I am using the tag “psuiphone” at del.icio.us to tag resources. You can see all resources tagged psuiphone here:
Month: June 2007
iPhone Communication Channels
We’ve been tasked with evaluating Apple’s new iPhone. To help get a sense of how we should handle reports, I’ve set up this simple form. The one requirement we were given was to not report via email … that means to me we should be taking advantage of one or more of our publishing platforms. In my mind we have three very good options:
- Wiki: The wiki would give us a protected, fully editable space for sharing insight. It is more free form than a blog, but does allow for solid collaboration. If you think we should be sharing and editing each other’s thoughts a wiki would be an outstanding option.
- Multi-USer Blog Site: This would give us a single site that all of us could blog about the iPhone at. An example of a space like this would be the ANGEL Community Hub. We could do this in the open or behind PSU authentication. This would give us the ability to post quick thoughts that would be organized via a taxonomy (categories) all in one place.
- PSU Blogs: We could each setup an individual PSU Blog and report in our personal webspace. I would then recommend we aggregate the content together to make it easily readable and discoverable.
Being Digital
I really couldn’t think of a title for this post … I wanted to share a quick story about the Digital Commons project we are currently working on. The Digital Commons is an initiative to provide a common set of tools at all locations of Penn State that enable students to create digital artifacts in a supported way. Too often we (we being administrators and instructors) have these expectations that all our students can easily envision and create digital media. I mean if you look at some of the reports that people like Pew Internet and American Life Project provide you may get the picture that every single person under the age of 25 is capable of creating content that will be shared at youtube. While it is true that there are a whole bunch of these kinds of kids running around our campuses it is just as true there are a whole heck of a lot more who can’t. Just reality.
The Digital Commons is an attempt to help promote and support the notion of being digital. We work hard to encourage faculty to allow evidence of learning in the form of videos, blog posts, podcasts, and more but when they assign it we just sort of assume the kids will just figure it out. Most of the time these kids do, but they do it on their own machines with substandard software tools and without access to things like digital cameras, green screens, lighting, etc — and forget about any education as it relates to things like using lighting, production, planning, or even copyright. That’s where the Digital Commons comes in — it provide more than the equipment, it provides a framework. It is a killer project that has potential for real transformation written all over it.
We are working really hard to install five of these studios across the Commonwealth of PA this Summer. That is tough — there are more factors at play here than are imaginable. Communicating the potential and requirements to each campus is very difficult given the time and geographic challenges. Today we made the first attempt at doing that … instead of getting in the car and visiting each campus we ate some of our own dogfood and used Adobe Connect Pro (you know, Breeze). We have a killer ACP setup here at University Park so we paired it with a call in line and delivered the hour long briefing to multiple campuses from the comfort of one of our conference rooms. I couldn’t be there — I was scheduled to be off site having a meeting at a local restaurant … the place had wifi, so I got there early and pulled out the MacBook Pro. I simply plugged in my earphones, fired up the browser, connected to the ACP meeting, and dialed the conference call with Skype. It was nothing short of amazing — the technology worked and the briefing went exceptionally well. I took a screen cap of the whole thing:
The Digital Commons project is one to watch … I will be sharing more as it all becomes clear, but this is one that we feel very good about. By providing a common platform at all locations there is so much we can bundle under the overall umbrella. Things are off to a very good, but very demanding start. Stay tuned …
Wow, Teachers are Smart!
I have to admit, talking to a couple hundred K-12 educators scared the hell out of me. I am used to higher education and corporate audience so my talk as the lunch keynote for the Third Annual One to One conference was well outside of my comfort zone. Turns out we are all in the same boat – huge challenges in driving acceptance, adoption, and diffusion of innovation within our environments. I had an hour and fifteen minutes to cram a couple of years worth of content related to web 2.0 and how it plays in the education environment into … the talk I did was a reshaped version of my “Enabling the New Classroom Conversation” talk I assembled a while back. I had to do some new stuff with it to make it appropriate for the audience, but at the end of the day I think we engaged in some really meaningful conversation.
As always I’ll make my slides available as a PDF, but I have to admit that I am disappointed that the talk wasn’t captured … this audience could use some long term take aways to help further their cause. Is it just me or is the notion of recording talks still a big deal for conferences?
