When I came down from the IST Solutions Institute late last year I was interested in creating opportunities to explore technology as it relates to teaching and learning that could be connected with tangible outcomes. One thing I have been working towards is a systematic process that charges a small group with looking at a specific technology to help inform our internal teams as they work with members of our audiences to apply new solutions in and out of our classrooms. The notion of the Hot Team was one that came out of some thinking spurred by the Art of Innovation book put together by the folks at Ideo. The Hot Team concept is actually quite simple — ask people to explore/play/investigate something specific and write up the findings as a white paper.

A while back we did a Hot Team that looked at Pachyderm as an authoring environment, but have had a little trouble getting another one going. Two weeks ago we decided to put a team together to investigate LionShare. LionShare is an open source peer-to-peer tool developed here within Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State under the leadership of Mike Halm. It is a very interesting piece of technology that does so much more than help you securely exchange files. This is P2P in a whole new light. Mike and his team are close to releasing LionShare widely here on campus and we wanted to understand it better to help drive adoption for teaching, learning, and research purposes. The Hot Team will be finished up by June 15th and we’ll be sure to share the findings. How do you encourage/support/promote the notion of investigating and reporting on new uses of technology for teaching and learning purposes?