Month: March 2006

Content Production and Finding Time

/ Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

As we are moving towards the end of our fiscal year — at PSU we roll over on July 1 — I am thinking more and more about what we’ll be focusing our energy on in the coming year or so. Being part of a new organization for the first time in a long time makes you step back and think a heck of a lot more. My biggest problem is finding time to act on those thoughts. Most of my days are spent in meetings, putting out fires, and all the other stuff that is part of being a higher education administrator. One of the things I have been thinking a lot about lately without much action is creating both a place to hold content and a strategy for producing quality content.

There are about 35 people or so in my group … a big mix of instructional designers, media developers, programmers, tech support, and marketing people. At the end of the day, what we are talking about is a very smart and diverse group of individuals all thinking about teaching and learning with technology. I am struck with the fact that they are in the same boat I am in when it comes to acting on their thoughts — they are all swamped with stuff that keeps them from doing the next big thing. I am working very hard at coming up with a plan that gives them time in their days to explore new thoughts and act on them. I am very interested in us producing evidence of our own research … I want us to be able to share more. So, how do we share more:

  • Presentations
  • One on one meetings with faculty
  • Seminars
  • Articles
  • Papers
  • Other stuff?

We can produce content but we don’t have a place to put it … for an organization that does a great deal of its work on the web, we don’t really have integrated web presence. That concerns me. I have been talking about a new model for our unit’s web space — I am calling it “exposing the intelligence of the organization.” What that means is in addition to the standard stuff that makes up web spaces — products, services, about, etc … — I want to add blogs for all staff members that help build the other stuff. Confusing. Here’s an example … my blog would not only list my posts, but also all the projects I work on. As I would post to my blog, the categories would tie my post to the project page. So if I am on the Breeze project and I make a post about Breeze at my blog, the Breeze project page would get updated with some of my content. It seems like a way to pull the smart people out into the public’s view. To me providing exposure to the group is as important as just talking about our products and services.

To this end, I’d like to ask people to be part of a content creation cycle … every month I would like to see each staff member being responsible for creating a piece of content — a lesson plan, a how-to, a review, a podcast, a movie, or whatever. I just would love to see us creating content from our knowledge … imaging 35 people producing content every month! Imagine how rich the content space could be — especially if it were all tagged and easily searchable. Would be interesting.

So this week I hope to begin writing the specifications for the new web space to support all this. I’ll also be talking with my leadership team about how we go about implementing the content creation process … we’ll also be talking about how we can carve out time so the smart people around us can have some time in their days to be innovative and creative in the context of their jobs. The real challenge is acting on the thoughts.

Mac OS X is Five and I’m Pert Near 34

/ Cole Camplese / 4 Comments

I am finally catching up a bit here … traveling for a week — with most of it spent without dedicated access or time to act on items has pushed my ability to engage in anything but work and family to edges of my capabilities. Finally a weekend; an end to a week that beat me up hard — I am still recovering from the worst jet lag I have ever dealt with, dealing with a cold, pulling my schedule out of hell at work, and fighting my way through the start of a heavy duty allergy season. Sorry to bitch … I don’t mean to.

I just came across a great read over at Ars Technica titled, “Five years of Mac OS X.” Most of the four people who read this blog know I am a Mac nut from way back — to the beginning actually. If I had a scanner I’d post a flat out hilarious picture of myself sitting in my old room on East Street in Bloomsburg with my feet up on my desk wearing a cheesy thin “Huey Lewis and the News” style tie, and an even cheesier pre-teen mustache at my trusty Mac 128K that I had gotten for my 12th birthday … Fast forward and here I sit, feet up at my desk with a MacBook Pro on the verge of my 34th Birthday 22 years later still loving every second of it. When I got that Mac, my Dad told me it was a fad and I know he felt is was a waste of money at the time. Well, no judgments here, but I do have a good job that centers around the use of technology — and let me tell you that when I was growing up, the thought that I might actually amount to anything more than a trash guy was starting to look like a long shot.

At any rate, looking back at the article made me realize that I’ve been through one amazing journey being a part of the space I live and work in. When I first put my hands on technology up at Old Science Hall at Bloomsburg State College (now Bloomsburg University) I was in one of the rat labs in the Psych Department. I’d go up and bug my Dad while he was working and would roam around and use the computers — these were pre-Macintosh days, but just seeing those things do stuff amazed me. One of my Dad’s friends, Alex ran the lab and would let me use the machines … he showed me how to write a couple of lines of code … you know the whole goto 10 and print your name over and over again on the screen kind of stuff. I was hooked. I had no idea, even into High School, that there were fields like Computer Science but I was hooked.

As I sit here thinking about the technological milestones that have occurred in my life I can’t help but be amazed. The enabling concepts associated with the information society — always on access, amazing advances in health care, unparalleled access to information, and on and on — make me feel like we are part of a time that will be difficult to recreate. At any rate, Happy Birthday Mac OSX and a week and half, Apple … and I’ll say it, Happy Birthday to me! Oh, and thanks Mom and Dad for wasting all that money on a silly “toy” computer that created my career all the way back in 1984 … I sort of get that commercial now, “you’ll see why 1984, won’t be like 1984.”