I got great feedback and the nods of encouragement left me feeling very good about the state of teachers in our world. These are people who are genuinely interested in transforming what they do with the technology that they do have at their fingertips. Here’s a huge issue I didn’t expect coming into it — the notion of schools blocking/filtering access to the tools we look at on a daily basis is disturbing. My big takeawsy is that we all need to be part of the equation and that teachers are working so hard to do great things with their students (BTW, those are our kids). All I have to say is that I wish I would’ve liked my teachers in middle and high school as much as I loved talking with this group today. BTW, thanks much for the kind words!
Show Notes
For the first time in my podcasting career — it spans several years now BTW 😉 — I have added show notes to the entry. Funny, it is the one thing iTunes U doesn’t give us. At any rate, take a listen to ETS Talk 27 and let me know what you think … about the show and the notes.
Be a Pligg
For several years a couple of us have wanted an easy way to rate and organize content that students submit. Sure, we have a the typical CMS/LMS tools, but we have always talked about something much more simple and much more open. When Digg hit the web a couple of years ago we thought the model was perfect — a place where users submit content and then the community does the rest. All we wanted was that environment … enter Pligg. A little piece from their site:
In a world with so many Content Management Systems fighting for control it can seem nearly impossible to pick out a perfect CMS to suit your needs. That’s why Pligg exists, because we know that no CMS is going to offer a perfect out-of-the-box experience for every user. The net would be a boring place if every site looked and acted the same, so be different! Pligg’s dynamic structure allows users to quickly and effortlessly install and customize their sites.
What it all means to me is that I can quickly create a site that lets users submit content and control (through action) where that content lives on the site. I have a Pligg demo site running on one of my domains … take a look.
I see two areas where this stuff could be very helpful — at the course and at the organizational levels. We talked about this during ETS Talk 27 this past week, but I think it is worth repeating here and hoping that the community will participate in some sort of conversation around this thing — in other words, I could use some help thinking about what I will write about.
In the classroom this could be used as a sort of “Leader Board” where students could constantly submit and review content in an ongoing basis. The best content consistently rising to the top of the site. If you made it part of the assignment process you could create a very interesting way to view student and faculty contributions over the course of the semester. I have wanted to let my students be much more active in both contribution and quick assessment — this may be the way.
At the organizational level I think it could be very useful as well. As an example, the new Blogs at Penn State platform has allowed the vast majority of my staff to start blogging out in the open. I would say that at least half are blogging on a regular basis and their posts have been very insightful on many levels. A few weeks ago I discovered how to aggreagate posts together quickly and easily using Google Reader — that has been very helpful. But what if we wanted to take it to the next level? What if we wanted to see how the community would react to not only the content in their blogs, but also at all of our community hub sites and the general web? Pligg could offer us a very unique opportunity to create a new sort of meta hub for community based sharing and control. Solid and informative posts rise to the top and stay sticky longer — that would be a good thing. I am wondering if this could be viewed as the ETS News site — with our press releases competing with staff content … it could just prove to be very interesting.
I would really like to know what others think about adapting a digg model to support learning and organizational communications.
First Signs of Google Presenter
I was going through my feeds and saw a little post over at TechCrunch that brought to light the fact that Gmail can now show browser based slideshows from attached PPT documents. So, I fired up PowerPoint (wow, that hurt my head) and created a quick little three frame slide show. I then sent it to myself at Gmail … when it arrived I saw this:
Notice that little, “View as slideshow” link? It opened up my PPT file in a new browser tab and it looked surprisingly like the original. It killed the transitions, but for letting someone view slides quickly and easily this is a big step forward. I guess if you have PPT installed and you are on a PC, this sort of thing is common. But to tell you the truth, I am hearing more and more people say they have abadonded the whole Office suite lately. Having this work in the browser w/o having the suite makes it all very nice. When I clicked the link this is what I got:
Looks like we are closer to an online presentation tool that works. I wonder if this will lead people to jump off the Office bandwagon?
ETS Talk on the Directory
Every Friday Allan Gyorke, Chris Millet, Brad Kozlek, and I get together to just talk. We record these conversations and call them ETS Talk … our little weekly podcast is really just an opportunity to take an hour every week to think out loud. We’ve recorded 27 of these which is actually sort of amazing given the schedules we all keep. It is honestly a highlight of my week.
How sweet was it to learn tonight that ETS Talk is featured on the new iTunes U directory from within the iTunes Store. Not sure we are worthy given the company we are keeping in the featured section … hmm, let’s see, yeah we’re next to Coach K’s Leadership Conference, an entry from the MIT Open Courseware initiative, and a few other notables. So, if you want to listen to four guys (with the occassional guest) talk about our perspectives on teaching and learning with technology and other stuff, jump on over and take a listen!
