ETC offerings for the week of March 26th, 2012: Seminars and tech spotlight

This week we had three inter­est­ing events offered by the Edu­ca­tional Tech­nolo­gies Center.

First, in an ETC spot­light on Tues­day, John LeMas­ney gave an overview of Picasa, Google’s image and video cat­a­loging tool. In the ses­sion, John showed users how to metatag, geo­tag, cap­tion, and enhance media items. He went over Picasa’s face recog­ni­tion, moviemak­ing, pub­lish­ing, and album mak­ing fea­tures. Finally, he demon­strated Picasa’s key func­tion­al­ity: search­ing for items in large media cat­a­logs using fil­ters, key­words, and flags. Here’s the entire ses­sion for your review.

On Wednes­day, dur­ing the Lunch & Learn session, Yannis Kevrekidis, Gar­net K.-L. Chan, Curt Hil­le­gas spoke on Prince­ton University’s most recent research com­put­ing activ­i­ties. From the abstract: “Com­pu­ta­tional mod­el­ing and analy­sis con­tin­ues to grow as the third par­a­digm of research along­side exper­i­ment and the­ory. Prince­ton University’s research com­put­ing activ­ity has grown to keep pace with and pro­vide lead­er­ship for this inter­na­tional trend includ­ing fac­ulty across many dis­ci­plines and depart­ments. We will high­light two pro­fes­sors’ work – Pro­fes­sor Gar­net Chan from Chem­istry and Pro­fes­sor Yan­nis Kevrekidis from Chem­i­cal and Bio­log­i­cal Engi­neer­ing – to show how com­pu­ta­tional sci­ence and engi­neer­ing is enabling and accel­er­at­ing sci­en­tific dis­cov­ery. Curt Hil­le­gas, direc­tor of research com­put­ing, will also talk about the cen­tral HPC resources that are avail­able to the Uni­ver­sity com­mu­nity and how to access them.” Here is the ses­sion for your review.

On Thurs­day, dur­ing the Pro­duc­tive Scholar ses­sion, Shaun Hol­land and Sean Piotrowski talked about using gam­ing to engage stu­dents in the class­room. They pre­sented the idea that games and ser­vices like Foursquare, Minecraft, and Por­tal pro­vide good exam­ples of col­lab­o­ra­tive engage­ment that can be applied to the class­room because these games appeal to an aver­age student’s sense of achieve­ment, com­pe­ti­tion, and chal­lenge. This pre­sen­ta­tion demon­strated some pop­u­lar forms of gam­i­fi­ca­tion in higher edu­ca­tion and real world exam­ples to apply to one’s teach­ing. Here’s the entire ses­sion for your review.