Mashups are emerging on our campus in places we'd never expect. Faculty and students alike are building mashups using the platforms we've been implementing and with sites outside the Penn State web. With this in mind, I will be presenting at the NMC Symposium on Mashups on April 2nd, 2008.
Mashing it up at a Big University
While most of our faculty and students don't realize they are creating mashups, some amazing things are happening on our campus. Here at Penn State University we've worked very hard to create flexible platforms to support faculty and students' use of emerging technologies for teaching and learning. What we are starting to see is amazing to us. During this session we will highlight examples of faculty and student mashups from PSU — some of which are directly supported by our Education Technology Services group and some that are just showing up. We will cover the PSU Platform for Digital Expression that is empowering faculty innovation, discuss issues facing implementing mashups at a large university, show real examples that are emerging on campus, and discuss how we facilitate effective creative use by both teachers and learners.
From the Symposium's website:
"The NMC Symposium on Mashups will itself be a mashup of venues, with sessions taking place in the 2D web environment of Adobe Connect, with support by LearningTimes and selected activities in the 3D world of the NMC Conference Center in Second Life (all Second Life events will be streamed back into the Connect environment)."
At the conclusion of the session I will post a PDF of the slides here.
Month: March 2008
Life Stream
So its been over a full week since my last post (as a recovering Catholic, that phrase sounds really familiar) … I have been on the road and have had little time to pull thoughts together in any real sense, but that doesn’t mean my head hasn’t been working overtime. A while back I was invited to give a talk at the University of South Florida, so I jumped on a plane and headed to Tampa last Thursday to talk to a group of faculty, staff, and students about student expectations and the tools we are looking at to engage them. It was a blast — right up until I had to come home. Let me put it this way, my plane took a nose dive towards the approach at the tiny State College airport — that was not fun. We hit a wind sheer that dumped us into a dive that set alarms off in the plane. Ten minutes later and the captain told us we were not going to be landing in State College, but were heading for Baltimore, MD instead. Once in Baltimore we were given the option to get off there or head back to Atlanta. Given my relative expertise in geography I chose to stay in Baltimore because as I saw it, Maryland is closer to Pennsylvania. That’s what I thought until they told us they were taking us home in taxi cabs — long ride, short story, but I made it home around 4:30 AM. It was a mess and has me thinking very seriously about ever traveling in or out of State College in the months of December, January, February, or March. Home is a good thing.
The other thing that is tormenting me are the god damn voices in my head. I am dealing with all sorts of thoughts related to identity management at the moment. A lot of it is coming from conversations I have been having with colleagues at work, but some of it is emerging from the online space. Talk of the PLE and more recently, David Wiley’s posts about his blog as the center to it all have pulled old thinking out into the front of my head. I am struggling with owning/shaping/building identity in ways that I haven’t in quite some time. I have been thinking about how we go about creating new identities all over the web all the while rebuilding our social networks and profiles in an attempt to get them all up to our expectations. What I mean is that each time I want to investigate a new environment I have to beg others to join me just to see how the social structure works … this makes me uncomfortable. What I prefer is to have one identity that I assert into new spaces and when I do, my netowrk and profile rolls along for the ride. I think as we move further and further down the social web path we’ll need to figure out what it really means to own our online identity. My thinking has not yet jelled (but that voice keeps talking to me), but I do think there is an opportunity here to ignore the need to recreate one’s self over and over again in multiple environments and instead just really focus in on honing it in one place. Is that too flaky? Is it to needy? Is it too much to ask?
I have been spending a lot of time recently talking about meta identity — you know, all these small pieces of identity add up to a real identity. FLickr, del.icio.us, my blogs, twitter, and all the other little places I express myself online create my meta self. I’m not sure anymore. It feels very unsophisticated to me … why not let me craft my identity and simply assert that credential into all the new spaces online. When that happens I simply gain a new attribute in my identity keychain (or whatever) that says something to the effect of, colecamplese can now log into Pownce and bring his whole network along for the ride (if they so choose)? Does that make any sense?
