Odd Week

Posted by Cole Camplese in Presentation, ThoughtsApr 15th, 2009 | 8 Comments

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 critical reflection, that may seem a bit short sighted or jaded but that is how I left feeling. If you look at the Twitter search results from the hashtag I introduced I think you can see a bit of the tension, although there may have only been a dozen of us using our Internet voice while things were happening. It felt like an event that was working really hard to connect with fresh ideas, but was not quite ready to let go of old constructs and have some really difficult discussions. With that said, I did learn quite a bit and I met some really interesting people while there … to top it all off, I got to present and spend time with a great friend and make some new ones. I am honestly hoping the CHE does this again and maybe invites some of us to be a part of the planning for the event. I would definitely go back — if they’ll have me.

As a personal aside, I firmly believe my talks did little to stir up the crowd in any sort of proactive ways — there were lots of folks who dismissed what I had to say as being fluffy and not based on the perceived rigors of traditional scholarship. Of course I was running a risk by showing youtube videos of Charlie getting his finger chomped on, but I wasn’t using the videos as the message — I was using them as a metaphor for the explosion of new forms of conversations happening all over the social web. I know for a fact I missed the mark with at least one audience member who had his hand up even before I finished … his comment created a strange segue into the open discussion portion … and he was serious.

If that is scholarship, we are all doomed.

Never mind the session was titled, “Building the Classroom of the Future” … these folks wanted to hear something else. It was very comforting when a woman in the audience raised her hand and told an amazing story about her 8th grade son who decided to (on his own) create a new religion. At first I was nervous where it was going, but the way she described his passion and his intensity as he researched existing doctrine to come to his own conclusions was the exact right kind of example we needed to get back from the edge of being “doomed.” Interestingly enough I spent time talking to one of the other people in the audience who really challenged my notions and he was far more interested in having a dialogue in a more private setting, even telling me he found the talk “engaging and interesting.” He didn’t seem that way during the session as he told me that all this was fine and good for the soft sciences, but there is no room for distractions in the real sciences (he was a mechanical engineer). Not sure I agree and when we did talk he told me how he does use youtube to show difficult concepts.

But perhaps the biggest stir came after the event when the Chronicle ran two separate stories on my message … the first was titled, “Web 2.0 Classrooms Versus Learning.” I was a bit upset with the use of the word “versus,” but I am guessing conflict sells — I felt as though a more appropriate title might have used the word, “supports” or even “and” as a replacement. Oh well … it created some dialogue. The thing that seemed to blow the doors off it all came about as Jeff Young from the Chronicle called me as I was driving home to talk to me about some things I mentioned about how my colleague, Scott McDonald, and I used Twitter during our classes. In the piece titled, “Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class — via Twitter” my ideas come off as a product of a crazy mad scientist using my students as guinea pigs and my class as an out of control research lab. The comment stream speaks for itself — this is a heavy debate and one that I am really hoping to engage in here locally. I think we have a lot of new opportunities to capture students imagination and engage them in new ways — if we are looking to be a bit crazy … well, here’s to the crazy ones!

And so it was an odd week that has me wondering if what I have to say really does resonate with people or if I am getting the polite nod because people actually think it is all bullshit. Not sure, but I am working to check my own confidence level and working hard this week to get my mojo rising for our own TLT Symposium. I really need to hang out with a group of really engaged and excited educators to get my head back on — and trust me, we have them here at PSU! Maybe I’m not ready to deal with the truth that nothing we do will matter outside these walls — or maybe that is the bullshit in it all. Perhaps those who call it all fluff are holding onto something that no longer exists, maybe notions of control, or maybe that never did exist? I don’t know. Do you?

Voices Carry

Posted by Cole Camplese in PSU BloggingApr 1st, 2009 | 4 Comments

I was feeling really restless early last week about our ability to run and manage new and emerging services in a World where change happens at a pace that is nearly out of control. I thought my post, Why Run a Service would be a signal that I’ve come to a conclusion that there are real reasons to try and keep up. I didn’t honestly expect it to strike the chord it did, but when you ask people interesting questions you sometimes get more interesting questions in return that demand to be explored. Lots of killer conversation going on in the comments of that post … one particular thread emerged about how encouraging open writing and blogging can generate greater depth of connections within our community. That last word is the really important piece to us — how we work to engage our community to embrace these emergent trends is what we think will ultimately make what we do more interesting and important. The more they participate, the more we can contribute opportunities to change teaching and learning.

