After the warm-up I tend to dive into the tools we are highlighting — Blogs at Penn State, Podcasts at Penn State, Wikis at Penn State, as well as the Digital Commons initiative and a few others. What made this conversation different was the fact the audience was a group of instructional designer and technologists — certainly a fun group to talk to. I was struck by how interested most of them seemed to be in the tools and how willing they were to discuss how we might think about using them. I was also struck by how excited many of them got as we continued to talk. It was a very fun hour and a half … it left me thinking two things — I would very much like to spend more time with groups of interested designers who are in the midst of creating lots of learning spaces and that I have now done this presentation for about a dozen audiences at Penn State but have failed to deliver it to my own staff. That last point hit me last night as I sat on the back patio with a glass of wine — talk about having one of those reality check, “duh” moments. That is obviously something I have to do.

The thing about the talk is that it really tries to define one of my core strategies — enabling opportunities for faculty, staff, and students to engage in the art of digital expression within the context of higher education. One of my goals is to create a platform that provides for supported use of digital tools to not only enhance teaching and learning, but that can creep into everyday life. The other thing it does is illustrates how quickly we are all moving … two years ago these platforms didn’t exist in a coherent way on our campus. The talents of many people have made it a reality.

At any rate, my slides are available as a PDF — it is big. I have learn how to shrink these things down a bit! I’d love to talk more about this with any of you.

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.

One thing we are doing as we get ready to open the doors is collect existing content from all sorts of sounrces all over campus.  We are talking to both Colleges and Administrative Units to make sure our iTunes U space doesn’t open as an empty shell.  It is actually a very good process as it requires us to go out and touch all corners of the University in an effort to get the best digital media out there.  Pulling in content has posed an interesting challenge however …

What we are discovering is that iTunes U uses the ID3 meta data for naming once you have completed uploading a file.  This makes it a pain as very few people actually attach meta data to the file before they hand them to us.  So once they hit the iTunes U space they have ugly file names and we can’t alter meta data once it is in there.  This has created an extra step in the process that is annoying to say the least — it requires us t obounce out of iTunes U, then import the files into iTunes itself to first add meta data, then locating the edited version, then renaming it, then returning to iTunes U, then going through the iTunes U form based upload process … it isn’t fun.

So, the big question I have is what is the best way to edit these tags without using iTunes?  Are there tools people are using to do this?

One thing we are really starting to notice as a major drawback to iTunes is its inability to play an enhanced podcast the way we think it should.  Everything plays great on screen, the chapters work, and you can watch the slides update in the tiny little album artwork window.  That last point is the kicker … first of all that window is so small it isn’t worth looking at slides on it … if you do resize it you end up altering the way most people really use iTunes the other 18 hours or so a day.  Apple lets you click the window and get a nice fullsize view … great, other than it does not refresh with the podcast.  This is putting us in a little bit of a bind.

One of our primary goals from the get go was cross platform playback (no iPod required) … we thought iTunes is a cross platform tool so we’d be in great shape … the fact that a student cannot sit down and listen and watch an enhanced podcast on their machine is crazy.  We need to have that artwork refresh.  Chris and I are even discussing what it would take to create our own player … sounds like a real pain.  Has anyone found a work around for this feature?

One of the things we decided to do are the ADC Leadership Institutes. I have gone to two of them over the last few years … the first, and my favorite so far, was put on by the people at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism (I did the wrap-up talk)… the second, was at Harvard where I was just a participant and spent the week with Kyle Peck thinking about what our event was to look like.

We’ve been trying for over a year to organize one here at Penn State. With two false starts we are close to finding a date that will actually work. We are thinking early March instead of the November date we’ve been working towards. Today, I was lucky enough to go offsite with three of the smartest people I get to hang around with (Kyle Peck, Carla Zembal-Saul, and Scott McDonalad … BTW, when are they going to start blogging?) — all of them are in the College of Education and all three share a real passion for teaching, teachers, and innovation.

We had scheduled this meeting before our planning committee decided to focus on March, so there wasn’t as much of a sense of urgency — just an opportunity for an informal planning session. We didn’t get the whole thing worked out, but there was a block of about 30 minutes or so where we went off on a real directed brainstorming session … I think the foundation for our event was in there.

It isn’t completely clear to me, but if we can somehow focus on the notion of transforming the higher education landscape so that we urge people to balance the needs/expectations of students with an instructor’s educational goals we’ll be successful. We want to expose people to all sorts of interesting things without making the whole thing solely about emerging technologies … you know, try to also emphasize there are really good things we should be doing in our classrooms and that the right technology choices can help us get there.

I am thinking/hoping we’ll be planning our event in the open — either here at this site, or at another open space. I’d like for a community to develop around this thing so that we can get closer to hitting the mark. Any ideas and thoughts to share?

Just yesterday I was lucky enough to be in a meeting with an amazingly open-minded faculty member who was asking for a blog platform to support his writing course. No problem … but, the big thing here is that we were joined by the people who actually support enterprise applications on my campus — you know the smart guys who think in terms of 100 thousands users and routinely deliver. They were there and it made me think bigger about what we can do to offer a single solution to a single faculty member with a tiny class (25 students) that would teach us about how we could scale to say 5,000 faculty and 80,000 students.

