Month: October 2007

Back to the Portfolio

/ Cole Camplese / 15 Comments

In light of the Blogs at Penn State project I have been thinking and talking quite a bit about how that platform can be used as a digital publishing platform … much less a blog, but a way to enable personal content management. I’ve written about this before, but have some additional thoughts to share … these are new ideas I am working on so bear with me.

I’ve mentioned before how the Blogs at PSU work — a central service that allows individuals to publish into their personal webspace. We all get at least 500 MB here at PSU and getting more isn’t difficult. We have recently been working on rolling out Protected Personal space as well. What Protected Personal does is allow anyone at PSU to publish into a protected directory within their personal webspace. It has a really nice permissions toolset so I can easily restrict or expose content inside Protected to only the people I decide to. This is an important step for us on a whole bunch of levels, but I want to focus on how it might be used as part of a personal ePortfolio environment.

You can obviously put anything you want into Protected space — including the automatic publishing of a PSU Blog. The way I’d like to frame this revolves around the notion that I would set up a master blog in protected that would act as my personal repository — essentially a place for me to collect everything I do while a student at PSU. I would use categories and keywords to organize everything including day to day class notes, the creation of papers, the place I stuff pictures, and really anything else I create while at the University.

Now the process of creating a solid ePortfolio relies on a few important concepts — an ePortfolio needs to be reflective and it needs to be made up of artifacts related to my personal and academic goals. So imagine as a student you are given a checklist of objectives or goals you should work towards in a given field of study. You would then be asked to work through the creation of a balanced scorecard that would have your personal goals on it as well. It would give you a roadmap to follow as you collect evidence of your growth. As you move through the semesters the idea would be to put everything in the repository while categorizing things as they happen with an eye on your goals — maybe even use your goals as categories.

At any given interval it would then be easy to go into the protected repository and critically select the strongest pieces of evidence and post them to a public ePortfolio site — also published and managed via the Blogs at PSU. The idea being that as you move them into public view you spend time reflecting on the work and soliciting feedback from others via the comments. Faculty and administrators could utilize your evidence by direct linking in departmental assessment activities as well if necessary.

ePort Process

I think the keys here revolve around making a few changes not to the technology, but to the ways we work with students as they move through their academic careers. Sitting down with them as they enter a program and helping them establish their personal goals so that they balance them with the goals of their program — that is critical. Showing them how to collect as much evidence as they can, knowing full well that only a subset of the repository entries will ever see the light of day in their portfolios is also a fundamental shift in thinking. Imagine a protected respiratory that would hold an entire academic careers’ worth of intellectual development and learning evidence. All of it would be tagged, categorized, and ready for searching, selecting, and reflecting on. I see it as a potential opportunity to shift the way we ask students to think about their academic careers … what do you think?

The iTunes U Ecosystem

/ Cole Camplese / 5 Comments

I have spent the last week in Seattle at Educause. During the week I have had several chances to meet and talk to colleagues at other institutions and from the companies I work with. It has been a fun, rewarding, and thought provoking week — total exhaustion aside, I think it was one of my more productive trips. I’ll save my overall Educause thoughts for a different post … this one is about the emerging opportunities I see on the horizon for content delivery to mobile devices for teaching and learning.

One of the short demos I went to at the Apple Booth was given by one of my good friends at Apple … he shared some amazing stories of how different Universities are using iTunes U for content, outreach, and campus news. Some really good stuff — although ETS Talk didn’t make the cut. The second half of the presentation focused on the mobile side of the equation … how the iPod (in its various forms) create an ecosystem of sorts for managing and delivering mobile content … it got me thinking about it more.

