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10/23 Tech Tips Newsletter Click here & Scroll Down!

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to the autumn season. As we prepare for the shorter days and longer nights ahead, I hope this message finds you and yours warm and safe. Keep reading to learn about:

  • Canvas Reminder Tip: iSchool Faculty Site
  • Zoom Recordings & Panopto Reminder
  • Immersive learning trends, AI news, professional development opportunities, and more!

As always, you can reference the Tech Tips blog for previous issues. I would also encourage you to email me your best tech or pedagogy tips to share in an upcoming issue.

Bethany Winslow, Director of Online Learning

"If Everything Around You Seems Dark, Look Again, You May Be The Light."

Canvas Tip: iSchool Faculty Site

This is just a reminder that you should be enrolled in the iSchool Faculty Site in Canvas. If you cannot access that link, email bethany.winslow@sjsu.edu with the subject line - ENROLL ME IN FACULTY SITE.

Keep that course site bookmarked as a favorite in Canvas so you have easy access to it when you need it. (*Star* the course as one of your favorites, from the All Courses option in the global left hand menu of Canvas, and it will display on the Dashboard.) What will you find there? For starters, the restricted materials login is always kept updated in there. You’ll also find an archive of all past T3 session recordings and slide decks. There are also some other materials organized by modules, check it out!

Zoom Recordings & Panopto Reminder

This is just a quick reminder that your Zoom recordings are now automatically saved to the SJSU Panopto instance, and they are deleted from your Zoom account within a month of recording. Please make sure to get into the habit of immediately migrating any Zoom session recordings from the SJSU Instance to the iSchool’s Instance. The link below goes to the tutorial previously shared with all faculty. It’s not a difficult process, but the iSchool policy is that all videos must be stored on our instance of Panopto.

NOTE: The tutorial was just updated with a little workaround from directly within your Zoom account.

Immersive Learning Trends

I wanted to give you an update on trends in learning in immersive environments because I see so many great examples with different institutions, educators, and disciplines. For example, over the summer I attended several meetups with a bunch of educators in the Educause Connect Extended Reality (XR) group that meets monthly for a show & tell on whatever space that educator or institution is using. I also attended several of the summer series meetups hosted by Mozilla with a bunch of different educators that are using Hubs with their students. (Seriously you guys... I have way more stories and examples than I can possible share with you each month!)

There is no one single best platform, and since most people actually don’t own VR headsets, most of the use cases in education are actually happening on desktop, and it's all happening right now. Why wait? Why not explore these spaces and learn how you could use them with your students? Below are just a couple different examples.

iSchool Faculty: Real Example of a Virtual Reality Classroom

My avatar in a student built room on radiology technology

First, check out what iSchool faculty and MLIS alumna Dr. Marie Vans is doing with her students at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. Marie runs the virtual and physical VR labs, but she’s also got a really amazing classroom on Spatial connected to a bunch of different VR rooms that her students create for her "AR/VR Environmental Realism for Systems Engineering" course. While there are exceptions, most of her students don't come with any VR experience. The ability to create rich learning environments just keeps getting easier, however, and with increasingly robust features. See pictures of the Center for Immersive Scholarship (CIS) Lab, the digital twin version of it, and read more her university's news article linked below, and check out the little fly through video.

iSchool Hubs: Banned & Controversial Immersive Book Talk

Our own MLIS student have created some incredible rooms!

In honor of Banned Books week, the iSchool’s Hubs team is hosting an immersive book talk featuring five MLIS students giving us a tour of the Hubs rooms they built for our Banned & Controversial Gallery. I am so inspired by the creativity of our own students! The event will be in-world, but also held on Zoom allowing multiple ways to interact with presenters and contribute to the conversation. Maybe you've seen the iSchool alert on this. The event is Wednesday October 4th from 6-7pm Pacific. (We'll post a video afterwards.)

Wagner James Au Book Talk in Second Life

VWEC Expert Series with Wagner James Au

A couple of us attended Au's presentation about his excellent new primer of a book Making a Metaverse That Matters: From Snow Crash & Second Life to A Virtual World Worth Fighting For. Again, I am always so happy to meet iSchool students who have been exploring virtual worlds like Second Life on their own. I'm just as happy to meet other students at other institutions. The chances to mingle and talk with other educators, librarians, etc., before and after events like this in-world are one of my favorite parts of being involved in virtual world communities. You can watch the video of the event here.

UMGC VR Initiative: Report Success in First Year Findings

The University of Maryland Global Campus started piloting the use of virtual reality and have been reporting very positive findings. It looks like they've created a digital twin with VictoryXR. (Actually, everything looks suspiciously just like EngageVR. I suspect the two companies may be connected. It's not browser based, but EngageVR is easy enough to use. Either way, these are just two of what seems like a gazillion vendors eager to get a piece of the education and VR pie.) Read what the faculty members had to say about the pilot. Their newsletter is linked below.

AI Research & Studies

I can't let a newsletter go by without sharing something on AI. Maybe you’re already subscribed to Ethan’s blog, but what caught my eye here was the specifics on how AI is quickly shaping the future of work. This topic is top of mind because I just attended a Coursera summit, and this was well covered by global educational leaders over those two days. I’m sharing Ethan’s article debrief about the paper he co-wrote with other social scientists in partnership with Boston Consulting Group. But I’ve linked to the full study below that.

In a nutshell, AI helps high level knowledge workers to produce better quality output, faster, across multiple realistic tasks than those not using AI. And those who were trained on how to use AI did the best.

Professional Development

T3: AI in the Classroom

Don’t miss this upcoming T3 brought to you by iSchool faculty Vic Ghosh, Norm Mooradian, Gerals Benoit, and Johanna Tunon. They’ll be discussing many of the questions and concerns faculty often have around the use of generative AI.

Remember, T3 Sessions are offered every semester. Review the schedule, and RSVP from the T3 Sessions webpage. You can also check out an archive of all recorded sessions in the iSchool Faculty Canvas course. Look for the module titled T3 Sessions and Archive. Email alman.sjsu@gmail.com with any questions about T3 Sessions.

eCampus Workshops

SJSU’s eCampus offers workshops year round. Click the links to access details and registration. Workshops are offered with multiple dates to choose from.

See the full list of upcoming eCampus workshops. Note that workshop dates are listed at the bottom of each image on the page. You can also request to watch a recording of an eCampus workshop.