My Head in the Clouds

For the past two weeks I have been using a MacBook Air almost exclusively as my mobile platform. I was very skeptical of the Air as a primary machine for me — I thought is was way too underpowered and had way too many compromises for my high intensity needs. I have to say I have been wrong, but with a few exceptions. The biggest drawback is the Air’s inability to drive my 30″ display on my desk. I can’t give that up — no way, no how. But other than that, the Air is a joy to use.

You can read about performance and that kind of stuff all over the web, so I won’t go into that beyond the fact that this ting is plenty fast. Now with that said, I have to admit I have given all sorts of stuff up — stuff I am actually enjoying not having on my machine. I am attempting to live in the cloud as much as possible and only use Apple applications (with few minor exceptions) on the machine itself. So far I have used this thing for nearly two weeks without the following two big suites:

• Microsoft Office: I am loving not having to wait for that thing to do its work. I obviously get a ton of attachments as Word documents that I have to review … probably a dozen or more a day. What to do? Well, as long as it is a .doc I can simply upload it into Google Docs and edit away. I’m sure I will bump my head on this eventually, but I haven’t missed a beat with it yet.
• Adobe CS3: I miss PhotoShop, but really only for easy resizing of images. Clearly I am not a graphic designer so this approach wouldn’t work for everyone. I am almost embarrassed to say I use PS mostly for resizing images for blog posts and for other online publishing tasks. I am taking advantage of Preview’s ability to scale images at the moment, but will probably find a better way to do it online or via another light weight application like ImageWell.

I have had wiki fever lately, so I haven’t run into any real issues with my multiple machine life … I have an iMac at home, a Mac Mini at work, and I still have my MBP hooked up to my 30″ on my desk. People have been asking me how I keep it all in sync. The answer lies in the cloud. Bookmarks? Del.icio.us keeps that working. Documents? Google Docs keeps that working. Writing? My various blogs and wikis keep that working. Email? I have IMAP for my PSU mail and GMail keeps the personal stuff working perfectly.

I have given up keeping multiple music collections going, but I have an iPhone to keep me happy when I need a music fix. As a matter of fact I haven’t found myself reaching for anything that I don’t have. An amazing thing is going on … I haven’t put any documents (of any kind) on the Air to date. I download them only to move them into the cloud to access them later. Kinda amazing. I’m sure I’ll run into other issues (not sure how I’ll connect my Express Card cell modem, but that is a worry for travel), but at the moment I am very happy. It is amazing how having this small of a machine has altered my use of the Internet. I like it. More to come as it evolves.

More Thoughts on Open Course Design

I am going to make a quick return to some previous writing I did on the potential power of community to drive course and knowledge creation. Bear with me, as I am still getting my head wrapped around this whole thing. I am clearly not there yet, so this is an open call for discussion around this concept.

Let me just say that I am loving the wiki. I have never (in my 10 years at PSU) seen the power of the collective more clearly than I have through the use of the ETS Wiki to drive thinking forward. Nearly as many of the edits to the things we are working on internally are coming from those outside the ETS staff — amazing and very powerful. Since I said no more invitations in my last post, let me say that I was wrong. You are invited to continue to participate. It is making my work more meaningful on levels I didn’t anticipate. With that said, I am getting set to explore a new use of wikis here at PSU.

With the closing of the IST Solutions Institute, a place I called home for six and a half good years, I have been working through emotions about lots of things. One thing I am struck by is the fact that much of the work of SI in the early days centered around creating courses for use across the State of PA to help manage curricular drift, create new standards for problem based learning approaches, and unify faculty in their curricular decisions. We built the Online IST courses to serve as the basis for the core undergraduate curriculum for a brand new College at a big, geographically dispersed University. The most amazing thing about it to this day was that faculty used it! They used these centrally designed course materials as their textbooks, delivered the problem activities we designed, used the ANGEL templates to quickly generate their semester sequence, and they participated with us by offering to help edit, create, and grow the content so it better matched the needs of the curriculum. Amazing participation and for me it was career changing observation.

So flash forward to the SI closure and a note I recieved about how the course materials would be “frozen” and left in their current state — no new updates. Perhaps an opportunity to explore new thinking? Why not go the other route? Why not “defrost” the materials and turn them into wiki articles and invite the IST community in to participate? Think how a concept as simple as “Knowledge Worker” (update …compare the linked Wikipedia article with this lesson from Online IST 110 on the same concept … sorry, PSU authentication is required.) could be created and grown through active participation. Think about dozens and dozens of these articles being created and shared openly within the community so the content grows and becomes as rich a resource and it once was — only stronger with the power of community behind it.

Well, people say that is fine, but what do you do with hundreds of disconnected articles? I guess my answer is to invite the community in to create meta articles — articles that creates a narrative story about the collection of concepts you are trying to string together into lessons/topics/chapters or whatever you want to call them. Let a course committee determine how the meta articles link and drive the course structure, but do it from a wiki approach.

