Northern Voice 2008

I am jealous. Not that I need to be on the road any more, but missing the awesome Northern Voice again has me down. Knowing there is a collection of amazing people all advancing our field right now has me wanting to jump a flight. Sigh. Well, tonight for a few brief moments I was able to join Alan Levine and his session via ustream.tv. Amazing. Enjoy the event and the evening NV2008! Thanks for finding new ways to be open.

How can we do something like this for the TLT Symposium?

Movable Type as an Open Content Toolset

I have been thinking more and more about the opportunities we have at our fingertips now that we have an enterprise blogging toolset in place here at the University. I’ve watched my online colleagues discussing open courseware and blog tools for about a week now and am ready to chime in with my own thoughts. I am impressed with the progress and ah-ha moments that have gone on around the edu-blog web for the better part of a week, although I am slightly surprised in that many of these same people are the ones who have been banging the “blog is more than a blog” drum for quite some time. I spent the better part of a year working that angle in hopes of getting our own decision makers to buy into an enterprise blog tool — “no, its a personal content management system …” So as I watched D’Arcy, Brian, Jim, and David show off the work they’ve done and the excellent thinking they are sharing I was a little confused by the excitement.

But then it hit me. The glorious piece to this is not the software, it is the philosophical underpinnings it is supporting. Openness. Open content that can be easily created, managed, searched, and then shared out (using a number of interesting methods) to other platforms so it can be customized and treated the way people want to treat content — ironically, as their own. What I mean is that we’ve all talked about online repositories for the last 10 or so years, what I see as the difference here is that I can find good open content, grab it, move it into a drop dead simple environment (like wordpress.com), and manipulate it and make it more like the environment I want it to be. We always wanted that but we (at least) couldn’t make it happen. Maybe we can now.

So, we have Movable Type as our enterprise blogging tool here at PSU. That means that anyone with an access account and webspace can log in and create a blog. A couple of clicks, some typing, and you are publishing. To me it spells a platform to support all sorts of learning content design and development. What if for a minute we envisioned a second install of MT that is built to be specifically for course design and development? A design team (including faculty) could build in this space using all the collaborative tools to do so, take advantage of tags, categories, and other meta-like data to help keep things straight, and create killer learning objects. This isn’t really new thinking. But what if all these things were just open and waiting to be exported (in MT format) and imported (in MT format) directly into our enterprise blog tool by a single faculty member who was interested in taking what was available and adding the parts they wanted the most — their own personal contexts to bring it to life.

A project like this would allow us to explore some things at an Institutional level and actually answer some questions … a few things that come to mind include:

• Platforms: The blog environment is the perfect kind of place to hang all sorts of opportunities off … I am thinking about podcasts, streaming media, google maps, links to ANGEL, and all sorts of other small pieces.
• Best Practices: What does it mean to use an environment like MT to produce learning content or objects … could we build a roadmap for others to follow?
• OER Standards: We need to establish all sorts of baseline constructs if we are going to move into a more OER space … what is the granularity of content, what kinds of tags should be used, how do we manage assets, and all the other things we worry about with learning object design.
• OER Policies: Even more critical to the long term vision is how do we position ourselves (and our content) for use and reuse? I know there is at least one College on campus already playing in the OER space, but what does it sound like as an Institutional conversation?
• Attitudes: How will our stakeholders react and what do people really think about sharing?
• Usability: Does this type of environment lend itself to use, and maybe more importantly is it the right kind of space to use in the first place?

It isn’t fully baked and I know there are holes in it, but I am willing to put a group of people together to aggressively explore it … what should we be thinking about — and at the end of the day, why shouldn’t we do it? I know this post is not articulate enough to really illustrate the vision, but it is my feeble attempt to get some input and get a conversation started around the concept. Anyone care to share some thoughts or participate in a larger discussion?

All the Rage

Not sure what is causing it, but screen casting seems to be all the rage these days. It seems like the ability to actually show people how to do thing has finally caught on … On the PC side they’ve had that Camtasia software for quite some time … us Mac users used Snapz Pro for most of our efforts, but recently a few new entries have made their way onto the scene.

The Jing Project has become an essential tool for quickly creating simple screen casts to show people how to do all sorts of things. It shares stuff instantly with screencasts.com in a Flash media format. It is really simple to use and does the trick for quick and dirty screen casts. What it lacks in sophistication it makes up for with simplicity and sharing.

This morning I stumbled on ScreenFlow … it is a new and sophisticated tool designed to take screencasting to a whole other level. It does some very nice things. Clearly the $100.00 price tag is a bit more than the free Jing, but it looks much more like a robust creation and editing tool. The demo movie shows that it can capture full screen, video, audio, and in a very cool twist, the video coming in via the iSight. So, using ScreenFlow, Keynote, and your iSight creating guided presentations to be delivered online becomes very easy. I haven’t used it yet, but will be putting it to the test later today. For now there is a free demo that places a watermark on your screencasts.

