Month: June 2007

Web 2007 at Penn State

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

Today I had the pleasure of presenting at the 10th annual Penn State Web Conference. This is the second year in a row that I have presented at this conference and it was just as much fun this year. Jim Leous and I revived our Web 2.0 in the Higher Education Enterprise act for this year … offering a bit of a status update on the state of Web 2.0 stuff going on here at PSU. Sort of cool to look back and see that at this time last year we were presenting dreams about University wide blogging, podcasting, and general Web 2.0 adoption and this year we were able to show what our emerging services look like. What great feeling it is to be talking about reality and not just “imagine if you will …” kind of stuff. I feel like we have made real progress in the last 18 months or so.

I really enjoying getting to present with Jim … he has been an innovator on our campus for so many years and he has insight into why things are the way they are that so many others don’t. He and I try to make it a fun and light session when we do this and I hope we pulled it off this year. It was also nice to see the conference bring a blog online this year as well as encourage people to tag items in del.icio.us and Flickr with “psuweb2007” … walking the talk is an important piece to the puzzle. By all accounts it seemed like a successful day and one that hope continues to push our overall awareness towards emerging web trends forward. I will also say it is so good to see close to 300 people (all from PSU) kicking the web tires. The next step has to invovle getting members of this community together with the learning design community in some sort of un-conference way to really get the conversation rolling. No matter how you cut it, I had a good time today.

My schedule continues to be hectic as tomorrow it is off to Pittsburgh to spend time learning more about Google and what they do … that should be a blast. Back in town Wed and getting ready for another talk at the Technology in Business Education conference. Again, new audiences and new challenges … should be fun and interesting. I will attempt to post thoughts about it all as it happens.

6/12/07: Presentation: Penn State Web Conference

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On June 12th I will be co-presenting at the 10th Annual Penn State Web Conference with my colleague, Jim Leous. Jim and I co-presented last year as well and it was a blast. Our topic this year builds on where we left off last year … this year we will take a look at the state of Web 2.0 in the Higher Education Enterprise 2.0 … we've worked very hard at PSU to make progress in this space over the last year and this talk will bring some of the outcomes and lessons learned to bear.
Slides available as PDF.

6/14/07: Featured Talk: Technology In Business Schools Roundtable Annual Meeting

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On June 14, 2007 I will be presenting and leading a session titled, Implementing Disruptive Technologies into the Learning Process at the Technology In Business Schools Roundtable Annual Meeting hosted by Penn State's Smeal College of Business. This should be an interesting opportunity to engage a group of people that I assume will be interested in looking at how business schools should be playing in the emerging technologies space for teaching and learning. This is an important event for me as the Dean of the College of Business is Jim Thomas. Dean Thomas was the Dean of the College of Information Sciences and Technology while I was the Director of the IST Solutions Institute.
My slides are available here as a PDF.

Engagment Stuff

/ Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

Boy, it has been a long time since the blog has published any new content. I can tell you why — real life. Work has been more than insane the last three weeks and the personal life (you know the one that really matters) has been over the top busy as well. A little travel thrown in last week and major preparation on the new Digital Commons project we are starting up at PSU this summer has put a major dent in my ability to write, read, or even think about anything other than work and family. But with that said, those new iPhone ads rock …

At any rate, this post is about engagement … not the kind that leads to marriage — by the way that is another thing that is part of the insanity, my sister is getting married in a month and we seem to be a big part of the planning process. I am talking about the Engagement Initiative we maintain here at ETS. This whole thing came out of my interest in us thinking more strategically about the kinds of ways we work with faculty and drive adoption of the things we are thinking about and working on. Last year at one of our ETS Leadership retreats I sketched out a process that we are now using to take ideas through to projects … the rain cycle, as many people around my office call it, is designed to help us be agile about starting new things but also be very cautious about what we take towards University service. Getting to the University service level is a dangerous thing — supporting 100,000+ users is not to be taken lightly. What this process gives us is the ability to engage faculty in the use of emerging technologies in a rapid fashion while giving us the time to assess the value and cost of implementation. I wrote about this quite some time ago. At any rate, here is the process map I created:

Engage Process
Click to See

The process starts with the Hot Team concept and follows a series of opportunities for collaboration and assessment all the way around. What is nice is this articulates that it is cool to try something and see if it works … if it doesn’t then we get out. It articulates that a bad idea is OK as long as we know why it is bad.

Fast forward to this week and the fact that NMC Conference is going on. I have several staff there and one of them, Brett Bixler decided to submit a poster that shares the Engage Process Map. He worked with Dave Stong to create a stylized version of it … Brett is all about serious games, as a matter of fact he runs our serious games project and manages our Virtual World blog. He and Dave redesigned the process map to be a game board … just blew me out of the water! I love it … take a peek:

Engage Game

I hope you all like as much as I do. As an aside, the Engage Initiative is working. We have been able to take a dozen or so projects ideas into the cycle and produce not only white papers about them, but we’ve been able to work directly with some great faculty to help us understand where we should be taking this stuff. I wonder how other people get faculty engaged on their campuses?

BTW, you have to read about the process Brett and Dave took in creating their award winning poster.

Update: I just found out the poster won the Judge’s Choice award at the NMC Summer Conference!

6/18/07: Keynote Talk: Third Annual One-to-One Computing Conference

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On June 18, 2007 I will be delivering a keynote talk to the participants on the Third Annual One-to-One Computing Conference. This annual event is held at Penn State University on the University Park campus. I am looking forward to this as it is an opportunity to talk with a whole new audience — mainly K-12 teachers. I will be talking about how we can leverage emerging technologies in the classroom to help extend the conversation. I am looking forward to the event and to the opportunity. Another big reason I am very excited is that the Father of the conference is Kyle Peck and many of my good friends in the College of Education have had a big hand in its overall success.
Link to presentation. Download the PDF