How did it start for you?

Back in State College

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Travel … it takes it out of you, that’s for sure. I spent all week last week on the west coast meeting with Apple and then Odeo. It was fun, interesting, and informative. I’ll post a full on report as time permits. When I travel, I get punished upon return with stacked up meetings. Heading towards the weekend that is how things look … crazy busy and really stacked up.

Teaching and Learning Symposium at Penn State

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We are in the final planning stages for the Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology that is scheduled for April 8th here on our University Park campus. This year we are doing some new things — not new to the rest of the world, just to Penn State. For one thing, we are skipping the traditional web site and running the Symposium from a WordPress powered blog space. Amazing how quickly and easily all that comes together! I have also found that giving people on campus a new view of a blog has been an ah-ha moment of sorts.

We are also releasing podcasts once a week leading up to the event (iTunes link). These are produced by the staff at Studio 204. Studio 204 is another piece to Edication Technology Serivces that focuses attention on providing PSU students with a digital video and audio production space. It has a studio and a seperate video/audio production room. The podcasts are built around the themes for the Symposium and are conducted in the student union on campus. Kind of cool to hear the students’ voices. This is another one of those ah-ha moments for people … I get asked about podcasting all the time on campus and this is just a great way to really show people what we are talking about.

We have recruited about 20 bloggers for the event, so that each session has a set of notes/thoughts instantly available. We’ll also be blogging the “birds of a feather” lunchtime discussions. All of it will wrap up with an invitiation to attend a new monthly brown bag event related to Teaching Innovations on our campus. All in all I am really looking forward to the event — I am really excited by the idea of including the technologies we are constantly talking about and exposing it to our guests.

Airports

/ Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

On a recent trip to Chicago I saw the best icons ever.  Not that a McDonald’s icon is that big of a deal, but when placed right next to a martini icon it just seems to work.  Guess which direction I headed in?

Best. Icons. Ever
Best. Icons. Ever

A Little Competition …

/ Cole Camplese / 4 Comments

Last Summer during the now defunct PA Governor’s School for Information Technology I used a little bit of custom code on my Drupal powered site … I was teaching pieces of Information, People, and Technology to a group of very smart high school kids.  I always put students in teams and make them compete against each other to solve a large real world challenge.  In and of itself, this is usually enough to get the kids really motivated.  During the Gov School I decided to put every single point into play as part of the competition, so we created a module for Drupal that we called the Leader Board.  It was essentially a dynamic point calculator that kept track of who was in first, second, third, and on … it also worked like a golf leader board in that the leader was zero points back, the second place could have been five points back, and so on.  It was interesting to see how much more energy they seemed to put into the class just to see their teams climb the Leader Board.  It was interesting and very cool to listen to hall chatter, “we are in first place” during the 5 week program.

PGSIT Leader Board

I used it again last fall with my IST class and it seemed to work there as well.  I am not using Drupal this semester as I am engaged in some formal research related to the use of WordPress for teaching so I can’t plug it in.  This is where things get even more interesting for me … in my new role as director of education technology services at the University, one of the first things I wanted was a place where the entire teaching and learning with technology group at PSU could contribute in a protected area.  What I wanted was an Intranet … one of my colleagues created a Drupal space that has become the center of communication almost overnight.  The space is heavily used … what the hell does this have to do with the first paragraph you might ask?

So when the site was developed he put a little piece of custom code at the top that pulls out the top contributors and commenters.  I have fallen victim of my own motivational tricks!  I can’t tell you how much seeing my name in second or third place on that bugs me — in other words, it somehow drives me to participate.  I doubt everyone feels that way, but I am intensely competitive and this little constant reminder pulls at me to write, contribute, comment, and be a more active member of this community.  This stuff has been going on for a long time, it is just interesting that when the tricks we use to help motivate students get pushed back at us.  Take a peek:

TLT Leader Board

I Have Been Busy …

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But at the end of the day that isn’t much of an excuse … who isn’t? But I am using it. Things have been nuts.

Either way, I was just running through my feeds this morning and I came across something I found sort of funny at Mac News World … Podcasting in 8 Easy Steps. What I find funny about it is that 8 steps is about 6 too many for mere mortals to really get into podcasting (granted they count things like “click the icon in the dock” as a step). I podcast in something like four steps and I think that is too many. My general process includes:

  1. Recording (in GarageBand)
  2. Editing (in GarageBand)
  3. Encoding (in GarageBand)
  4. Sharing (From my Blog)

What I am working towards is something that allows people to record, publish, and walk away. That is the solution we are building towards. we are writing a podcasting application that allows you to simple press record, pause/stop, enter a little meta data, and publish. That all happens as a background process via an XMLRPC hook. So, at the end of the day I am after two steps … Record and Publish. That will help the whole podcasting for edu thing a bit.

The same on the student end … I love the whole phone to blog thing that Odeo seems to be doing so well. But I am also interested in making a tool set available that students can use to record quick podcasts that publish into their personal webspaces — complete with the feed.

We are so close to solving both of those. I’ll be talking about what it all really does soon enough … for now, I am going to try and be less busy.