As a quick follow-up to my USA Today post this morning … I was digging a little deeper into the tools there and saw a little, “powered by Pluck” link. When I followed it I surprised to see the tools and services they offer to bring a little social activity to your site. Not sure how we could tap into them, but it is worth some more investigation.
Month: March 2007
Old School Getting Social
When I first started to really use the web back in the early to mid 90s one of my primary destinations was the online version of the USA Today newspaper. It had all the characteristics of what could make the web good back in the day– constantly updated content, ease of navigation, and good search. Every morning I would go into my little home office, fire up my PowerMac 7200 (let it crash and restart a few times), open up a PPP connection, wait while Netscape crawled to life, and watch the USA Today slowly draw on screen … it was my pre-rss daily routine. I would visit it a few times a day just to get the latest news. It was good, but then the web started to change for me and I just stopped showing up. By the emerging social standards the USA Today lacked the punch and collaborative feel of the places I began to spend most of my time — blogs.
Seeing that it is NCAA tournament time, I tend to use “real” web sites a bit more — you know ESPN, CBS Sportsline, and the USA Today. I find their coverage is more in line with what I need to make my annual (terrible) picks. At any rate, I hit the USA Today yesterday to find an interesting opportunity at the top of the site that pulled me in — an opportunity to become a member and log in. Right next to it I saw quotes from real people (just like me) about the things going on in the paper with links to the articles they were associated with. Here’s what I mean:
It isn’t immediately clear what membership provides, but after exploring it starts to make sense … set up a profile, give them some demographic info, and watch the news you want roll in. I accomplish the same thing through RSS and the dozens of sites I use to cull together the information I need to stay current. I suspect that the USA Today folks finally figured out it was time to hook up the power of the information they manage with the increasing demand for personalization and participation.
Will I spend more time at the USA Today? Maybe … I know it won’t be like it was back in the day, but I imagine if I get engaged with a community there I’ll be a return customer. I know other news sites are actively soliciting user participation in the form of videos and other user generated stories, but this one struck me as a nice move for one of my favorite old school web hangouts. Are there other traditional web spaces that are working hard to integrate web 2.0 concepts? I’d like to explore and watch how that goes for them as well.
Why Do We Do It?
I think I know the answer to why we spend all of our time living in places that are less than perfect … for me its all about opportunity and reality. If I could afford to live on an island somewhere I am sure I would … problem is, aside from working in the service industry, there just aren’t a ton of jobs available for someone like me. The other side of it all is that if you live in paradise you most certainly have to work in paradise … to me that just sort of kills the whole thing. I guess for now I am happy with just visiting and spending some mindless days watching the sun go down. With that in mind I’ll share with you some pictures so far.
Another quick thought. My wife and I were pulling some pictures out to throw up on Flickr and we both got a bit of a kick out of the fact that out of the 215 we’ve taken so far only 30 made it. When I said that she looked at me and reminded me that was a little more than a standard roll of film a few years ago. Shoot digital, plug in the camera, let iPhoto pull them in, and instantly publish to Flickr — really amazing. And another thing, literally 30 seconds after posting the pictures I had a comment on a photo from someone I had never met. Amazing.
Talk to Me
While bouncing around the web this morning I came across Wufoo … it is a nice little site that lets you create custom forms on the fly. Its funny because that is something we dreamed about providing in the CMS we built back in the IST days. At any rate, I made this simple little form in no time and was hoping you would fill it out and let me know a little more about how you use my site. I’m not collecting emails and stuff like that and I certainly have no reason to sell any info … just testing out Wufoo and seeing if I can gather a little information.
The price structure looks a whole heck of a lot like BaseCamp … there are free options that let you do a limited amount of data gathering and there are paid accounts that let you grab all sorts of information. The free account gives you three surveys and allows for 100 entries per month. I haven’t explored it yet, but there is an exposed API … could be interesting as well. Once I made the little survey below I was able to just copy and paste the code right into my post.
69,000 Reasons to Pay Attention
In the past I have always railed against the “one system to rule them all” approach to classroom eManagement. I have always found ways to use tools outside the mainstream to achieve my goals — it could be a WordPress blog, Drupal for a large class experience, iTunes U for podcasting, or whatever else seemed interesting at the time. I have a feeling as I go forward I will continue to use these spaces to stretch my understanding of the social software space. With that said I am thinking differently about how we need to leverage our enterprise LMS/CMS environment, ANGEL.
Let me put this into perspective, at Penn State there are currently 69,725 students with at least one course in ANGEL. Let me think about that for a minute … yeah, that’s a lot. To me that says that faculty have adopted the platform. I just spent the last two days in Chicago with peer institutions across the CIC listening to what they are doing in the enterprise LMS space and I can tell you that we are doing just fine at PSU.
My team is looking at ways to innovate and change (for the better) how faculty use technology for teaching and learning … for the past year or so we’ve invested a lot of energy in relationships with other (non-ANGEL) venders trying to introduce new technologies into the teaching and learning landscape — think podcasting and blogging in particular.
