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...

Chris Millet is managing the Podcast at Penn State project for us and is doing a great job!  Last week he decided that he would create a new podcast show that would highlight new and interesting content going on in the Penn State on iTunes U space.  So with that in mind he took a little time and cranked out the first of the weekly series.  Now into its second week it seems Chris is getting the model down.  If you are interested, go on and click the link.  You will be taken into the open part of Penn State on iTunes U.  Let me know what you think.

I got an email from our CIO last night pointing me to a short article in the Scranton Times Tribune highlighting faculty use of podcasting for educational purposes. Nice to see that our faculty and staff at Penn State Worthington are getting some positive press for their efforts. The article is short, but does a nice job of explaining podcasting. Since Scranton is the home to the Office, it just makes it all the better. When we set out to do things University-wide, we want to make sure we are really thinking beyond University Park. This is a nice piece of evidence of that approach.

We are getting closer and closer with our iTunes U implementation here at PSU.  We are a little late with it all, but will have a nice sized pilot for the Fall semester.  As we discovered last Spring, faculty are very interested in being able to protect their podcasts so only their students can see/hear them.  I wonder how much of this is thinking based on the years of LMS/CMS utilization?  At any rate, iTunes U gives us the option of making content open to the world, closed to a specific class, and a few other options in between.  It should make for an interesting pilot. One thing we are...

As things are heating up in the Podcasts at Penn State project more and more faculty are starting to create podcasts for the fall semester.  Chris Millet has been spending an hour with all the faculty who request a consultation and many times these meetings end with a trip to the Faculty Multimedia Center within ETS.  The FMC has already started working with a handful of faculty to create some great content … most of it so far has been created using ProfCast so the audio syncs with the slides from PowerPoint or Keynote.  The faculty are excited and other than a few very small issues with...

For those of you have been around this blog for a while (I can see all four of you out there!), you know that I was/am part of the original Apple Digital Campus group. Back in the day, Apple invited five Universities to help them think about what the digital campus environment might look like in the coming years. All five of us brought a very interesting perspective to the party and we had a great time figuring out what we did, why Apple selected us, and how we could help one of the most creative and educationally grounded companies on the planet think about the higher education landscape. One...

Even as I am neck deep in a podcasting and iTunes U implementation here at PSU, I am gearing up for the next BIG project for us. That project is figuring out how to create a platform can support all sorts of web-based content production — I had written a post about when is a blog not a blog that seemed to get quite a few people thinking and talking here at my campus and beyond. The big thing that we have started to really explore and explain is that the tools that support this whole blogging thing really have the power to support a lot of what is going on on our campuses. Let’s...

Not too long ago I blogged about a great research briefing on how social preference was going to change the way people decided on and purchased songs in the eWorld. Tonight while chatting with Chris Millet, I started wondering how an iMix would work as a digital reading/watching/listening list … I think it is time to add a new question to the list. New question to think about … can/do iMixes work in an iTunes U space? Are they exposed as links just like songs and podcasts? Would be great if it worked that way … I tried creating an iMix with video, podcasts, and a PDF file...