So back to the Blogs at Penn State … as Brad and I sat there we realized we are sitting on a river of data that is built entirely on people right here at PSU. Now that we are reaching the 10,000 user milestone with the service we are seeing an explosion in the understanding and use of tags for filtering content. Courses are using them to aggregate student posts together, students are using them to mark portfolio entries, departments are using them to pull information/knowledge about initiatives into focus, and so on. Once we realized that we started to realize that we could begin to act a little bit like Twitter and use our data to see trends and ultimately predict the future as it unfolds. With this in mind we’re working on a few new and interesting ways to not only tap into the community but also ways to let them move the state of the University around a bit.

So, as Brad Kozlek wrote yesterday about the birth of PSU Voices and our friend The Reverend, Jim Groom linked to today is now in the wild. Is it done? No, but it has huge potential to draw in community engagement and connect academic use to real world context. The Voices project is really just taking advantage of a mashup of our own tag aggregation for blog posts and collections of related items from across the social web. So, if I use Brad’s example, one were to do a tag search for democracy they’d see all the posts from across the public side of the Blogs at PSU mashed up with items tagged with democracy from YouTube, Flickr, and Delicious … they’d also see a running Twitter stream that uses that same term. What it means to me is if I am a Political Science student in a class using a shared tag, in this case democracy, I get to not only instantly see everything my classmates are writing about, but I get to be exposed to an explosion of opportunities from across the social web. I might see an amazing photo that challenges my notions of the concepts associated with democracy, or a grassroots documentary that makes me want to grab a Flip HD and create a response, or it may open my eyes to a whole series of sites that people from all over the World have tagged. To me, it is the opportunity to be engaged beyond the walls of the classroom that is the primary thing here. Exposure to open resources and the thinking of my peers is a powerful mixture that has me really excited.

So the vlaue in running a service like the Blogs at PSU means we can leverage our investment in the platform and reinvent opportunities within the framework of our local environment. It means that our primary audiences can trust the identity of the local content and be exposed to the massive contributions from across the Internet. It means we can invent … and that rocks.

Changing Nature of Physical Spaces

Posted by Cole Camplese in Learning Spaces, ThoughtsMar 29th, 2009 | 8 Comments

Each Saturday I meet my friend and colleague, Scott McDonald, at a local coffee shop for an hour or so to discuss some emerging research topics we’re working towards. Each week we are amazed at the number of people in Saint’s sitting on their laptops working — most of them are doing browser based work like google docs, Facebook, and the like. It is rare that I see anyone not using the browser as the primary mode of work. That is a big change from even a year or so ago.

The same can typically be observed if you walk onto our campus and into the student union building. You see table after table of students on laptops, living in their browsers — Facebook, gmail, and ANGEL seem to be what I see. Rarely do I observe work happening in “real” applications. I am guessing that will only get more common as the Blogs at PSU gain wider adoption for writing and students begin to weave google docs into their daily workflow.

I am observing a radically changing dynamic on campus that will force us to rethink much of what we offer to students. I’m glad to see my colleague, Allan Gyorke, is leading a team looking at the design of informal learning spaces because we need to really make some changes to keep up with the new reality of mobile computing. I don’t have numbers from this year right in front of me, but I am betting computer ownership among our students is close to 100% and I am betting laptop ownership is around 80% or higher. The old argument/claim that they don’t bring them to campus is holding less water for me … just as an incidental observation, there are more laptop users all over the place than I’ve ever seen.

As I was doing some reading this morning I came across an announcement that the University of Virginia is phasing out its public computing labs. Talk about a radical move! They will repurpose several of the lab spaces to support the need for collaborative work, but the idea that the stand by public computer lab is being phased out is stunning. In the linked announcement they share some remarkable usage statistics that I am fairly sure we could gather quite easily as well … from the piece,

Lab software usage statistics from 2008 reveal that out of a total of 651,900 hours spent using software in the public computing labs, 95% of the time (over 619,500 hours), students were running commodity or free programs such as Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Acrobat Reader, or Microsoft Office. All of these software programs come pre-loaded on student laptops or are available at low or no cost to UVa students. In contrast, just 5% of the time spent running software in public labs was devoted to specialized packages such as MatLab, Eclipse, Mathcad, or SPSS.

The browser is winning. The idea that all students need access to specialized, high-end software like Adobe Photoshop, MatLab, CAD, and other packages is slipping as the ability to do more advanced things in the browser expands. As more of what we do moves to the cloud, the more we’ll have to rethink services. Add to it the extreme economic pressure many institutions are facing and you have a recipe for a changing physical computing landscape. I’d be really interested to know what you are seeing on and around your campuses … are students bringing laptops to campus and do you believe they live in the browser? What should we be doing to address it?

Why Run a Service?

Posted by Cole Camplese in ETS, Higher Education, PSU BloggingMar 22nd, 2009 | 23 Comments

The debate over when to build, buy, or use is one that rages in higher education information technology units all the time. I am constantly asked why we’d run that service versus just relying on someone else to host it for us. I sit in meetings where the debate over taking something off the shelf for our use is weighed against our desire to build it. It never ends and I don’t expect to ever really have a solid answer.