The other night, Chris Millet and I were talking about the overhead associated with introducing not only a new approach but a whole new tool to support it … we started to think out loud what it would look like if we spent half that energy working with the ANGEL people on the kinds of things we need from their tools. Would that allow us (long-term) to focus more on the actual adoption of the approach and less time on the adoption of the toolset? I’m not at all saying it is time to bail on innovation — what I am saying is that we have a huge uphill battle in getting faculty to try the things we talk about, why create more issues by pushing multiple platforms at them? What I am now thinking about is how do I spend my time helping the conversation move forward.
I have to wonder what people think about this … does it just absolutely laugh in the face of small pieces or is it the right thing to think about? I honestly can’t see us jumping out of anything we are doing, but it sure would be nice to not have to think about running servers, managing accounts, and holding hands through new tools. Looks to me like there are some serious relationship activities on the horizon for me and those around me. I am up for it … any thoughts on using enterprise tools to support innovation?
TLT Symposium is Back!
Last year one of the big things I spent a ton of time on after arriving at ETS was the TLT Symposium. The Symposium is a full day event on our campus that serves to gather faculty and staff to look at how technology is being used to impact teaching, learning, and research. Last year I put a lot of effort into integrating an open feel to the event — I pushed to have the site come alive as a blog, we podcasted sessions and in the hallways, and more. It turned out to be a very good event and it sparked a lot of interest in the social computing space.
This year things are being taken to whole other level. We’ve moved the event to the conference center on campus, opened it up to more attendees, and have invited two featured speakers. Our own Studio 204 and podcasting groups will again be podcasitng sessions and in the hall, but we’ve added an onsite podcasting studio to the mix. We’ll also have all sorts of demo stations where we’ll be showing off social tools in a teaching and learning context. We’ll also have bloggers keeping track of sessions as they are running. Should prove to be interesting. It is isn’t for another month, but thought I’d share a brief program overview I got yesterday.
The Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology is an opportunity for faculty to gather and share the ways they are using technology to enhance teaching, learning, and research. This year’s theme, “Social Computing and the Culture of Teaching and Learning” addresses many of the concerns and opportunities presented by tools such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, and social networking sites. How does Wikipedia change concepts like intellectual property and publication? How are faculty using tools like podcasts and Second Life to teach foreign languages? How are faculty using Adobe Connect (aka Breeze) and videoconferencing tools to teach courses that are offered at multiple locations?
This year’s Symposium will be held at the Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel on April 14 from 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM. It will begin with a keynote presentation from Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, who conducts research on topics like social computing and the digital divide. The featured speaker over lunch is Bryan Alexander, Research Director for the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, who investigates emerging technologies for a consortium of colleges and universities. The Symposium will close with a Horizon Panel of our speakers and Penn State administrators and students, who will discuss their thoughts on the future of educational technologies. In addition, the Symposium has 27 concurrent sessions throughout the day for Penn State faculty to share their latest work.
I’d love to know what you do on your campus to get faculty together to share their work.
New Look
Nothing too interesting, just a new look here at the old blog. Trying out a new, more modern version of K2 built for three columns. I like the way this one does the three thing — big to the left and two smaller ones to the side. It has a built in banner rotation deal, so I created a few new banners from images I had. There certainly seems to be a theme in those — spring, summer, travel. What can I say, I am jonesin’ for some good weather and have been on a bit of a travel bender lately. Let me know what you think. Tomorrow it is off to Chicago, so who knows what the posting around here will look like … you know the drill, no promises.
A Giant Sucking Sound
That sound you hear is silence … since my three and a half week travel extravaganza started a couple of weeks ago my mind has not been able to focus. I have been stuck in winter weather along I-95 while driving to FL, been stranded in airports, cities, more snow, and now I face another leg of my journey with a pre-dawn flight to Chicago. I get to spend a little more than 24 hours in the windy city before I get to go back to FL for a little vacation time … that is the good news.
I spent several days — actually two more than I was supposed to — in northern California last week (and weekend) meeting primarily with Apple. As usual, our hosts were great — lots of good conversations, smart people, demos, and information that helps me make real decisions about real projects. I try to never miss a chance to spend time with a couple of key people at Apple. The thing with going to Apple is that the whole time you are there your head is spinning with stuff. You can’t talk about any of it because Apple takes its information very seriously and it takes years to establish trust with them … what that means is that my mind is filled with things I’d love to talk about, but can’t. It means my blog goes dead. Sorry about that.
Tomorrow morning I fly to Chicago to meet with the CIC Learning Technologies group. The CIC is essentially the Big Ten on the academic side of the house. It means I’ll get to spend a day an half with peers from schools that are heck of a lot like PSU. We’ll have time to share updates on a whole host of things and I am sure there will be some good bar talk about the things we aren’t really ready to share widely. I will attempt to capture some of that in a post that makes some sense — I need something to jar the wedge out of my brain. For some reason since traveling to the west coast I can’t focus or put two sentences together. Maybe over time it’ll get easier, but right now all I hear is a giant sucking sound in my head.