TLT Symposium 2008 is Here!

March 29, 2008 / Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

So the day after my Birthday and on the day of my Dad’s Birthday I am heading to the Penn Stater Conference Center for the 2008 TLT Symposium. No need to go into detail on what this thing is as I’ve been talking about it for months, but I will say I am excited. Excited my be a bit of an understatement as I am so jacked to watch Lessig deliver the keynote this morning. I was lucky enough to spend several hours with him yesterday, mainly listening. My favorite quote from the day was when he was talking to people from our Public Broadcasting group, “Public Broadcasting should focus more on the public and less on the broadcasting.” It was just one of those kinds of days.

At any rate, Lessig gets started this morning after PSU’s President Spanier provides some opening remarks and introductions … I can’t tell you how stunning it is that our little event has ballooned into something of this size on our campus. Not only do we have hundreds of faculty coming from all over the Commonwealth, we have learning designers coming — and that is where the real buzz is. I have been watching the excitement build in my Twitter stream for days and weeks now … it is so cool to see and I am really looking forward to meeting some new friends from my own campus and getting to hang out with the ones I’ve known for years! So, more posts later today both here and at the Symposium site … the Flickr feed of public images is already exploding as is the Twitter space for the Symposium, and the Hashtags site — all worth a peek. I gotta get dressed and get out the door.

Oh, Happy Birthday Dad!

Quick Note on Usability

March 24, 2008March 24, 2008 / Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

We’ve all heard the jokes and snickers about Microsoft’s infamous usability (ahem) in their tools. Today I have been working on my presentation for the NMC Symposium on Mashups that I am to give next week via Adobe Connect. I know Connect fairly weel as I use it here at PSU with some regularity and we have perhaps one of the best ACP for teaching and learning experts (I am a little biased) in the country sitting down the hall from me in Yvonne Clark. So when I need to know something I can feel certain I am getting a solid answer.

Anyway, I am working up my slides using PowerPoint instead of Keynote for the first time in four years or so just so I can load it into ACP and let it run the right way — I am even using the shiny new and very good looking PPT 2008 for my Mac. The software looks OK, but I have to admit it is slow and just doesn’t seem to work the way I want it to … not that solid usability starts and stops with my needs, it should at least not make me feel totally out on my own. At one point I was trying to use the new and improved transition feature and thanks to the perfect placement of the tooltip popup I couldn’t see what transitions were hiding beneath. Not a big deal, but an obvious opportunity for a screencap …

All I am going to say is that Alan, you owe me one … only b/c of the PPT lock in!

Wiki Feeds

March 23, 2008 / Cole Camplese / 4 Comments

As I was looking over the changes at the First Annual Learning Design Non-Conference wiki, I was noticing a bunch of additions. That in and of itself is amazing. But I decided to add the change log RSS to my Google Reader and was really impressed. I know this is going to sound crazy, but it is the first time I have ever subscribed to a wiki change log. This has to be one of the reasons why so many of my colleagues swear by the wiki for group work. I’ve used them for all sorts of things, but I’ve never fallen for them like I just did … all because of a change log.

Our Learning Design Non-Conference

March 23, 2008 / Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

As the TLT Symposium approaches I am struck again and again at how much I enjoy working in the PSU Learning Design community … this community is made up of faculty in all sorts of disciplines, staff across our campuses who think about teaching and learning with technology, and students who are engaged in discovering new territory. It is really active and alive! My Twitter stream tells me that is true.

With that in mind, I am thinking about how we get as many of these people together to keep pushing our conversation forward. One thing I know we should have done a long time ago is some sort of an unconference model where we can come together, pick some topics, and share thoughts related to them. So, the other night I put together a page at my wiki asking for help in designing the First Annual Learning Design Non-Conference. Come on in and help us figure it out … the whole thing feels like the right thing to do. If there are people outside the area who would want to join the fun, help us think about how we could extend it to others.

My Twitter Community

March 22, 2008March 22, 2008 / Cole Camplese / 7 Comments

I have been writing and talking about how Twitter has seemed to re-emerge in my life recently. I can’t seem to shake my re-found need to connect and share with the vibrant Twitter community. As a matter of fact, we spent quite a bit of time talking about it on ETS Talk 41 this week as well … So much of it has to do with the extended network I can connect to, but recently I am finding myself really engaged in my local tweets. As my friend Scott McDonald remarked at lunch the other day when I was saying I haven’t been this plugged in since this time last year, “its the energy leading up to the Symposium.” He is right on several levels, but I would contend that it is more than that. Let me share a couple of recent examples.

The first started on Wednesday evening when I decided to post the Symposium Tag images that were created for the people tagging at the Symposium. I made a simple post over at the ETS site that explained the tags and provided a simple download for the whole group. The ETS site is setup to send an automatic tweet, so it hit the Twitter stream. After that I decided to change my Twitter icon to one of the tags and wondered out loud if others would do the same.