One of the neat things you can do in Seattle with an iPod Touch or iPhone is walk into a Starbucks (you may have heard of those things … coffee shops I think) and get instantly connected to what seems like a location aware network. Once connected a new opportunity on the device emerges — a commerce opportunity. In this case the fact that my device knows I am in a certain place, the network lets me in, and I am presented with an opportunity to acquire content is a very cool thing. I am not one to frequent the old Starbucks at home, opting instead for the local shops but this is an interesting model for us to consider in the delivery of podcasted material.

starbucks_01.png

Another very cool feature to mention is when I am in an open WIFI zone my iPhone gives me the opportunity to purchase content from the Apple Music Store. They even let me look at what is hot, the top 10, and other ways to browse music in multiple genres. Again, this is great but for this to be valuable to me in an academic sense I need to authenticate into my Universities’ iTunes U space. Think of the potential — as these devices hit our campuses students can gain access to learning materials in a true anytime, anywhere fashion. Imagine being a faculty member and creating a podcast two hours before class on a relevant (late-breaking) topic and publishing it to your iTunes U space. What if when you do that you could instantly send an SMS, eMail, and an update to your FaceBook entry that new content is available … students receive the update and can (with their Touch or iPhone) grab that content out of the air. Just in time mobile content delivery is only one option … there are dozens of scenarios — tours, travel updates, and so much more — especially if you can rely on some sort of location aware technologies.

It all seems to rely on the fact that your device knows your identity and can make that connection. Well, guess what? When you buy an iPod or iPhone the first thing you have to do is sync it with iTunes … when this happens, why not use the local iTunes U space to create a connection? Let the iTunes U space on your campus take part in the activation process … when you log in with our school identity all sorts of great things can happen — auto-synced University bookmarks, account information, University wide calendar events, and more. One of those things is a pairing of the device with your iTunes U access. Seems easy enough to me and it paints a really powerful end-to-end picture of the way iTunes U could sit in the middle of so much more than content management.

iPhone (and iPod) SDK

/ Cole Camplese / 4 Comments

I am not going to rehash the news that Apple will finally release an iPhone SDK, but will make special note of the fact that this means there will (finally) be an iPod SDK. What is so great to me is that I actually sat in an Apple conference room five years ago (?) when the first iPod came out and told them straight faced that unless they released an SDK they would have a loser on their hands. I hate looking so stupid … but vengeance is mine, Apple will indeed allow third party developers extend the most popular device on the planet. The thing that really interests me is the notion Fraser Speirs writes about — how long until there are as many OSX powered devices as there are Macs in the marketplace. With that as the starting point for this, the rules of the mobile device game just got changed in a whole new way for those willing to play in the Apple landscape.

Predictions in an Online Publishing World

/ Cole Camplese / 5 Comments

I got asked a very interesting question today during a committee meeting today. The question was about the use of the Blogs at Penn State toolset as it relates to student portfolio activity. I have been saying for about 36 months or so that a robust blogging environment could serve as an “ePortfolio Light” toolset to enable students to focus on the reflection of their learning without needing to learn commodity web skills. As an aside, for a long time I have been trying to talk about a blogging platform in terms of personal content management and as a publishing platform. What I like about the PSU portfolio efforts is that it has been about the right stuff — students taking time to reflect upon their personal story. The thing I haven’t liked about it is that we have forced them into a very old school web publishing model to do it. We’ve asked them to use Dreamweaver to do this expression and while it is a decent tool, the whole notion that a complex piece of software gets in between thought and execution as it relates to reflection is a shame.

I have had one of my colleagues, Glenn Johnson, come into my class in the past to discuss ePortfolio and the students really do get it — they get the importance of building a place online that represents them. What they struggle with (generalization time) is the whole web publishing process. Think about it, expression online using a WYSIWYG tool is a convoluted path — open a WYSIWYG tool, learn it, understand the naming conventions of the online world, figure out how to move your static files, make sure everything is in the right directories, upload it, look at it in the browser, rinse, and repeat. Contrast that with modern publishing tools — authenticate, type, and click publish. Sort of a no-brainer.

So, back to the question. Today I was asked to project if the Blogs at PSU, when used in a electronic publishing context, would increase the amount of students engaged in portfolio creation. Right now, from what I understand, less than 50% of students activate the free personal webspace we give them. Activate is different than using it. About half of that group reports using it for academic purposes. Will giving the students of our University a simple tool for publishing, reflecting, sharing, and collaborating online change those numbers? I said I think it will — and I also mentioned that if we built a FaceBook Application to facilitate blogging from their profiles we’d see an even bigger jump. I am wondering if those of you who have done University blogging environments to support simple web publishing have seen increases in student utilization of online publishing for academic (or even personal) use. Any help out there for me?

