Blogs at Penn State – The Real Thing!

So this semester (after about a year of work) the Blogs at Penn State will be used in classrooms to support online conversations (and probably all sorts of other stuff). We decided after much debate to restrict the pilot to 1500 people, but probably have the capacity to jump to 2000 if requests and numbers continue to flow in. In all honesty we could probably handle more, but the point of a pilot is to learn. We’ll be doing a while bunch of that this semester! As I type there are students clicking the links for the “self-enroll” process so they can start blogging right away within PSU. To me it is very exciting — the Daily Collegian even ran a little story about the new opportunity this morning.

We are already evaluation Moveable Type 4 as it offers all sorts of new features we think will be critical. We are also starting to build our list of features we think we should be providing when this thing hits production status and the whole of the University can have at it. One thing I am noticing is that the Blogs at Penn State Community Hub is picking up steam — people are showing up and posting questions and answers. It is very cool to see the community rise up and work to support itself. One of the things I thought I’d link to is a page that has a bunch of links to help faculty get the most out their blogging experience. I’ll be reporting numbers and reaction as they roll in. Exciting stuff!

If a Tree Falls …

I carry a black leather journal with me most of the time … I use this little analog capture method to take meaningful notes, jot down ideas, and to record things that I think will provide me with some historical perspective (on a personal level). From time to time I actually go back through my journals and play a little game of, “this time last year we were thinking about …” Yesterday I was having lunch with the instructional design group here in ETS and I pulled out the book to see what we were thinking about and struggling with last year at this time.

black_book.jpg

One of the things that jumped out at me was something I wrote about in my journal literally on this day last year — I called it the ETS Innovation Hour. I’m not that keen on the title this year, but it is something I have continued to think about and push … a monthly computer mediated “show” that would expose people to some of the things we are working on, thinking about, and more. It has evolved into something we’ve now started calling, ETS Briefings. It hasn’t gotten off the ground.

Two weeks ago I was a presenter for an online seminar and I talked about Penn State on iTunes U, our community based support ideas, and some general information on the Blogs at Penn State project. Nothing earth shattering there other than I did it from my office, at my desk, wearing a USB headset over Centra. It was well attended and people asked a bunch of questions at the end. It was honestly the first time I had done something like that. I got me thinking about just moving the ETS Briefings forward, but on my own just to see what would happen.

Would anyone show up if I just started doing these once a month from my office over Adobe Connect Pro? It would be primarily for a Penn State audience as I would be sharing information and insight into the projects we are doing here. My hope is that the University Learning Design Community would tune in and help me think about new ways to engage faculty and students around our projects. About a year ago I was at this same crossroads over an ETS podcast — can we find time, would anyone listen, would it provide value, etc. If I use that as a model, maybe it is time to just lock an hour every month and see what happens.

Opportunities for Digital Expression

I’ve written about my personal interest in providing opportunities for faculty, staff, and students to engage in the creation of digital media — text, graphics, podcasts, videos, and whatever else this group needs to use to communicate ideas. One of the things I have been working towards over the last few years is envisioning what a platform for digital expression in an educational environment might look like. I have also written quite a bit about the projects that we’ve been investing lots of time and energy into here at PSU to power this approach — namely Blogs at Penn State, the Podcasts at Penn State, the Digital Commons, Streaming Servers, and our Course Management System (ANGEL) to name a few. We’ve also been spending all sorts of time engineering our processes and programs so that we are more appropriately positioned to attack and create opportunities to engage our audiences around this space. We’ve created a new way to investigate emerging technologies and trends through the Hot Teams approach, built new models for working with faculty through the Engagement Projects, rethought the way we can use students as part of the adoption and diffusion process via the Technology Learning Assistants (TLA) program, engaged the community through the Community Hub concept, opened the walls of ETS by being more transparent and adopting podcasting and blogging as another way to reach our audiences, and really cranked up our efforts around the TLT Symposium. All of these things are part of the eco-system to support and promote Digital Expression on campus.

Two days ago, Chris Millet and I were having lunch and we were sharing some thoughts in this space. This is a reoccurring theme with us as this work dates back to the time we spent at the IST Solutions Institute and working with Apple on the Apple Digital Campus project. It was in those early discussions that we both made a commitment to exploring and promoting digital expression as a means to demonstrate learning. During our conversation I was telling Chris how I’d been thinking about trying to create a visual representation of how we have been striving to align our thinking around Digital Expression with our new projects, programs, and existing (and emerging) University infrastructure. I sketched some stuff on a napkin or two and when I got back to my office I drew a crude illustration on my window trying to visualize it all. What emerged from that is what I will attempt to articulate below. I am asking for feedback and thoughts about all of this — and keep in mind, much of it is the product of both a ton of thinking and quick execution.

