I had the pleasure of presenting to a group of faculty from the SMEAL College of Business yesterday. We spent the better part of an hour and a half talking about the many opportunities we provide here at the University to integrate technology into teaching and learning. The time was well spent with lots of great questions and ideas being thrown around. I reshuffled my PSU Platforms for Digital Expression presentation and added some ideas on how to use ANGEL as the hub to all of the new things we've been doing.
Download the presentation as a PDF.
Month: November 2007
Digital Media Value Chain
During the last few weeks I have started to see some really amazing digital media artifacts coming out of our classrooms here at PSU. Two weeks ago I came across one of the most amazing uses of a student blog I have ever seen. I hate to say it, but I am reluctant to link to it without her permission, but suffice to say she gets how a blog can work better than most of the people I talk to. This post was based around a video project she and her team did in class — a simple interview of a faculty member edited to be of interest. Here is what made it amazing, she spent time not only posting the finished product, but wrote a reflective narrative about the process she and her team used to create it. Pictures showing the team working together, a map of their storyboards, and even a discussion of the script. Just an amazing illustration of how powerful digital media can be.
If you look at the pieces that add up to that example you can see a value chain emerging. We start by doing a hot team … this usually helps us decide if a technology would be appropriate for use in the classroom. Funny that we never come up with ideas that match up to the things that actually happen in our classrooms. The hot team can lead to a call for proposals from faculty under the Engagement Project. When we select a proposal, we meet with the faculty to discuss their needs and find ways to support their activities. From there the faculty teach their course and engage the students in all sorts of cool activities that require them to create digital artifacts. On campuses where we have them installed, students typically visit the Digital Commons to work with killer technology, get hands on help, or connect virtually with a DC Consultant. Once they use the physical spaces to create something they publish it online — with the Blogs at Penn State, the Podcasts at Penn State, or ANGEL. Every step of the process is supported (or has the potential to be supported if need be). I know it is a very simple view of the value chain, but here is how I see it:
I also think of it as a stack …
Which leads me to the example that inspired me to write this evening … a faculty member who submitted an Engagement Award proposal for the Fall semester sent us a couple of examples of her students work today. The first is a virtual tour of the 2007 solar decathlon. The second is just as cool, a walking tour of the tree biodiversity at Ridley Creek State Park. All I can say is that it is amazing. She is integrating blogging, podcasting, Digital Commons, Google Maps, digital photography, and so much more into her classes. The amazing thing is that her students are doing work that will blow you away! Looking at the outputs I can’t help but feel excited that the opportunities that are being created can support it all. Just some killer stuff!
More WVU Football
I know I am annoying most of my readers, but I need to capture this stuff just the same. I just decided not to go to the WVU – Pitt game in Morgantown this weekend — maybe it was the lack of a hotel room, or maybe I just know that showing up would somehow destroy their mojo. Either way I will be watching from home in HD and (hopefully) enjoying the last bit of work that needs to be done to get my Mountaineers into the BCS title game. I know it is a long shot, but getting there would be sweet!
Never Thought I’d See This
I know the College Football Season isn’t even close to being over, but I never thought I would see two respected ESPN analysts have WVU in the BCS title game. Clearly it all has to play out on the field, but just seeing this gets me excited! WVU still has to win out over a very good UConn team and Pitt. Both are in Morgantown, but history is against us — this is Thanksgiving week at WVU so the crowd will not be nearly as insane as usual and you can always throw the records out when Pitt and WVU tangle in the Backyard Brawl. What a year this has been and could be.
More on Moving MT to a New Location
Last night I wrote about exporting one blog out of the Blogs at Penn State platform and importing into a commercial (or self hosted) blog environment … clearly it is really easy, but I didn’t think of a couple of things. So today I did the same thing with my Spring 2007 Podcasting Update that I had done in the Blogs at Penn State about a year ago. You can see the whole thing here at this space now by using this link. This time I did three things while moving it:
- Grabbed all the images it references from my PSU Personal space and uploaded them into my common directory here at this blog. I obviously preserved the names to make it easier. Another thing I do with all my blogs is organize all the media I reference in each post into a common location … because of this I was able to take the export file and do an easy find and replace with the old path to the new path. Perfect! Now all my posts reference local media files.
- Next thing I did was create a new category here at Learning & Innovation that I wanted all these posts to show up in — I chose PSU Podcasting.
- Again using TextWrangler I did a quick find and replace to set the Primary Category to PSU Podcasting. This brought all my posts in under a common category. I didn’t do that on my iPhone blog import and it made me go through and update each by hand … not too bad, because I only had 20 or so posts, but if it would have been a big blog it would have taken me some time.
I could easily create a script to do that here locally, or by working with someone smarter than myself we could come up with a simple little utility to do it all via the web. All told, it took me under 10 minutes to make it all happen. Seamless move!
Moving Day
Tonight I decided to move one of my blogs from the Blogs at PSU that I have stopped using over here to my main space. The blog I wanted to move is my iPhone blog that I set up during our investigation of the iPhone. There are a couple reasons I wanted to move it — getting the content in one location and to see how easy it is to leave the Blogs at Penn State. BTW, all my iPhone related posts are all under the category “iPhone” and can be accessed here.
I have been writing quite a bit about ePortfolio at the University and much of my thinking has centered on the Blogs at PSU as the primary tool for them. One of the questions I get asked a lot is how can students take their content with them when they leave. One of the things we talk about is that since the Blogs at PSU publish static pages into a directory the whole directory could be downloaded and burned to a CD. I haven’t tested that and while I think it would work, I am guessing it would take some tweaks to get the paths right for media and for the CSS. That method would also keep someone from updating their portfolio.
There are a number of commercial blog hosting spaces out there — WordPress.com and Live Journal are two of them. I wanted to see what would happen if I took my MovableType powered blog and simply chose to export it and import into a WordPress blog. The long story short is that it just worked. In the Blogs at PSU dashboard I was able to select export and it kicked out a downloaded .txt file that had my posts and all the comments in it.
Then in WP I was able to jsut go to the Options > Import screen and browse for the file.
From there all I did was select a user name for the files to be imported under. At that point I could easily edit the posts, add categories to them, or anything. Everything was preserved. I also just tested it out over at the free wordpress.com and it worked perfectly! So we do have an easy to use solution to let people take it with them when it is time to go.
Lessig to Keynote this Year’s TLT Symposium!
When we sat down to talk about who we wanted for this year’s TLT Symposium Lawrence Lessig was the firsdt name we threw out. We then instantly said it would be incredible, but probably not realistic … well, guess what? We got him — for real, here is the official word. For those of you who do not know who Lessig is, he is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society. He is also the author of several books and is world class speaker. I am thrilled! Save the date, the Symposium will be the day after my birthday, March 29, 2008.
Digital Commons in the News
I was pleasantly surprised to see an article about the Digital Commons today at the Penn State Live site. Nice to see it getting a little attention … we are getting set to do the next five campuses and we are getting really solid feedback from those who already have DC facilities. Our own facility here at University Park is seeing massive usage — much more now that we’ve integrated our faculty and student support spaces into the one Digital Commons. Very exciting!