Getting Ready for Max

We’re getting the nursery together for the arrival of our second child, Max Wilson Camplese. Kristin is due in early September … should be quite an interesting twist here in our house. We’ve gotten his room almost completely ready for him … just a couple more touches and we’ll be good to go! We hired an amazingly talented artist to come in and do a little custom work on his room — an interesting twist to the story is that Kristin selected her because she had a very complete ePortfolio from PSU. We let Madeline pick his name and the theme from the room came from a trip to see the Curious George movie that she and I took a few months back. Everyone in our house is excited and terrified!

While I am on the subject, I thought I’d share something we discovered/realized today. When we first moved into our house five years ago we noticed a bird’s nest with little eggs in it in the tree in the front of our house. When we moved in we didn’t know that Kristin was pregnant with Madeline, but had been trying for quite some time to have a child … we took that little nest as a sign that this house would be the place for our family to start and grow. When we did find out Kristin was pregnant, we put the nursery in the room right above the tree where we had discovered the nest. This morning, we were sitting in the dining room having breakfast when we noticed a bird’s nest right outside the window with three tiny birds being fed by their mother … guess where it is? Yep, right under Max’s new room. Strange but wonderful.

Here’s a little glimpse into Max’s room … clicking the picture should jump you over to a set of pictures at flickr:

Controlling Time

Now this is a very interesting little secret … Going through my feeds this morning and I ran into a pointer via Alan Levine to a feature of Odeo that I hadn’t seen before … the ability to link directly to a specific portion of an audio file. Think of those possibilities for faculty and students! If you need to focus attention on a specific portion of an audio clip now you can do it.

I took a podcast from the Podcasts at Penn State site and simply linked it into my Odeo account (I didn’t upload it, I just pointed the player at the original file), published it as an Odeo podcast, grabbed the URL, and added the necessary components to tell the player where to being and end. The resulting Odeo link looks like this (with the stuff needed to play the quotes in bold):

http://odeo.com/audio/1583023/play/quote/4:10/4:50

FaceBook in Class

My good friend Brian Smith is going to try something a little different this semester — coordinate his course via FaceBook instead of PSU’s CMS, ANGEL. I am very interested in how this is going to shake down. Brian says he’ll be posting his thoughts during the semester over at his site. This could be interesting.

The Casual Podcaster

For some reason I felt like firing up GarageBand on Thursday and creating a podcast.  Since I am stuck in PSU Podcasting Project Land I thought that would be a good topic to discuss.  I know it is probably becoming a very tiring topic for most people around me, my head is planted squarely in the middle of it all and there are times I need to get some of it out.

Even though I have the pleasure of working and talking with Chris Millet everyday, I thought having Chris join me via iChat AV would be a good idea.  Chris has been visiting all the people at Penn State who are interested in podcasting the last four weeks or so and is really starting to get the lay of the land.

In this podcast, we discuss all sorts of stuff in 20 minutes … topics run from the training he and Tim Perry are designing, to tools, to project goals, and more.  The thing that turned me on the most was Chris’ statement about wanting to create opportunities to enable the “casual podcaster.” What I loved about Chris’ comment was that his expectations are all about this being so easy that faculty, staff, and students can create digital content without thinking about the technology or the approach. You know, real digital expression. He wants it to be like when you currently want to say something in a digital sense, you click on Word and write it … this thought is about being able to capture the moment in a digital, first person sense and share it instantly. Just goes along with all the things Chris and I have been discussing for a number of years in this space.

At any rate, it may be worth a listen. Direct link to the 14 MB podcast.

Planning to Plan

For those of you have been around this blog for a while (I can see all four of you out there!), you know that I was/am part of the original Apple Digital Campus group. Back in the day, Apple invited five Universities to help them think about what the digital campus environment might look like in the coming years. All five of us brought a very interesting perspective to the party and we had a great time figuring out what we did, why Apple selected us, and how we could help one of the most creative and educationally grounded companies on the planet think about the higher education landscape.

One of the things we decided to do are the ADC Leadership Institutes. I have gone to two of them over the last few years … the first, and my favorite so far, was put on by the people at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism (I did the wrap-up talk)… the second, was at Harvard where I was just a participant and spent the week with Kyle Peck thinking about what our event was to look like.

We’ve been trying for over a year to organize one here at Penn State. With two false starts we are close to finding a date that will actually work. We are thinking early March instead of the November date we’ve been working towards. Today, I was lucky enough to go offsite with three of the smartest people I get to hang around with (Kyle Peck, Carla Zembal-Saul, and Scott McDonalad … BTW, when are they going to start blogging?) — all of them are in the College of Education and all three share a real passion for teaching, teachers, and innovation.

