Big Week Coming Up

Now that Dr. C (my Dad) has entered the blogoshpere with his first comment here at my blog I feel as though worlds are colliding … this is just the latest sign that technology is impacting so much of our daily existence … dare I call it ubiquitous? I knew things were being turned upside down in their house when I watched him on the couch at their house clicking away wirelessly on the couch last weekend. I just never thought he’d figure out how to drop sarcastic comments on me.

In my real life, I have been spending a great deal of time meeting with people who until recently have not embraced technology as a cornerstone to academic pursuits. It has been an amazing few days — creating new opportunities on campus that will extend our reach into more corners of the University. Yesterday for example was spent meeting with faculty and department heads from two very different colleges here at PSU looking to enhance and extend their curriculum with eAnything. Today was equally as exciting … having lunch with one of the smarter guys on campus and talking about both the rich history of eLearning at PSU and the great potential for the future. Good stuff.

Next week we host the Web 2006 conference here on our campus and it proves to be an exciting event. Over 350 web professionals from all over PSU will be descending on us for two days of peace, love, and music — no, wait, that’s not right … two days of hands on information rich sessions that will hopefully bind us together like the event on old man Max Yasgur’s farm. I am actually doing two talks … one on podcasting and the other on Web 2.0 in the higher education enterprise. Should be interesting. The highlight for me is the fact that Jeff Veen is the keynote … I am looking forward to hanging out and talking with him Monday night and hearing his talk Tuesday morning. I’m not even close to being done with my talks, but I imagine it’ll get done sooner or later. Then I spend some time with my friends from Apple at Harvard at their Apple Digital Campus Leadership Institute … I am looking forward to that as I am traveling with Kyle Peck, who is an amazing educator and world-class thought leader. Three days with him will be a real treat. At any rate, now that it is close to the weekend I can hunker down and get my presos done — oh, and spread eight yards of mulch in my yard.

The Hot Team … LionShare Style

When I came down from the IST Solutions Institute late last year I was interested in creating opportunities to explore technology as it relates to teaching and learning that could be connected with tangible outcomes. One thing I have been working towards is a systematic process that charges a small group with looking at a specific technology to help inform our internal teams as they work with members of our audiences to apply new solutions in and out of our classrooms. The notion of the Hot Team was one that came out of some thinking spurred by the Art of Innovation book put together by the folks at Ideo. The Hot Team concept is actually quite simple — ask people to explore/play/investigate something specific and write up the findings as a white paper.

A while back we did a Hot Team that looked at Pachyderm as an authoring environment, but have had a little trouble getting another one going. Two weeks ago we decided to put a team together to investigate LionShare. LionShare is an open source peer-to-peer tool developed here within Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State under the leadership of Mike Halm. It is a very interesting piece of technology that does so much more than help you securely exchange files. This is P2P in a whole new light. Mike and his team are close to releasing LionShare widely here on campus and we wanted to understand it better to help drive adoption for teaching, learning, and research purposes. The Hot Team will be finished up by June 15th and we’ll be sure to share the findings. How do you encourage/support/promote the notion of investigating and reporting on new uses of technology for teaching and learning purposes?

Blogging at a BIG University

As the three people who regularly read this blog know, I work at Penn State. Those of who know Penn State know it is big. Somewhere in the 80,000 student range across all the campuses. There over 40,000 here at our University Park campus alone. We are starting to talk about giving blogs (as James Farmer would say). Clearly we’ve thought about why it would be a good thing and are now moving into the land of what we would do and how would we do it. Our IT people are very smart and understand scale in a way I do not, so I am not going to argue with them when they discuss things like server load and security. I am lucky enough to be a guiding member of the team, so I am taking my thoughts public … I usually stay away from large-scale work projects here, but I thought since this is a blog project what a better place to start than to solicit feedback from the blogosphere. So please help us think about this!

What follows are some general thoughts about where we are after a bunch of general conversations and one meeting … oh and a lot of this is my thinking along with one other colleague — in other words, this doesn’t represent Penn State’s position on any of this. Please feel free to leave comments or email me ideas. First the basic assumptions:

Blog installation/activation managed centrally (vs. local installations) a lot like blogger.com to provide:

• activation via an easy to use control panel
• no access to underlying code
• blogs are published into individuals’ personal web space via a static publishing model (a lot like MoveableType or remote Blogger publishing). At PSU we provide faculty, staff, and students with 1 GB of hosted web space.