Not too long ago, I was sitting and talking to Brad Kozlek about our choice to run our own blogging platform. I go through these massive swings about the topic — usually settling somewhere around, “why not just lean on wordpress.com and focus on training and adoption.” That argument works on lots of levels. On this particular day we came to another conclusion about why it is so important that we are running our own service — the potential for community.

Several weeks ago I was lucky enough to spend time talking and presenting with Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, Chief Scientist at Twitter … I wrote about it then, but have been thinking about it nearly nonstop. What became incredibly clear to me was that Twitter is sitting on an Ocean of data. Data that they are working really hard to turn into meaningful content. If you go to the Twitter Search page you’ll see that they are making sense out of this data and showing us how clearly the social web is plugged into what is happening. They have their “Trending topics” displayed right below their search field and it shows you what we are all talking about 140 characters at a time. I’m sure many of you have heard the story about how reports in Mumbai were first broadcast via Twitter and the first picture of the plane landing in the Hudson River came through the same channel — its obvious that what is wrong with big media is the same thing that is so very right with the social web — connections building community that is, in the case of Abdur and Twitter, predicting the future as it happens.

So back to the Blogs at Penn State … as Brad and I sat there we realized we are sitting on a river of data that is built entirely on people right here at PSU. Now that we are reaching the 10,000 user milestone with the service we are seeing an explosion in the understanding and use of tags for filtering content. Courses are using them to aggregate student posts together, students are using them to mark portfolio entries, departments are using them to pull information/knowledge about initiatives into focus, and so on. Once we realized that we started to realize that we could begin to act a little bit like Twitter and use our data to see trends and ultimately predict the future as it unfolds. With this in mind we’re working on a few new and interesting ways to not only tap into the community but also ways to let them move the state of the University around a bit.

A simple example is something I’m loosely calling, “PSU Voices.” Essentially we would hand out a tag each month (or perhaps week) related to topic we’d like to see the community explore. Imagine during April (when Earth Day is) asking the student body to write, or post pictures, videos about “ideas to make PSU a more green campus?” We’d ask that question, provide a tag, and watch as the aggregate posts of that month’s conversation came into focus. If we took a simple advertisement out in the student newspaper, The Daily Collegian, to get people to participate I wonder if they would? If they did I think the results would be amazing.

We’ve already started to pull out some trending data based on the popular tags and we are seeing some really interesting things. It was clear last week that lots of students were working on their portfolios. One of the next steps is to build an interface between the tag and content search to see what people are talking about in mass … I can’t even imagine how interesting that could look when we have 20,000 or 30,000 people writing regularly around PSU. I’m not ready to share the pages yet, but I am hoping that in the next couple of weeks we’ll start to see the unintended results of running our own service — the ability to not create community, but to coalesce it. Anyone have thoughts related to these ideas and others?

The Right Start

Posted by Cole Camplese in ThoughtsMar 18th, 2009 | 1 Comment

I’ve had a tough time getting back into writing since my One Post a Day participation during February. March brought about Spring Break and an absolutely amazing vacation that was just what the doctor ordered … problem is that I have been buried in a way I haven’t been in some time. Every day this week I’ve been hoping to write something but I haven’t been able to find the time or the energy.

Driving to work this morning I was in a bit of a funk so I shuffled the music and got a dose of what I really needed — a serendipitous series of songs that changed my day.

It left me wondering what the things are that make our days work? So many of us walk into environments that demand change and attention that it can be a bit overwhelming and lead to frustration. Some days it works and you are ready to meet the challenges … there are other days when it is more than difficult. The best part about it is that each day provides something that makes me want to meet the challenges, to work to change things, and push thinking. The bad parts really do pull me down.

So when the perfect trio of random music carried me to my 8 AM meeting I felt better than I have. Its amazing that three songs can make a day. Are there things that change the day for you?

Our eLearning Platform

Posted by Cole Camplese in eLearning, eLearning Tools, PSU BloggingMar 11th, 2009 | 3 Comments

I’ve been on vacation all week and haven’t really even checked my feeds to see what is going on in the World. I was sort of surprised to see that Apple released a new iPod Shuffle that talks given how hyper-connected I typically am. The thing that prompted me to post this morning has nothing to do with music players however. I came across a post at my new colleague Matt Meyer’s blog, Blog Platform: Authoring Tool, where he exposes some thinking about how he is planning to author and deliver the Biology Wet Lab course he is the lead designer on. I really like the thinking and thought I’d share some overall thoughts.