The images below are my best shot at creating a visual representation of how I have worked to strategically align all of the work in the area of building a leading University example of a platform for Digital Expression.

Stack 1

This is the foundation of the stack … here is where we can utilize existing enterprise level infrastructure to make sure our platforms can exist. In this case, I have selected our single sign on web access environment as a key ingredient … identity management is a critical component of all of this and having a powerful access architecture in place is critical. Personal web space is also an important piece to this as it is a University provided service that allows us all to store and manage our content in our own spaces. This also has strong identity ties and provides a basis for much of what we will build upon it. Our streaming environment will become even more important as we supplement the excellent QuickTime Streaming Server with a Flash Media Server. Finally our lab images give us the ability to offer high end software to thousands of faculty, staff, and students in a supported and consistent fashion. This not so basic infrastructure is critical to the rest of the stack.

Stack 2

The next layer is comprised of physical spaces. Our CLC Managed environments give faculty and students environments to tap into the tools that they would otherwise not have access to. Again, through access accounts, identity is playing a huge role here — everything they do is tied to that ID and the ability to walk in anywhere and log in and see and interact with your stuff is critical. The Digital Commons is obviously a big piece to the whole Digital Expression puzzle. These facilities will provide faculty, staff, and students at all locations of our institution access to the best equipment, software, and expertise to physically interact with digital media.

Stack 3

Our publishing platforms have really come alive in the last year or so … ANGEL has been a huge part of the teaching and learning with technology story on our campus for quite some time. At the end of last semester we had around 70,000 students active in ANGEL. While those are impressive numbers, we have attempted to create new publishing platforms to share content across our digital environment. The Blogs at Penn State project has, over time, the potential to change the way people publish on the web. The Podcasts at Penn State has already had impact — through both our use of iTunes U for public and course-level content and via our own platform. No matter how you look at it, podcasting has captured the imagination of a whole new set of faculty on our campus. PSUTube is in the earliest stages of thinking, but could have far reaching potential as a digital media distribution platform. By building it on top of the QTSS and FMS we can create an environment that promotes legitimate sharing of digital content for our populations. The idea is to use the best of social video sites for educational purposes.

Stack 4

Our platforms would be nothing without powerful support opportunities. This may seem obvious, but providing support across multiple layers is critical. For early adopters and awareness we tap into the ITS Consultants. They help educate the PSU environment to the opportunities and provide a first layer of support. ITS Training Services does the same thing but at a second level — this is when people are getting ready to really use the stuff. The help desk gives us a full on support group to lean on. All of it is critical for so many reasons — happy users, freedom for other staff to think about what is next, and so much more.

Stack 5

Finally we provide opportunities for communities to form and support to reach a new level of engagement. Engagement is what we are striving to get to … we want our audiences to be invested in where they are spending their time. I feel if you can get the community to grow up around the opportunities you are providing you have something very powerful. We’ve started by opening the organization and supporting traditional marketing channels with blogs and podcasting … this is a much more direct and natural voice and is sometimes easier for people to follow. We’ve tried to create methods for working together internally and have pushed ourselves to bring in people from the outside to participate through the Hot Teams. There is so much more here, but coupling all of the online activities with real face to face opportunities is also critical. The Symposium has honestly changed our relationship with our faculty audiences. I hope that it all has provided new opportunities for engagement at all levels of the eco-system.

So at the end of the day, the goal is to provide a leading platform to support Digital Expression in Higher Education. Are we getting there? Maybe … time will tell. I know we’ve been working hard to make the right decisions (which sometimes makes it all look and feel slow) and we will continue to do that. So, after all that stuff if you’ve made it this far I’d love to hear your take on it all.

Some Thoughts for Apple and Keynote

I am an avid Keynote user and have been since it first hit the market. I love how clean and elegant not only the design tools are, but also the resulting presentation files. Let me also say that I use it a ton. A big part of my job is sharing progress, giving updates, giving presentations, and all sorts of other show and tell style events. This means I have lots of Keynote files — I tend to have four or five that I use constantly for a year or so at a time. I tweak them with each talk slightly for the audience, but for the most part 90% of the slides stay the same. When I do this I do a “Save As” and create a new instance of the slides. This results in lots of very similar, yet slightly different versions of my slides … This drives me crazy!

What I am really after is something that is just like Keynote, but with the cross-over functionality of iPhoto. iPhoto’s new “Events” feature is killer. Why not allow us to store stacks of like slides (not presentations) as Events (or something) in a completely different view of the application — a content management view. Let me organize each slide as an asset unto itself. I could then use an “photo album” metaphor to drag individual slides onto the presentation stack (or timeline, or whatever) to create new slideshows. Giving me the ability to manage all my slides as assets, just like Apple does for iPhoto, iTunes, and now iMovie, would give me unprecedented control over my content.