I would have to think new affordances would present themselves … here are a couple I am thinking about:

• Faculty could weave their work into the articles in a more seamless way. By exposing their research and citing their publications in a wiki article students would get a more complete perspective of what the field is all about. Encouraging debate within the articles would open up new perspectives on otherwise mundane topics.
• Students could be asked to contribute new knowledge and make it available to the course committees for inclusion in the meta articles. Students are often out in front of us on emerging trends and getting them to contribute seems really exciting and very appropriate.
• Alumni, Doctoral students, and industry partners could participate in new ways that brings in perspectives that would otherwise be locked out. One of my former colleagues at IST, Shawn Clark, has done amazing work with an advisory board member and letting him work side by side (virtually) with the students. The reason it works is because Dr. Clark gets that there are people outside the academy that have much to contribute to the work going on inside the academy. His futures site is a model of open collaboration and contribution. If Shawn can pull it off, don’t you think other interested parties connected to IST could as well? Wiki content could help that.

There are more, but at the end of the day this would be a ton of work — not at all hard to move content out of existing systems, but really hard to socialize the whole approach. Someone would have to apply that energy and someone would have to see the value in it all to make it real. With the closing of the Solutions Institute, I’m not sure who that person is.

Invitations? Not Anymore.

Running through a lazy Saturday read of the feeds and I noticed that my long-time colleague and friend, Chris Stubbs, has written another one of his great posts. I have to admit reading Mr. Stubbs’ blog is one of my favorite things to do. If you don’t read it, go on and give him a shot. At any rate, Stubbs has a particularly good post today titled, No Invitation Required in which he comes right out and says what so many of us feel — don’t wait to participate.

Its not so much that he says it, it is that he says it well. I was particularly interested in his closing paragrph (right before he goes and quotes John Mayer … not that I don’t listen, just surprised):

So if you are reading this and you’ve ever hesitated to participate in the web 2.0 world – to comment, to friend someone, to offer up your $0.02 or jump into a conversation, take heed: don’t wait for an invitation. Not only is an invitation not required, but frankly it may never come. Even with the best analytics, the internet is closer to a one way mirror than a transparent piece of glass. Just because you are interested in a web 2.0 idea, podcast, or post, doesnt mean that the creators know it. The web is too big for invitations. And if you are worried about sounding stupid, worried you don’t have anything important to contribute, or are not willing to take the initiative, to speak your mind and to join in the conversation, you will never be recognized. Your voice will never be heard. You lose a chance to participate. The world loses your contribution. No one wins.

I think too many of us forget that the spaces we live in are very new to whole bunch of folks and that they aren’t aware of the protocol — they don’t know the rules are different in the web 2.0 space and many are very uncomfortable interrupting their understood social norms. I hear it from people quite a bit myself, “I didn’t know I could participate in the [insert name of event/opportunity/space here].” I just never really took a minute to step back and think that I am contributing to the problem by not being more overt, by not going beyond assuming people know they have an open invitation, by not being more clear. For that I am sorry, but as Stubbs says if you are waiting for the US Postal Service to show up with an invitation to the conversation you could be waiting a long time. But with that said, let me go ahead and say it so those who are here can read it for themselves — You are Invitied to Participate!

Now, how to get to the rest of the world who doesn’t know I have a blog?

C is for Community

As is the case with most Fridays when the weather is nice in State College I came home and spent the majority of the evening outside in the yard with the kids listening to music. This evening we decided to forgo the typical “Dinner Mix” playlist of grown up favorites and instead played selections from the Sesame Street gang. My little boy, who will be two in September, fell in love with Cookie Monster’s “C is for Cookie.” I’m not going to make the parallel that we are doing the work of children or anything, but I will say that there was a line that resonated with me — “C is for Cookie and that’s good enough for me.” What struck a chord with me is that our approach to community is very similar to what my little man’s interest in cookies feels like … serious. I must say that the power of the local community is emerging and it is good enough for me.

A stretch perhaps, but on target for what I am feeling on and around campus. Let me share a living example … today we had the first meeting of the Learning Design Summer Camp committee members. Typical stuff for higher education in most cases other than the simple truth is that not a single person was assigned to their post. All we did was establish a wiki, share some opening thoughts, and Tweet the existence of the thinking out to those who were listening. A strange thing happened — lots of people contributed. And then they volunteered. Then another even more amazing thing happened — people outside the standard Twitter stream joined the conversation. Community happened.

Our Summer Camp is shaping up to be quite the event. I am personally hoping it pushes a conversation forward related to the tools we’ve been building on campus to support new thinking for teaching and learning. The idea is to get people together to actively engage in discourse that is well beyond the typical “how to” format we all deal with. No matter what I am hopeful to see about 100 of my colleagues working together to think critically about how we design learning spaces. Seems like a very cool thing. It is time we all start to raise the level of our conversations.