10/15/2007: Presentation: Faculty Advisory Committee on Academic Computing

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I provided the FACAC with a status review and update on the Digital Commons, Blogs at Penn State, and Community Hub projects. There was great interest and discussion related to Digital Commons on several levels. Some people were interested in infrastructure, while others discussed why digital media is important and how it may be used to support teaching and learning. Interesting conversation.
Download the presentation and a PDF.

A Plea for Some eLearning Help

/ Cole Camplese / 7 Comments

A few years ago the design of eLearning seemed so obvious to me — align a systematic process, a team, and a technology platform to create courses to support resident or distance education. So much has happened in the online space the last couple of years that has shattered my thinking as it relates to the technology platform choice … I still think any project must be supported by the strategic alignment of factors (you know, something like people, process, and tools), but the notion of selecting a single eLearning design and development environment seems very difficult and confusing.

Friday, several colleagues and I spent close to two hours in our conference room talking about all of this. We were getting together to explore those three elements and discuss how we should move forward to support our new eLearning efforts. When I was the Director of the Solutions Institute we created a four-tier instructional design model that was supported by our Digital Design Document tool set that our team would use to manage the creation of eLearning. In the world of the web back then, it seemed OK to build courses that were page turners — really just textbooks on the web with a few interactive (Flash) activities thrown in. Today that just seems wrong and the team on Friday came to that conclusion. If we are going to really build a model for eLearning that we are proud of then we are going to have to think very differently about how we go about doing this. Over the last two years we’ve worked really hard to bring new tools to our campus to support digital expression — we came around to the notion that to do this right we should be promoting and leveraging those platforms in new ways.

What I struggle with is the idea of what is a really good eLearning environment these days? In my mind, a handful of pages of content that link and embed objects that drive student and faculty to engage in conversations (on or off line) seems to be the goal. With that said, why not design those content pages in a blog so students and faculty (and maybe people from the outside) can have conversations in context? Why are we still struggling with what the right eLearning tool set looks like when we are sitting in a world with dozens of content creation tools? The model we are trying to avoid consists of tons of static text pages that prompt students to leave the content and jump into a discussion forum to interact — I’ve never liked that, but now the technology supports what I am after … the opportunity for conversation at every level of a course experience.

So, at the start of our meeting we were exploring an eLearning design, development, and delivery tool … it is a powerful web-based environment, but it just didn’t seem to fit where our thinking was taking us. The group started by saying we should adopt and adapt it, but as the conversation grew we came around to a different conclusion — that what we needed was an environment to create and save the design information of the course (you know, a digital design document) and an easy way to connect content that is created in blogs, as podcasts, digital movies, or whatever else. We need a project management and communication environment that can be used to support a distributed team and a collection of content management tools to deliver the results from. This is all new thinking, but I am trying to piece together in my mind a path towards aligning the people, process, and the new set of technology tools we’ll need to get to the next level of eLearning design strategy.

I would love to hear from those of you out there who design courses and what works for you … what are the right tools and approaches? Think of a design environment that a team (with specific roles) is asked to create scalable eLearning materials … what are some examples of people ditching the all in one design/development environments to create courses that are made up of small pieces? Can we legitimately ask our faculty to work with us to select and deliver killer learning environments using the platforms we constantly talk about? Any thoughts for me?

I Love Surprises on the Web

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I think you may know the feeling of pure surprise and joy when you discover a new thing on the web. For those of us who have been around the web since before Netscape introduced the masses to the visual Internet, being impressed is a fleeting and rare opportunity. Most Saturday and Sunday mornings we have tea and coffee, listen to music, and watch the children play … I usually pull out my laptop and hit the New York Times site (BTW, thanks for making Times Select free!) to see what is going on in the news. This morning I was reading an article about Al Gore and the speculation of him running for president after winning the Nobel Peace Prize when I just started clicking and double clicking randomly on the page — I do that sometimes involuntarily when I am reading. To my surprise and joy something new happened when I double clicked a word — a small window popped open with the word defined. It wasn’t a link, it was just text on screen. I actually called my wife over and she didn’t even make fun of me. Innovation in small packages make me happy. From what I can tell it only works in FireFox, but go give it a try!