We had scheduled this meeting before our planning committee decided to focus on March, so there wasn’t as much of a sense of urgency — just an opportunity for an informal planning session. We didn’t get the whole thing worked out, but there was a block of about 30 minutes or so where we went off on a real directed brainstorming session … I think the foundation for our event was in there.

It isn’t completely clear to me, but if we can somehow focus on the notion of transforming the higher education landscape so that we urge people to balance the needs/expectations of students with an instructor’s educational goals we’ll be successful. We want to expose people to all sorts of interesting things without making the whole thing solely about emerging technologies … you know, try to also emphasize there are really good things we should be doing in our classrooms and that the right technology choices can help us get there.

I am thinking/hoping we’ll be planning our event in the open — either here at this site, or at another open space. I’d like for a community to develop around this thing so that we can get closer to hitting the mark. Any ideas and thoughts to share?

Net Neutrality III

Yes, it does appear as though I get all my news from the Daily Show. That would be ridiculous … the “real” news is on sometimes when I am out to dinner and I can read the crawl from across the room. At any rate, here is yet another wonderful piece about Net Neutrality on the Daily Show. Wonderful explanation, actually.

Back to Blogging at a Big University

Even as I am neck deep in a podcasting and iTunes U implementation here at PSU, I am gearing up for the next BIG project for us. That project is figuring out how to create a platform can support all sorts of web-based content production — I had written a post about when is a blog not a blog that seemed to get quite a few people thinking and talking here at my campus and beyond. The big thing that we have started to really explore and explain is that the tools that support this whole blogging thing really have the power to support a lot of what is going on on our campuses. Let’s see, ePortfolios? Yep. Blogs? Obviously. Personal note taking? Sure. What else? Well, anything that relies on faculty, staff, or students creating and publishing content.

Just yesterday I was lucky enough to be in a meeting with an amazingly open-minded faculty member who was asking for a blog platform to support his writing course. No problem … but, the big thing here is that we were joined by the people who actually support enterprise applications on my campus — you know the smart guys who think in terms of 100 thousands users and routinely deliver. They were there and it made me think bigger about what we can do to offer a single solution to a single faculty member with a tiny class (25 students) that would teach us about how we could scale to say 5,000 faculty and 80,000 students.

If you look back at some of the requirements we were looking at a few months ago the last time the blog team got together, not much has changed. It still needs to stand up to the pounding that an application like this will get on a big campus — but now we are thinking a whole lot about building a platform that enables all the things we need. We are going to try and build some sort of personal content management solution that can support blogging, portfolios, personal web pages, resumes, syllabi, you name it. Call it what you will, but in my mind we are attacking a paradigm shift here — I am looking to tear down the WYSIWYG tool du-jour domination on our campus. What we want is a space that empowers people to think about content, information architecture, self expression, and self-reflextion instead of how do I do that with DreamWeaver, then SFTP it, and then … see what I am saying? It is time to move to the next level.

What I am planning to do is task several smaller, more focused groups to look at the needs behind ePortfolios, behind personal note taking spaces, behind personal website tools, and so on. We’ll then roll those requirements up to the larger PCM Platform team and start constructing a solution. We have a starting platform in mind that I think can really get us close “out of the box,” but we’ll see.

As we started to talk, it became clear that we can create a handful of custom apps that will glue our solutions together to create all sorts of novel solutions. If students are publishing into their personal webspaces, then we’ll have to find innovative ways of pulling content into other locations. Here’s an example … if a class is blogging, but they are doing it into their personal spaces, the faculty member will want to aggregate every student’s post into a single class blog that she can control and manipulate as if it were a multi-user blogging environment itself. That is where we build.

I know this is a rambling mess, but my thoughts are still coming together. As they develop, I will share more. Any thoughts for me so far?

Late to the QuickSilver Party

I had tried several times to work with the unified interface app, QuickSilver. I was never quite able to make it work for me … about a year ago, it was just completely unstable on my PowerBook and I gave up. I went back at it today on my MacBook Pro and am finally seeing what all the excitement is really about. A little flick of the fingers and you can do just about anything right from the keyboard without touching the mouse, track pad, dock, or whatever.

Since I am a newbie with this stuff, it is probably best to point you around the web for the ins and outs related to QuickSilver. Just a fantastic application that is already saving me time and from taking my hands off the keyboard. I am starting to collect resources at del.icio.us under the tag, quicksilver. Might be worth a look for all the Mac users who are as late to the party as I am.

A quick keyboard combo makes a small interface appear that gives you access to applications, actions, and literally everything on you Mac. Amazing.