So to review, what I want is Keynote as it stands today, but with a new content management view that lets me store all my keynote slides and slideshows in one place. I don’t care how the individual slides are stored, but the whole way you can scrub through the events in iPhoto to see the contents of that grouping would be ideal for slides that have very similar information, but might have been changed slightly with context sensitive information. I would then be able to click into that slide event grouping, select the right one for the presentation I was preparing and drop it into a Presentation Stack that I could enter to edit my preso just like I do now. And give me some real ability to store some meta data about each slide so I can search this massive database of content I am constantly creating and tweaking.

Does that make sense? It does to me and I need it!

8/15/2007: Presenation: Penn State World Campus ID&D Group

Day before yesterday my colleague, Allan Gyorke, and I gave a talk to the Instructional Design and Development group at the Penn State World Campus related to Digital Expression. It is a talk I’ve done before and it really focuses on the platforms PSU has been working to deliver for the last 18 months or so. The talk frames the need by looking relatively deeply at the changing characteristics of our undergraduate resident population — they are very mobile, very smart, and very plugged into social spaces (read, Facebook). I use a bunch of PSU statistics gathered by our assessment team as well as numbers from the Pew Internet and American Life Project team. It is a talk that provides an overview of our goal to create a platform that can support digital expression.
Slides and more thoughts can be found at my Learning & Innovation blog.

Talking Design with Designers

Day before yesterday my colleague, Allan Gyorke, and I gave a talk to the Instructional Design and Development group at the Penn State World Campus related to Digital Expression. It is a talk I’ve done before and it really focuses on the platforms PSU has been working to deliver for the last 18 months or so. The talk frames the need by looking relatively deeply at the changing characteristics of our undergraduate resident population — they are very mobile, very smart, and very plugged into social spaces (read, Facebook). I use a bunch of PSU statistics gathered by our assessment team as well as numbers from the Pew Internet and American Life Project team.

After the warm-up I tend to dive into the tools we are highlighting — Blogs at Penn State, Podcasts at Penn State, Wikis at Penn State, as well as the Digital Commons initiative and a few others. What made this conversation different was the fact the audience was a group of instructional designer and technologists — certainly a fun group to talk to. I was struck by how interested most of them seemed to be in the tools and how willing they were to discuss how we might think about using them. I was also struck by how excited many of them got as we continued to talk. It was a very fun hour and a half … it left me thinking two things — I would very much like to spend more time with groups of interested designers who are in the midst of creating lots of learning spaces and that I have now done this presentation for about a dozen audiences at Penn State but have failed to deliver it to my own staff. That last point hit me last night as I sat on the back patio with a glass of wine — talk about having one of those reality check, “duh” moments. That is obviously something I have to do.

The thing about the talk is that it really tries to define one of my core strategies — enabling opportunities for faculty, staff, and students to engage in the art of digital expression within the context of higher education. One of my goals is to create a platform that provides for supported use of digital tools to not only enhance teaching and learning, but that can creep into everyday life. The other thing it does is illustrates how quickly we are all moving … two years ago these platforms didn’t exist in a coherent way on our campus. The talents of many people have made it a reality.

At any rate, my slides are available as a PDF — it is big. I have learn how to shrink these things down a bit! I’d love to talk more about this with any of you.

SecondLife in Bloomsburg, PA

I am from Bloomsburg, PA … I was born just down the road in Danville and spent my whole pre-college life there (except for a little while in Lewisburg, PA while my Dad was a professor at Bucknell). When I finished undergrad at WVU and after failed stint at NC State, I returned to Bloomsburg. After several months of painting houses, cutting weeds, and failing to find myself I entered the Institute for Interactive Technologies at Bloomsburg University. I got my masters degree there — it was the first program that brought together my two main areas of interest — technology and learning. It was an amazing and eye-opening experience.

These days there is some very interesting stuff still going on at the IIT. One of the big things happening there is revolving around Dr. Karl Kopp. I didn’t know Dr. Kopp when I was an IITer, he wasn’t there yet, but his work in the serious games for education and training space is getting some major play across the industry. He does some very insightful blogging and from what I know, he is hell of a good speaker. One his great pieces is the video linked to his latest post — it is essentially a six minute video looking at SecondLife in the learning/training space and how important immersion can be. Well done and worth a look. I am still not convinced SL is anywhere near being the end all be all, but Dr. Kopp makes some interesting points.