This morning I talked to a large group of Alumni Association staff about ideas related to connecting communities. The talk was titled, Emerging Trends for Connecting Communities, and focused on the emergent opportunities within social environments, content creation spaces, and the rise of mobility. It is always quite a bit of fun getting to talk to people outside my specific area of focus and I always discover that we have far more in common than I expect going in. Another nice thing was that I got to give the talk in my old stomping ground at the IST Building … in the IST Cybertorium...

Last week was strange on several levels. It was an odd set of experiences that have left me more confused than usual … so much so that I have been unable to figure out how to write about it all. I attended and presented twice at the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Tech Forum event in Washington DC and while I was really excited to attend I left feeling a bit down. I don’t think it was the event that did it to me, I just think the overall vibe was way outside of my sweet spot. It was a crowd that seemed to be much more interested in yesterday than tomorrow — and as a...

Last week I went to beautiful Bedford Springs, PA to speak to Superintendents from the Allegheny Intermediate Unit … it was both intimidating and exciting. I am always a little nervous speaking to K-12 educators because I always make the mistake of thinking our worlds are so different. It was exciting because I always end up finding out how similar our problems and issues really are. This was no different. I went in thinking I was out of my element and left with a new found appreciation and confidence in my understanding of our shared issues. I shared a mix of stories and statistics...

I blogged about the talk Allan Gyorke and I did at last week’s TechForum and had posted the slides, but wanted to include a little more insight with them. The basic theme of the presentation is related to how we’ve been using Web 2.0 philosophies to support our work within the teaching and learning community. I sat down day before yesterday with my slides and a simple USB headset and tried out the narration recording capabilities of Keynote ‘08 … long story short is that it worked. The resulting presentation is about 50 MB, but it is in iPod format and actually looks...

I just got back last night from Indianapolis, IN where I attended the CIC TechForum 2007. The TF is an event sponsored by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation — essentially the Big Ten schools, but with a focus on academics and administration. I was lucky enough to present and Allan Gyorke and I shared a presentation related to using Web 2.0 technologies and philosophies to support innovation. It is a talk I have been trying out lately, only compressed into the short 20 minutes we were given. I really think it has some potential. The talk essentially covers the steps we’ve...

Day before yesterday my colleague, Allan Gyorke, and I gave a talk to the Instructional Design and Development group at the Penn State World Campus related to Digital Expression. It is a talk I’ve done before and it really focuses on the platforms PSU has been working to deliver for the last 18 months or so. The talk frames the need by looking relatively deeply at the changing characteristics of our undergraduate resident population — they are very mobile, very smart, and very plugged into social spaces (read, Facebook). I use a bunch of PSU statistics gathered by our assessment...

I have to admit, talking to a couple hundred K-12 educators scared the hell out of me. I am used to higher education and corporate audience so my talk as the lunch keynote for the Third Annual One to One conference was well outside of my comfort zone. Turns out we are all in the same boat – huge challenges in driving acceptance, adoption, and diffusion of innovation within our environments. I had an hour and fifteen minutes to cram a couple of years worth of content related to web 2.0 and how it plays in the education environment into … the talk I did was a reshaped version of my...

Today I had the pleasure of presenting at the 10th annual Penn State Web Conference. This is the second year in a row that I have presented at this conference and it was just as much fun this year. Jim Leous and I revived our Web 2.0 in the Higher Education Enterprise act for this year … offering a bit of a status update on the state of Web 2.0 stuff going on here at PSU. Sort of cool to look back and see that at this time last year we were presenting dreams about University wide blogging, podcasting, and general Web 2.0 adoption and this year we were able to show what our emerging services...