I have been watching a lot of these social “life stream” apps hit the web 2.0 space and am wondering why I have to actively add yet another account only to bring my identity back together. Why am I disaggregating myself only to maintain yet another profile to bring it all back together? I’m not sure of the answer, but I could sure use some help in thinking about it. Maybe the voices are really the just voice of the terrible winter we’ve had, or maybe the voices are right … I’m not sure. What do you think?
My Time Machine
For one reason or another Twitter has come back into the center of my digital life in a big way. I know it started at ELI 2008 in San Antonio. There were so many people that I try to follow at the event who were sitting in sessions sharing thoughts that I decided it was the best (only) way to keep up. It has sort of brought back the feeling of being connected to both the larger education technology community and the one right around the corner here at PSU. Another big factor has been teaching this semester and seeing my students showing up in my Twitter stream … I have to admit I am getting to know the students in my class who are twittering on a regular basis a little better — not sure if “better” is the right word, but they are quickly becoming a component of my Twitter community and I am a little more tuned into what they are thinking about.
With my interest in Twitter returning I find myself updating on regular basis again … I enjoy the renewed feeling of connectedness. I did something this morning as I was reading a particularly refreshing post from one of my students — I set out to find my first Tweets and blog posts about the service. I am not sure if Twitter was intended to be used as a personal content management system of sorts in the way I use my blog and my old fashioned analog journal, but with the frequency of Twittering I was doing a year ago it is obvious it is a great way to look into the past. So I did just that and turned up what I was doing at this exact moment a year ago. I was also able to read through my Twitter tagged blog posts and see that we were thinking about some interesting uses of Twitter way back in the day (last year) that I’ve seen put into use at conferences, events, and by organizations. When I asked Twitter what I was doing literally last year at this moment it was able to tell me … not as easy to search as the blog, but the results turned up the following:
So I am feeling like it is more important than ever to keep the thinking moving forward and to keep documenting what is going on in my day-to-day life. As with blogging, I feel almost like I am leaving little anthropological records of my own thinking for my own reflection in the future … so I’m sorry if I tweet about things that seem odd, disconnected, and even irrelevant, but most of it (when looked at from a meta level) gives me solid insight into my own thought development. I’ve been saying it for a while now, but it is becoming very clear to me that all of my online identities are coming together to form not only my self in the present progressive sense, but also as a sort of time machine for me to return to the thinking that is forming my research, my organization, my thinking, my relationships, and so on. In essence, Twitter is always asking me to respond to the simple question of “What are you doing” when I am now seeing it as an amazing opportunity to travel into the past to understand the answer to that question in a more reflective and holistic sense.
3/7/2008: Featured Presentation: University of South Florida
I spent the last couple of days at the University of South Florida where I had been invited to give a talk in the College of Public Health as part of their Dean's Lecture Series. I had been invited to talk about the changing landscape of teaching and learning with technology and meeting student expectations. I t was interesting because this was not a technology focused conference or anything, as a matter of fact the Dean told me it was the first time they invited someone from outside the Health Sciences to be a part of this lecture series. I planned on spending time sharing some early results from our most recent technology survey from PSU, but I just wasn't able to digest the latest data and integrate it into my talk. I did spend quite a bit of time talking about student expectations and sharing thoughts on a handful of themes that have emerged in the teaching and learning space.
I have to say that I enjoyed this opportunity as much as any others in the recent past. I had a great time talking to everyone I spent time with, from the Dean to the ID staff … it was really a smart and energized group of people. I enjoyed the time I spent after the talk in meetings with people as well — so many challenges that we face are also high on the radar at USF. The one thing that made me chuckle a bit were the posters they had up informing people of my talk. First rate group all the way! Grab the PDF of the slides … usf_preso_final.pdf
