans pods, appears on the right of the screen and shows the years for which things have been dated in your timeline. You can easily navigate to that time by clicking on it. If you’ve hidden your birth year, it simply shows “Born.” ☺

It is a good time to talk about the things one will need to consider with these changes. Of course, privacy is always a concern. Make sure you check out your privacy settings to make sure you are happy with who can search you and see your contact info (these are combined at present—should be separate, I think), who can post to your wall, who can see post made by others on your wall, default status privacy from external apps, tag control, apps, etc. Additionally, it is now rather easy for someone to see what you posted several years ago. You should peruse your own timeline before publishing to make sure you are still happy with all of your posts. What I don’t readily see, that used to simply appear in the old left column under Friends, is a pod for Family. Perhaps I’m just missing it. You can look for it by clicking the “About” button.

Overall, I’m happy.  I’m sure more changes are forthcoming. Meanwhile, I went ahead and published mine.

1. Click to open the page that you can create the College of Education Qualtrics site.
2. To create an account, please click “Please click here to create an account” under the comment box that you need to type your user name.
   
3.   Type your UT Mail account. The system allows you to use ONLY UT mail account, so in case you don’t have it, please create on HERE.
   Type your password and then you can start to use Qualtrics Service.

Jaejin collected a set of Qualtrics-related web resources for College of Ed faculty and students to use in building Qualtrics surveys. Good stuff! – Karen

Qualtrics University is offering a series of trainings according to the following 5 topics: 1) Basic Building, 2) Advanced Building, 3) Distributing, 4) Reporting, and 5) A-Z.

1) Basic Building

2) Advanced Building

3) Distributing

4) Reporting

5) A-Z : Qualtrics online Index

Extra resources

• Free Qualtrics manual
• More information for programming
• New at the Q: reporting and research trend