Month: September 2006

TLT Innovator’s Speaker Series

/ Cole Camplese / 2 Comments

One of the cool things about ETS is that we are responsible for the annual Symposium on Teaching and Learning with Technology. Last year you may recall we had a great time and tried all sorts of new things — blogging from the sessions, podcasting, Flickr photo posting, and more to try and enhance and grow our community. This year we are pushing even harder.

One of the things I was very interested in doing was seeing if we could create a series of talks leading up to the Symposium that would pull leaders from our campus out and have them give talks. I wanted it to be a first rate series … with a great room and great speakers so as to help inspire others. I think the Fall 2006 series fits that bill. We have Kyle Peck, Brian Smith, David Passmore, and Rose Baker all doing some very interesting things. The thing I like the best is that these talks all have a very student centric tone to them. It will be good. The room is a wonderful space in the union building and will add to the overall feel of each talk. Below is the announcement. If you happen to be in the area on the dates, please let me know and we’ll make sure you can attend … and yes, we’ll be delivering enhance podcasts of each talk.

Teaching and Learning with Technology is proud to announce the TLT Innovators Speaker Series. Beginning October 2006, this new series will feature Penn State faculty presenting perspectives and approaches for teaching with technology. These presentations, are designed to inspire faculty to develop their own ideas for enhancing their courses with technological components and will continue until the 2007 Symposium, to be held on April 14, 2007.

Register today!

Symposium Speakers

It’s Showtime at Apple, but …

/ Cole Camplese / 2 Comments

There are reports all over the web about the iTunes Music Store being down in advance of Apple’s media event today … I’d discuss the rumors, but what is the point? We’ll know soon enough. What I am finding interesting and a little disturbing is that our Penn State at iTunes U space will not open either … I couldn’t get into Duke’s Fuqua on iTunes U site either, so I am assuming it isn’t local to us. Looks like while the real iTMS is down, so is access to our content.

I can understand at some level, but when you go to the standard iTMS you get some sort of message telling you it is down … our login doesn’t open iTunes at all … it just sits at the browser. Interesting. Some unsolicited advice on usability, provide some sort of feedback to the users that the site is down. It would also be appropriate to articulate the reason and the expected down time. With information like that faculty and students alike can understand.

Other than this, we have been extremely happy with our iTunes U site so far. All the credentials are working and faculty are starting to get their access emails. With that in mind, I hope Apple puts on one hell of a show today so that I can have a reason for the downtime to share.

Communities DO Self Correct

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

In light of the recent FaceBook craziness I have been telling anyone who will listen that the community will regain control over the insanity … today, FB decided it was time to listen to their community and made some changes. This all looks to me like a huge moment in the web 2.0 space — people have a voice, they will use it, and they will protect what is important to them. There is a lesson here folks … don’t piss on the digital herd and whatever you do don’t make a mistake when you are out in front — especially if your success is built around a vocal demographic.

On a related note, I wonder if Amazon would change their tune if all the Mac folks decided they were going to stop buying books (and all the other stuff they sell) because their new Unboxed service in not Mac friendly? Given the power of the blogosphere and the explosion of community this could be a reality. Say what you will about small Apple market share, but 5% of Amazon users would make a difference … it isn’t like it used to be when people just had to take whatever the big boys told them. We have a voice and we will stop showing up. I am not picking on Amazon per say, I am just saying that making big time service decisions aint what it used to be. Watch out, the times they are a changin’ (BTW, that isn’t my line).

In the meantime, log into FB and update your privacy settings — I am sick of seeing all your changes.

Privacy

The FaceBook F*%#s Up

/ Cole Camplese / 5 Comments

I was talking with a student today and he was telling me how much FaceBook blew it with the new set of services they introduced a couple of days ago. I had actually logged into the FB just the other day and was sort of shocked to see the new feed feature running on my profile page. What was both interesting and a bit disconcerting was that I was able to see a whole bunch of information about all my friends and that my friends were able to see a whole bunch information about me. I thought, “I’m nit sure I want everyone to know that I just updated my music profile …” At that same time it was nice to see that one of my friends had gone from single to engaged for example.

When I listened to this student talk about how pissed everyone was I thought about a bunch of people sitting in a room making decisions for their audience … I’ve been in rooms like that, a group of people deciding on features we were convinced were the best thing to do only to find out the hard way we were wrong. I have been thinking about doing a real review of what has gone wrong with the FB’s latest moves but when I read Fred Stutzman’s post on his excellent blog Unit Structures this evening I just thought I’d point to the expert.

Feed

iTunes U vs Roll Your Own

/ Cole Camplese / 4 Comments

Yesterday I did a quick post on iTunes U here at Penn State — really it was a plea for help on meta data management … but, since we have not really announced iTunes U in a formal way I think it has started an interesting question, what do we do with our own Podcasts at Penn State site now? I had originally posted this as a reply to the comment on yesterday’s post, but it got me thinking about the question of iTunes U vs Rolling Your Own …

It is a good question and one that we are constantly tossing back and forth. On one hand, having developed our own space gives us the opportunity to innovate on our terms — that is a good thing. On the other hand Apple is good at this stuff and is likely to continue to create new thinking in the space that we may be just playing catch up to. If I did a balanced score card — not a bad idea — I think at the moment it would come out tipping towards iTunes U. The lure of not having to maintain and grow yet another service (YAS) for my team is a very attractive alternative.

At the moment the Podcasts at Penn State site does not give us an authenticated podcast space … in other words, if you post it in our space anyone can see it. That doesn’t matter to me, but for the vast majority of faculty that doesn’t fly. iTunes U is by nature a secure podcasting platform — obviously we can control the public v private content, but it is much more like a CMS/LMS toolset. Some have criticized Apple for creating a “walled garden,” but in the realities of higher education it is the model people are used to and seemingly prefer. I see a day somewhere in the future where we can open this stuff up, but we aren’t there yet.

Our vision for the Podcasts at Penn State site are to move it to a “podcasting hub” of sorts — a place where faculty, staff, and (eventually) students can go to learn how to podcast, get equipment recommendations, listen to sample podcasts, collect lesson ideas, discuss how they are using podcasts, and other applied things that support the appropriate use of the technology. When our Fall pilot is over, I envision posting the final report there as well. Could it grow into a home for a community of practice? I also see it as a space that will evolve into a directory to highlight the best content at Penn State on iTunes U. I wonder what others would like to see?

Can it be compared to where we all were 10 years ago with the LMS/CMS decisions that we were facing? A lot of people set out to build their own, a lot of people just sort of hung back and waited, and a lot of people went out and bought WebCT, FirstClass, or whatever at the time. I’m not sure it is the same thing, but I have been through the, “let’s build our own solution” cycle too many times and with something as potentially complex (and popular) as this I have to ask myself if it is worth it. I would much rather be in the business of inspiring and supporting the appropriate use of technology for teaching and learning and leave the heavy lifting of designing, developing, and supporting enterprise applications to the big boys. At the end of the day I just hate it when something jumps up and bites me in the ass — for either building or buying. What is the right long term move? Good question …

iTunes U and ID3 Tags

/ Cole Camplese / 8 Comments

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 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?

iTunes U List