Looks like they have partners with a few different services/tools/sites/databases to power it all. One of them is WordNet. WordNet is a tool set built and patented by Princeton University. It is an amazing little piece of technology. Looks like the other two are The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and Answers.com.

I haven’t done any more investigation, I just wanted to capture my thoughts on it, but I am wondering how it would fit into our Blogs at Penn State project — imagine any term someone writes in their blog being automatically linked to an only database of definitions — no linking by the author required. It fits into the learning landscape and so many ways. What I like is how invisible it is to users and authors — double click and knowledge is gained. I love surprises.

I Finally Get It!

/ Cole Camplese / 4 Comments

In what could be viewed as a tip of the hat to one of my new favorite educational bloggers, Chris Stubbs, I am finally starting to understand the gaming space. Not that I get Stubbs’ obsession with all games, but reading and listening to him (and a few others) has made me rethink my stance about games in general. It has made me look at them in new ways and I am seeing all sorts of new opportunities. With that said, my little girl is the one who finally made the lightbulb go on.

I have to admit, I have tried for quite some time to get the whole, “games for education” stories I hear about all the time. Obviously I get it on a certain level — we’ve all put our hands on games that help us learn. In the recent past, however, I have been put off by the emergence of environments like SecondLife as an example. Even though I said in an ETS Talk Podcast a while back that I thought SL was a commerce game (I was promptly ripped by the others in the room), I have just not been able to get it on a whole bunch of levels. We are putting a lot of energy into the environment to try and see how it plays out in the learning environment, but I am still unconvinced. That doesn’t mean that we are doing he wrong thing on any level, it just means that I am probably a lot slower about adopting something like SL. What I see is a place that has a steep learning curve on the creation side that is sitting on really shaky infrastructure — add to that Google’s recent moves in the virtual space and I think we have a very challenging landscape. We are doing some interesting things, but it isn’t what I would want to invest in for the long term — for my dollar I would invest in the creation of community ( and I think we are also doing that). With that said I watch my colleague, Brett Bixler, make the environment do some very interesting things and I have seen how his work has captured the imagination of faculty — never a bad thing.

While I was in Indianappolis last week I stopped in a store and dropped $12.00 on a WebKinz for my little girl. For those of you not into online spaces for little kids, this thing is a real stuffed animal that comes with a special code that when paired with their website brings that creature to “life” online. All I can say is that my little girl has probably learned more about currency, reading, and math in the last five days or so than she would in a typical month. The environment is engaging in a simple yet powerful way — you log in for the first time, are greeted by a guide, and dropped into an empty room. They throw some KinzCash at you so your little one can buy some furniture, a little food, or whatever else they desire from the company store. Sure, there is a serious commercial side to all this, but we haven’t disclosed the fact that we could simply go to the (real) store and buy her a card filled with KinzCash … to make money she has to do stuff. And that is where it gets really interesting to both my wife and I.

webkinz_01.png

There is an Arcade where she can play simple games for money — very little amounts of money is made available in the Arcade. To make the real bucks you have to answer trivia questions, get a job, go on quests, and other activities that require a great deal of cognitive energy for a 5 and half year old. The stuff is so engaging I’ve actually caught another member of my family spending time working puzzles and answering trivia. There are all sorts of incidental learning going on as well … as an example, one of the first things she wanted to buy was an outside “room” that she could grow stuff on. She bought the land, bought a bunch of seeds and plants, and proceeded to create a virtual eco-system that requires raking, watering, and real care. Every time she logs in one of the first thing she does is feed her puppy, put him on the treadmill to make him healthy, and hit the new outdoor room to work the garden. She is learning all sorts of things — well beyond how to make and spend money. I am quite frankly stunned by what I am seeing.

I am sure other parents see this — as do gamers of all sorts. The thing that strikes me as we are working at PSU to create the Educational Gaming Commons is that simple, well designed spaces can create very compelling learning environments. They don’t have to be massive online worlds where you interact with strangers (or people you know), but they do have to exhibit some basic tenants of solid game design — guided learning, guided tasks, clear goals, and opportunities to engage and interact along the way. I’m sure my colleague Bart Pursel would agree with me when I say it might be time for us to look very closely at how simplicity (when well designed) can create environments that make people want to learn — and at the end of the day I think that is what we are after.