I’ve written about my struggles with eLearning and eLearning authoring in general lots of times, but after reading Matt’s post this morning I jumped into my way back machine (this blog) and found a post from a couple years ago where I asked for some help thinking about this topic.

What I struggle with is the idea of what is a really good eLearning environment these days? In my mind, a handful of pages of content that link and embed objects that drive student and faculty to engage in conversations (on or off line) seems to be the goal. With that said, why not design those content pages in a blog so students and faculty (and maybe people from the outside) can have conversations in context? Why are we still struggling with what the right eLearning tool set looks like when we are sitting in a world with dozens of content creation tools? The model we are trying to avoid consists of tons of static text pages that prompt students to leave the content and jump into a discussion forum to interact — I’ve never liked that, but now the technology supports what I am after … the opportunity for conversation at every level of a course experience.

I’ve built a couple of examples of blog powered eLearning spaces since then and I’m pretty sure having these examples were helpful in sharing my thoughts with Matt last week. I had written about it back in October as I did a survey of some of the emerging ways our blogging platform has been being used.

Recently I took an old topic from an Online IST course I helped design about seven years ago and republish it via the Blogs at PSU environment. It took only a handful of minutes and produces a portable package that can be customized by an entire team in a collaborative way. And since our platform allows for easy export and import, a faculty member who wants the content can easily download an export file and import it into a new blog space to customize the look, the feel, the content, the activities, or anything else for her own instruction.

When I built the examples I wanted to explore the potential of the platform as an easy to use design and development environment as well as experiment with personalization. I ended up with two versions of the content … one to be used as a “standard” version and one as a fully customized version. The Master Course provides a baseline version of the content in a central location — perhaps in an Open Courseware model. A faculty member could browse the content and download a simple file. This file contains the entire course and structure. This is ideal because it allows that faculty member to manage and customize the content as their own. This can then be used to create a personal version of the content.

What is great to see from Matt’s post is that he gets the notion and he is thinking about how to use the built in communication tools as a way to gather feedback. I can see he and the team he is working with taking advantage of the commenting system to get an idea from students as they work screen by screen what they think of the environment. I am also excited that we are buying into the idea of embedding different kinds of content to make the experience a little more complete — we all know how easy it is to drop in media from YouTube, but imagine collecting data live via an embedded google spreadsheet form and you can imagine that is when things start to get really interesting.

All of this is important stuff and it puts a new look on some existing and (IMO) outdated and outmoded thinking in the eLearning design world. I am anxious to hear what others are thinking about this and the questions Matt is looking to explore.

Taking a Break

Posted by Cole Camplese in Education, ThoughtsMar 6th, 2009 | 2 Comments

I’ve been quiet here for the last week trying to collect thoughts after writing so much last month. I think I’ll be a little quiet for the next several days as well. I’m not giving up on writing, just need to find my voice again. Before I sign off to enjoy Spring Break, I wanted to mention something … I dropped a friend of the family’s son off at school today for them and walked him to his pre-K classroom. It is the same private school my daughter went to prior to moving on to first grade this year at the public school. As I was walking down the hall I saw the quilt her class made last year as a culminating project. I was stopped in my tracks — I was just in awe of what it means.

It was filled with color, life, and inspiration. I recall hearing her talk about the quilt nearly every day last year and didn’t quite understand why it was such a big deal. Even at her graduation when they showed it off it didn’t quite hit me. Seeing this living example of my daughter’s contribution to the intellectual, emotional, and perhaps spiritual embodiment of her school in the hall today made me both very sad and very happy. It is, in every single way, in stark contrast to the representation of her contribution in the public school system — the “adequate sign.” I can’t tell you how it made me feel to know she made something tangible that the current students point to as a model for how they learn to contribute, share, and participate in the process of learning. Really an amazing thing to see.

And with that, I’ll talk to you when the mood strikes!

March is Here!

Posted by Cole Camplese in One Post a Day, ThoughtsMar 1st, 2009 | 5 Comments

I made it through a One Post a Day challenge now for the second time and it feels good to be on the other side. One thing that happened this time around is that lots of people decided to join the conversation — I ended up writing 30 posts and getting 229 comments (right up there with the best ever months). I have to say that reading the comments really helped me think more deeply about the things I was writing about and it certainly pushed me to stay more engaged with my thinking. It was the first time in a long time that I was able to focus energy in a general direction over a series of posts which is typically a problem for me. Like in August when I did this before, I found it both extremely difficult but very rewarding. This time around I found myself really pouring intense energy and thought into what I was writing. So with all of that, I say thank you to all who spent time reading, commenting, retweeting my posts, sending me emails, and talking to me about the things I was writing about. And I will say a sincere thanks to Allan Gyorke for pushing me down this path when I didn’t want to.