If you look back at some of the requirements we were looking at a few months ago the last time the blog team got together, not much has changed. It still needs to stand up to the pounding that an application like this will get on a big campus — but now we are thinking a whole lot about building a platform that enables all the things we need. We are going to try and build some sort of personal content management solution that can support blogging, portfolios, personal web pages, resumes, syllabi, you name it. Call it what you will, but in my mind we are attacking a paradigm shift here — I am looking to tear down the WYSIWYG tool du-jour domination on our campus. What we want is a space that empowers people to think about content, information architecture, self expression, and self-reflextion instead of how do I do that with DreamWeaver, then SFTP it, and then … see what I am saying? It is time to move to the next level.

What I am planning to do is task several smaller, more focused groups to look at the needs behind ePortfolios, behind personal note taking spaces, behind personal website tools, and so on. We’ll then roll those requirements up to the larger PCM Platform team and start constructing a solution. We have a starting platform in mind that I think can really get us close “out of the box,” but we’ll see.

As we started to talk, it became clear that we can create a handful of custom apps that will glue our solutions together to create all sorts of novel solutions. If students are publishing into their personal webspaces, then we’ll have to find innovative ways of pulling content into other locations. Here’s an example … if a class is blogging, but they are doing it into their personal spaces, the faculty member will want to aggregate every student’s post into a single class blog that she can control and manipulate as if it were a multi-user blogging environment itself. That is where we build.

I know this is a rambling mess, but my thoughts are still coming together. As they develop, I will share more. Any thoughts for me so far?

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 from the iTunes Podcast Directory and I got the message below:

Not promising, for now. If I could quickly create a playlist that turn into an iMix that can be easily linked in an iTunes U space I could do quite a bit. I did try exposing a URL from one of my iMixes and it seemed to work. See for yourself. At the end of the day, this could be a feature that could make this space even more promising.

As an example, if you jump over to Duke University’s School of Business you’ll see something interesting … when you click the link to launch iTunes U you’ll notice you come into the site a couple of steps down the breadtrail. If you try to follow the breadtrail back out to the “main” Duke iTunes U space you are kicked back out the web to authenticate with your Duke credentials. That is very cool. It makes our lives on campus so much easier — we get to run one instance and expose some materials we’d really like to share widely without putting our private content into the wrong hands. So, there is one question answered.

In addition to all that, we are getting closer and closer to testing iTunes U here on our campus. With that in mind, I thought I’d jot down some of the major questions I am getting as I am sharing the news with people. I get asked some basic questions from faculty and staff every time I start the iTunes U discussion. We will be maintaining our public podcasting site as a portal to open and free PSU content as well as a big front door to iTunes U on our campus. The big questions I hear going in look something like:

• Can we have both public and private content in our our single iTunes U implementation? You know, I have heard a couple of different takes on this and am very interested in seeing this in action. There is so much content that we would want open to the public while keeping a bunch of other items closed. We did a very limited pilot this past Spring and there were some serious concerns about posting lecture-based podcasts in the open. The single biggest concern was that the microphone would pick up some sort of private conversation between instructor and student — a real concern. I am hopeful that we can simply designate certain areas open and certain areas private … that would make life much easier.
• How will iTunes U play with our CMS, ANGEL? For now I am telling people that every space in our iTunes U space can expose a URL that will allow instructors to easily provide a direct link to the space itself. I think for the first few months that is the direction we’ll explore. After we get our ideas straight and really understand how it all works, I am guessing we’ll explore a greater level of integration with ANGEL. Imagine tools in ANGEL that allow instructors to manage much of their iTunes U spaces without jumping around different environments.
• How easy will it be for faculty to use? I have no idea … I am assuming it is very easy, but time will tell. I’ll be able to report on that soon enough. For now, from what I have seen there will be a small learning curve, but once it is climbed we should be OK. We have amazing adoption of ANGEL on our campus, but that took time. I am expecting that this will take time as well. I doubt we’ll have explosive use of the service without solid programmatic initiatives in specific Colleges and disciplines. In the early going that is what we will focus on — getting specific partners moving and see what we learn from there.
• What kind of content can be delivered? This to me is the exciting part of the whole thing … instructors can use the space to deliver audio, video, and PDF documents. When I get to that part in my discussions with people I can see light bulbs going on. Once they get the whole subscription model, the next thing they get is that things they want their students to get just show up. If managed correctly, this could have profound effects on efficiencies in the classroom. Imagine not having to worry if your students get their feedback, assignments, or whatever it is you currently push around via email or LMS/CMS? That is a powerful thing … it also gives us the chance to look at how an iTunes U space can be a dynamic syllabus environment.
• Does it support teams? No idea, but I seriously doubt you can make certain tabs and spaces private to sub-groups within a class. We shall see.

So there’s a quick brain dump to get me back on the blogging bandwagon. I have been off for a week or so … been crazy busy and dealing with some things that have sapped my writing energy. Any thoughts from people out there about these questions or have questions of your own?