Merry Christmas, Chumby!

So after Allan introduced me to the Chumby on ETS Talk 36 a couple weeks ago, I decided to ask Santa for one. Well, under the tree this morning there was a shiny new web-enabled widget player. What I like about it is the openness of the platform. All I’ve done so far is embed a few of their sample widgets, but I’ll do more with it after breakfast.

At any rate, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

12/19/2007: Presentation: Student Affairs

I was asked to come and talk to a group from PSU's Student Affairs about how a publishing platform — like the Blogs at PSU — could form the basis for personal portfolios. I am a part of the ePortfolio team here at the University and have been making the pitch for some time that a blogging environment is ideal for a personal portfolio. We had a great discussion and I think we'll be working together more as we flesh out our move to integrate blogs into the existing ePortfolio space.
PDF of my slides are available here.

12/18/2007: Presentation: Campus ID Meeting

I was asked to spend an hour discussing some of the things we have been working on that impact teaching and learning with technology. I spent the time sharing information on several of our larger initiatives that are designed to let faculty do interesting things in and around their classrooms. I have attached my slides as a PDF … it is 4 MB. Download the file here.

ETS Year in Review

We had our last staff meeting of the year this morning here at ETS … I was going to cancel given the amazingly bad weather we are having, but late last night I decided not to do that and instead to forgo the usual house cleaning, project updates and operational policy discussions and simply say thank you to the group for an amazing year of work and effort. I tried to share some of the highlights from the year with them … a list of things way too long to cover as quickly as I wanted to came to mind. So instead of a huge laundry list of stuff I picked a handful of our largest impact initiatives and shared some highlights and some thoughts. I linked to the slides below without audio in Flash format. If you are interested, just click the image below to check them out (it is 5 MB). As always, comments are welcome!

It is also important to note that there are people all over ITS and the University in general who have had a big hand in these things.

MT Goes Open Source

Just a quick pointer to the fact that after a few months of talk and lots of whispers Moveable Type 4.1 has gone open source. This makes our decision to adopt MT at PSU that much stronger, IMHO. This gives us a chance to really do some very interesting things with a very scalable and stable platform. Obviously I love WordPress (as it powers this blog), but the MT 4 release is a gorgeous piece of software. Everyone I have shown it to at the University has been very happy to see its interface, learn about its features, and can’t wait to get their fingers on it. The open source move is just icing on the cake for us.

Just a Little Funny

Just got back to my office after a lunch meeting and thought I’d do a little RSS before my 1:30 … tried to hit Google Reader and I see the following:

The rest of the Internets is fine, just Google … no calendar either. Never thought I’d see that one.

First Class Podcast

Scott McDonald and I are co-teaching a course in Penn State’s College of Education this Spring. We’re teaching Curriculum & Instruction 597, Disruptive Technologies for Teaching and Learning. One of the things we’ve decided to do is produce a course podcast as much as possible. Today we sat down and recorded the first podcast of the semester — well before the semester begins. This is really just a course introduction and a little view into what is going to go on. The included podcast is the first cut — complete with strange music breaks. I hope this version makes the cut … feedback is welcome.

Download the Podcast

Off the Grid

I actually took the whole weekend off from email and work. It is something I haven’t done in a very long time and it actually felt pretty good. I stayed on email all day Friday and did my last check around 6 PM, then just packed it in for the weekend. I moved my personal email account out of Apple Mail — so it wouldn’t get mashed up with work … that let me send a couple of personal emails without getting in the middle of what is typically an avalanche of stuff coming my way over the weekend. I did this to spend more real time with the family and to stem the inevitable Friday evening email that makes my weekend taste sour. It was worth it.

The damage was reveled this morning around 6:30 AM when I opened it back up … about 85 work emails and a handful of others from a couple of various accounts. Once I killed the spam and the unrelated stuff there were honestly only about 20 actionable notes … my wife asked me if the state of educational technology had fallen since I logged off on Friday. Cute. Obviously it hadn’t. What did I miss? A few things that I probably should have been connected to, but at the end of the day it was all stuff that could wait.

My question to anyone reading is how you deal with down time — weekends, holidays, etc? Do you go off the grid when the work day is over? I’m not sure I can pull it off every weekend, but it is an excellent exercise every now and then.