Within minutes I was getting tweets from every direction … and a strange thing was happening, people were changing their icons. Then I jumped and used CafePress to make myself a tag t-shirt. I let people know via Twitter and several people wanted one. I made a few more and shared the link and some amazing things started to happen — several people Tweeted back that they too bought some of the “Tag Swag” right then and there. The more amazing thing was the flow of the whole thing … people firing Tweets back and forth all getting hyed up for the Symposium next week. It felt like it was the kind of thing Twitter is designed for. At the end of the evening, people were recounting their purchases and expressing how much they enjoyed the interaction … the community had emerged, come together, and was ultra engaged.

When I got on Twitter the next day I was amazed at what my Twitter stream looked like … nearly all the PSU people (and I follow a heck of a lot of non-PSU people as well) with Symposium Tags flying around as icons.

Now on to the second example — and I promise I will make it quick. Thursday is the day Scott and I teach our “Disruptive Technologies” course … about half of the class is on Twitter and they all went through the Alan Levine Twitter Curve cycle … started with “this is the stupidest thing I have ever done …” and have ended up with, well, I’ll let their tweets tell the story.

I know this is a long and twisted post, but if you’ve made it this far I’d love to hear if you are finding similar things in your environment. I know that Twitter started to make me ultra aware of how lucky I am to live and work in such a vibrant community like PSU … now I am seeing how amazingly connected and interesting all of them are. Being able to push the walls of a class out by several hundred miles and also push beyond the normal roles our identity assign us (teacher, student, staff, faculty, etc) has been an amazing eye opening experience.

Back at It

March 17, 2008March 17, 2008 / Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

Well we are now less than two weeks away from the TLT Symposium here at PSU. It is a very exciting countdown given the program looks great, the surround activities look fun, and with Lessig coming I have a real sense of excitement. Less than two weeks to wrap up the lose ends and to add a couple new little wrinkles to the mix.

One such wrinkle is the addition of the “Tag Team” table to help Symposium visiters get started in the social software space … what we have decided to do is to have a table where people can walk up and feel supported in understanding how to use the conference tag tltsymposium2008 with Flickr, the blogs, del.icio.us, and Twitter during the Symposium. The idea is simple, we are asking people to share thoughts during the event, but with an expected crowd of 350, it will be tough to see more than a quarter of them really contributing. Most of that is awareness and an unfamiliarity with the tools. That is where the Tag Team comes in. There should be to on duty throughout the day to help people get accounts and understand tags. Should be interesting … oh, and my students don’t know this yet, but we’ll be asking them to take shifts at the Tag Team table. Shhh don’t tell them!

Real Life

March 15, 2008March 15, 2008 / Cole Camplese / 6 Comments

With all of blogging about Second Life, identity, and my online world I thought I’d share something a little more personal than I typically do. I very rarely, if ever, go this far off blog with things, but I have to say the last two days away from home with my wife and my two children has me realizing more than ever what it is all about. I can say with total honesty that I really do love what I do in my professional life, but days like yesterday and today make me reconnect with what brings me balance and peace. Today in particular was amazing — the sun, the ocean, a quiet walk with my (not so) baby boy asleep in the stroller — all of it was humbling and perfect. After spending some amazing time on the beach with the family, a time my daughter marked by actually getting into the Atlantic Ocean in mid March, I can say that I am completely in awe of what is around me.

The two wonderful and mysterious little people who share DNA with me continue to bring me to my knees in appreciation. I never share public pictures of them, but the setting and their smiles have left me with little choice. So, with that I say I am sorry for inflicting a moment of personal reflection on anyone who decided to show up for this post and want to tell anyone who will listen that life is truly a gift. There will be no talk of SecondLife, RSS, Twitter, or anything else … the images that follow are my meta identity. That’s it.

shelling

max

running

sharing

max looking

early spring

Symposium Tagging

March 11, 2008March 11, 2008 / Cole Camplese / 5 Comments

One of the nice new additions to this year’s TLT Symposium are the beautifully designed Tag stickers. These were designed by Audrey Romano in ETS — I think the overall idea was a joint venture between the Symposium project manager, Allan Gyorke, and all the members of the committee. What I like is that they focus on the idea that people all over our campus are doing really interesting things with the platforms we are working on … in a lot of cases, many of these people don’t get the chance to talk directly with each other about what they are doing. So one way to overcome that was to take the idea of people tagging to a new level and let people use these stickers to indicate what they are into by sticking them to their badges. Hopefully conversation will occur with people informally sharing their interests and ideas. Here are a few samples:

The stickers are produced by the people at moo.com and they are of the highest quality. Last year we did Moo Cards and they were a real hit, so this year we embraced the idea that we should use some visual design in a more obvious way. I’ve started to integrate these into the ETS website as well to indicate project groups … we also make heavy use of the concept at the ETS Community Hub.

Cole Camplese

Learning and Innovation

Month: March 2008