Why would we do this? Well, for one reason we can maintain a single code base for all blogs … so when things need upgraded we don’t have to do 40,000 updates at once. It also facilitates integration, ensures security, professional look and feel can be maintained on blogs (esp. important if student blog being used like ePortfolio), and we absolutely don’t want to end up with scattered, disjointed collection of blogs, and have no way to fully leverage this service.

Some of the Features

• Group blogs with multiple authors
• RSS 2.0 with support for enclosures to allow for podcasting
• Control Panel model
• Allow individuals to create and post to multiple blogs
• Access controls to enable public/private blogs as well as public/private posts on blogs
• XMLRPC – if it can be secured
• Tagging at some level — to be discussed further
• Categories – critical feature for the creation of custom URLs and custom RSS feeds
• Themes so end users can skin their blogs
• Blog Rolls – manage a group of links in multiple link categories
• Track backs
• Allow local search on a per blog basis
• Spam protection
• Allow for comments
• Comment controls — approval, edit, delete, etc.
• Text formatting — do we use a WYSIWYG editor for posting?
• Plug-in architecture?

So as we are going forward we have many questions and are in the early stages but are very excited about what is going on … we still have questions and are very open to suggestions. I would be curious to hear about others are doing at their schools to enable blogging in a quasi-controlled environment.

Penn State TLT Symposium

The Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium kicks off in the morning.  I just had dinner with Henry Jenkins, our keynote speaker, and if he tells the same types of stories tomorrow, it’ll be amazing.  Smart guy.

Do me favor, join us tomorrow via the event blog.  We are doing live blogging and podcasting all day long — from every session.  It is the first event at PSU to take advantage of these types of spaces, so it will be interesting to see how it all goes down.  Either way, stop by.

Teaching and Learning Symposium at Penn State

We are in the final planning stages for the Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology that is scheduled for April 8th here on our University Park campus. This year we are doing some new things — not new to the rest of the world, just to Penn State. For one thing, we are skipping the traditional web site and running the Symposium from a WordPress powered blog space. Amazing how quickly and easily all that comes together! I have also found that giving people on campus a new view of a blog has been an ah-ha moment of sorts.

We are also releasing podcasts once a week leading up to the event (iTunes link). These are produced by the staff at Studio 204. Studio 204 is another piece to Edication Technology Serivces that focuses attention on providing PSU students with a digital video and audio production space. It has a studio and a seperate video/audio production room. The podcasts are built around the themes for the Symposium and are conducted in the student union on campus. Kind of cool to hear the students’ voices. This is another one of those ah-ha moments for people … I get asked about podcasting all the time on campus and this is just a great way to really show people what we are talking about.

We have recruited about 20 bloggers for the event, so that each session has a set of notes/thoughts instantly available. We’ll also be blogging the “birds of a feather” lunchtime discussions. All of it will wrap up with an invitiation to attend a new monthly brown bag event related to Teaching Innovations on our campus. All in all I am really looking forward to the event — I am really excited by the idea of including the technologies we are constantly talking about and exposing it to our guests.

ProfCast Thoughts … The Podcast

After I posted about the missing podcasting link last week I got a couple of comments asking for my ProfCast thoughts … I am not going to do an all out review, but instead thought I’d share my thoughts as a Podcast … surprisingly not using ProfCast. Not that it isn’t a good tool, its just I needed to edit it a bit and that is the big hang up with that tool for me right now. I did have a chance to speak to the founder of the company that makes ProfCast and he assured me that good things are coming.

At any rate, take a listen to the podcast … it is only about 13 minutes long and weighs in around 7 MB.

Zope/Plone … What Do You Think?

Here at Penn State we are looking very closely at Zope/Plone as a foundation for a lot of stuff … what I am looking for are ideas, thoughts, and just some comments from everyone as to experiecnes and thoughts related to it. We will be using it for University-wide implementations of several tools … BTW, Institutional-wide at PSU can reach the 80,000-100,000 user mark.  Thanks to D’Arcy for helping me with this one!