Neglect

That is really all I can say about how I am treating this space … neglect. Sort of an ugly word, but at the end of the day I have little mojo for writing in this space. Not that I am not thinking, it is just that I can’t seem to find the words for what the hell is going on in my head. In reality I have tons to talk about — class, TLT Symposium, PSU projects, life, travel, and a half dozen other non specific things — I just can’t seem to form them into sentences, paragraphs, or posts.

I’ve been here before and I know what it means — it means there is stuff brewing. Teaching always does this to me … additionally, ELI this year got me excited in ways that I haven’t been in quite some time … it has me thinking and working on things that will take time to come together in my head, but I feel things happening. So while my posting is lean I’ll probably start to flesh some ideas out here in the open … in the mean time I’ve started back into Twitter for some reason, am spending too much time on my course site, been trying to take good pictures, working hard to make the next steps at work, and am blogging at my PSU space for class quite a bit. Time will tell what comes of it, but what I really need is time to get it rolling in the right direction. There are so many amazing opportunities waiting to be turned over and discussed … trust me, I’ll be doing it. I just have to figure out where to start.

Collaborative Data Gathering: Now Easy

Most of us have used the suite of tools under the Google Docs moniker to do all sorts of collaborative things. Giving us a web-based, multi-user version of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint has been a good thing. I’ve had my ups and downs with the tools since the Writely days, but I think in general they are a very powerful and flexible set of tools. This is so clear when working in committee or as a student working in teams — the idea that you don’t have to shuffle individual documents back and forth is an amazing benefit.

Yesterday during class we demonstrated the Google Docs suite to the students … most of them had seen them and we didn’t see too many jaws drop until I showed a new feature of the spreadsheet app — the ability to create web forms that actually dumps data back into the originating spreadsheet. This new feature was announced by Google just a few days ago and it makes the act of collecting data very straightforward and I would even say stretches into the online survey space. I read this morning over at Daring Fireball that there appears to be a 5,000 row limit, but that is a hell of a lot more data collection than you can do in many free survey tools.

It is so easy to make work … just create your spreadsheet and share it. In the sharing area you can now select an option “to fill out a form.” That’s it … select it, get the URL and send it out. Amazing that if you are in the google spreadsheet as people are filling out the form you see the data come in. I created a little form to test it out … fill it out for me! It also appears as though you can publish the spreadsheet with the data live updating.

One thing I don’t see that would really make this even more handy is a little web clip of code that I could drop my form on my blog or in a place like ANGEL. I checked it on my iPhone and the layout is great and it works … sweet for mobile data gathering applications. Nice little step forward.

02/10/2008: Workshop: PA Classrooms of the Future

I will be taking part in a day long pre-conference workshop for the PA Department of Education.  The event, Leading for Educational Change in 1:1 Computer Environment is focused around the Classrooms for the Future project in the state of PA.  I'll be presenting a half day set of sessions focusing on the use of emerging technologies for teaching and learning.  The first session will attempt to provide an overarching framework as it relates to emerging trends in student use and expectations of technology as well as a survey of three emerging trends.  The other sessions will focus on blogs and RSS as tools for managing content and knowledge.  It should be an interesting day.

Reading Thoughts

As I sit at my counter on a lazy Saturday morning with Jazz playing in the background I am struck at how nice it is to see the thoughts of my students streaming before my eyes. Now that I am finally home after what feels like weeks on the road, I am taking a little time to get caught up on my RSS feeds. The big difference is that I’m not reading my typical array of Apple news or Enterprise 2.0 stuff … I’m going through entries my students have made in their own blog spaces over the last few weeks. What I see are a lot of really insightful thoughts as they relate not only to the assigned readings, but to all sorts of things they are thinking about. What I am struck by is that none of my students in the past have taken the time to post thoughts unrelated to a course in an CMS/LMS such as ANGEL or BlackBoard. I wonder why that is …

This isn’t really news to me as I’ve used blogs in courses I’ve taught before, but the combination of our own PSU Blogging platform, an interesting course topic, and a more mature group of students is creating some interesting results already. I recall a few years ago in a small study I conducted with my colleague, Bart Pursel, we asked students if they were more motivated to post in the blog environment compared with ANGEL and they overwhelmingly reported that they were. I am very interested in seeing how these students continue down this path.

What does this give me? I am already learning so much more about the way they think, write, and discuss. The fact that there are more artifacts for me to begin to build my impressions of them is amazing to me. One of the themes of the course we are teaching is identity … with that in mind I find it interesting that I am already able to create a stronger sense of who these students are by not only interacting with them in class, but by reading their blog posts. Makes for a stronger sense of community (which is another one of our primary themes).

So, as I sit here and read the thoughts of my students I know there is something important about giving students their own place to think out loud. I am also struck by the fact that I would rather read their thoughts than those typically clogging my google reader on a lazy Saturday morning. I’ve shared out a Meta-Blog of my students if you are interested in exploring with me … you can always check out what is happening in the class by visiting the Pligg site. We’ll also be posting our first class podcast as soon as I can get it edited. Until then I have some reading to do.