All of it shows me once again the power of the collective. It also reminds me just how open and engaged the community is on our campus. I am very proud to be a part of it!

Presentation: 06/12/2008: Big 10 Communication Conference

I was asked to present with my colleague, Bart Pursel, on new ways to engage audiences to the Big Ten Communication Conference held here at University Park.  Bart and I decided to tackle the notion of engaging communities — trying to spark some discussion around the use of tools to help bind communities together.  I talked about some of the things we are doing with youtube, Twitter to drive traffic, and podcasting.  Bart spent his time discussing SecondLife and the work he is doing in the College of IST and with the Educational Gaming Commons.  It was a good discussion and fun experience.

Should it all be Miscellaneous?

I know from the start that much of what I am working through will agitate a great number of the people around campus and the world that I consider colleagues. I apologize in advance, but this is territory I want to explore with others.

Today I attended the Penn State Web Conference and left asking new questions about how the information of the academy should be organized … even in that statement I am making the assumption that we should be organizing it. When I step back, I have to ask myself a simple question — what the hell am I asking? Of course we need to organize it — without our attempt to put content into an organized structure we aren’t climbing the curve to information and are certainly stopping short of knowledge … but, to tell you the truth I am now questioning that notion specifically. I am also rethinking the notion of the systems we are asking users to adopt — content management systems. Even the naming of it has become very frustrating to me … the idea that we need to manage content may not be the right approach at all.

I am reading David Weinberger’s new book, Everything is Miscellaneous and am taking from it the idea that information really wants to be free from the structure we attempt to pack it into — as if information is like the silverware we obsessively place into the drawer separated by the little dividing lines. His observation is that digital world shouldn’t be organized in such rigid first or second order structures — that instead it should be allowed to exist as complete thoughts and rearranged and explored based on the users’ needs or the context seekers are approaching it for. From his book:

We can confront the miscellaneous directly in all its unfulfilled glory. We can do it ourselves and, more significantly, we can do it together, figuring out the arrangements that make sense for us now and the arrangements that make sense a minute later. Not only can we find what we need faster, but traditional authorities cannot maintain themselves by insisting that we have to go to them. The miscellaneous order is not transforming only business. It is changing how we think the world itself is organized and — perhaps more important — who we think has the authority to tell us so.

So what. Well, what I am continuing to think about is the institutional knowledge issue I’ve been exploring over the course of the last few weeks. The Web Conference, while very solid, seems to be dwelling on two things — the big problem with managing the web at a large University and the use of content management to fix it. I am starting to think we are all wrong on both counts. I’ll try to make sense of that.

The idea that we can follow a book filled with instructions on how to do information architecture, web design, usability, and so forth may be crazy. The problems are too large to be solved by following a recipe that seems to work for corporate sites that have a focus on selling something — sure you can argue we are selling something and that is true. The problem I see is that we have stakeholder groups that insist on being included, largely can’t effectively participate, and really don’t have the space in their worlds to worry about the problem. Think about the pressures that compete with our primary need (in my mind that is recruiting new students) within the context of a University website — instantly I think about faculty pages, research centers, information for existing students, knowledge bases, externally facing Intranet like pages, class webpages, and so on (and on and on …). Let me just say it, those books don’t exist. I haven’t come across the process for managing that process. The system is too complex to look at it and arrive at an answer that makes them all happy.

The second thing I am concerned about is the almost fanatical need to push a tool as a solution. I am all for content management systems (hell I use them every day), but I am afraid that we will sell them as the solution and that they will lead to unfulfilled promises. The CMS will be part of the answer, but why have we lost our ability to look at the overall system? Not a CMS system, I am talking about taking a systemic view on the issue.

I don’t have the answer, but I spent some time talking to a few people I find very smart and suggested we take a step back and look more closely at what has made Wikipedia successful … I am thinking specifically about the governance models around what does and doesn’t see the light of day. What if we did an exercise that asks a subset of our dozens upon dozens of stakeholders to strip away all the noise around the Institutional webspace and focus only on the handful of critical concepts and directed intense, top down energy on that? Below this threshold, let go of control. Completely. Give the users the right and ability to write what needs to be written — let them easily collaborate, share, edit, tag, and create the information that makes sense. Don’t make them worry about hierarchy and navigation. Let University Relations work with the right people to manage say 100 pages within the Institution’s webspace and then let everyone else manage everything else. Make the stuff we really need to share so obvious that it just works and then just let search lead people to the rest. No idea if it would work, but after listening to and interacting with a couple hundred web professionals today, the current system isn’t cutting it.

My parting thought is if we are actually doing what I suggest, but in a massively inefficient way — everyone chooses their tools, establishes their own processes, and builds their own site maps. How does one make the leap from a massively decentralized process to a massively coordinated decentralized collaborative approach? Wow, I have no idea if any of that made any sense. I need reaction and feedback. If you made it this far, I’ll buy the beer to talk this over.