Month: August 2008

From Blogs to Publishing Platforms

/ Cole Camplese / 2 Comments

D’Arcy wrote a post over the weekend questioning the need for an Institutionally run blogging environment … I always take notice when he asks questions like this for a number of reasons — he’s smart, he’s been in the field for a long time making smart decisions, and his posts tend to bring in smart comments. This is no exception. D’Arcy asks if, given the plethora of open/free blogging services on the Web, the University of Calgary should be running its own service. I see where he is coming from and it is something I wrestle with across the board. There is a real tension between what we can/should provide in comparison to just recommending a .com service. Blogs are the tip of the iceberg … think email, calendar, and other more mission critical things that are being outsourced by Institutions all over the country.

D’Arcy talks about how hosting your own may provide for increased integration, trust, and authority. I think these are solid reasons, but I might expand them a bit. I can honestly say the reason we adopted MovableType as our blogging platform had very little to do with blogging. We knew we were going to be able to (over time) shift it towards a very powerful publishing platform that can do all sorts of things online. When we went down the path, the immediate win was a robust, scalable, integrated, and universally available blogging tool that people could use to support teaching, learning, expression, or really anything else.

Going forward, the idea is that you arrive at your personal webspace and are encouraged to just click over to your MT dashboard and publish. It is a jump for a user to think of this outside of setting up a blog — on the surface, the environment is a blogging toolset after all. The big ah-ha moment comes when you actually watch how easy it is to extend this into the world of instant site creation, all with the affordances of a modern CMS and blogging platform — instant publishing, RSS, ping/trackbacks, categories, tags, search, and so much more.

The work of our faculty fellow, Dr. Carla Zembal-Saul, this summer illustrates just how powerful this is when the jump is made to publishing and not just blogging. And the most interesting work being done has to do with how the portfolio becomes a social environment — guess what our platform is really good at? IN the coming weeks, I am going to try and focus some energy on explaining Carla’s work and share some more tangible evidence of the new ePortfolio Platform (powered by MT) we will be promoting here at PSU. The idea that a blog can be used for any publishing task is important to grasp if we are going to move to the next level of academic utilization of the web as a platform — at least, if you agree with D’Arcy that the notion of doing it on the inside promotes integration, trust, and authority.

Off to Camp

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

When I was as kid I went off to camp every summer … I attended sports camps every summer, working to hone my tennis, basketball, and soccer skills. I never did the full on all summer camp thing that lots of kids did. I did a lot of time at Bloomsburg University camps primarily because my parents worked at the University and it was our home town. But I also went to Russ Houk‘s camps every single summer from the time I was 9 until I was a senior in High School. Russ’ camps were in the mountains and amazingly separated from reality. I went for soccer, but always learned so much more.

Each summer I’d head off and have to play in the blazing summer heat, to work harder than I ever had with coaches from all over the World, and deal with an environment that was very primitive. It was awesome! It was at these camps that I stretched myself to play with quite literally some of the best players in the state and sometimes the World … I learned how strong I could be and most importantly I learned how much work it took to be really good at something. Russ’ camp were about stretching yourself physically, emotionally, and at times, psychologically. It was a blast and a disaster at the same time.

Heading into tomorrow’s Learning Design Summer Camp here at PSU I am reminded of my time heading off to camp at this time of year. I am nervous about how it all plays out, but I am anxious to put our collective intellegence to the test. Our goal was to raise the level of the conversation related to learning design and we will see how it all plays out. I know this from Russ’ camps — it is up to everyone to bring their A-Games. Can we do it?

I plan to engage … I set my “vacation” message for autorespond on email to read:

I am taking part in the ETS Learning Design Summer Camp at Penn State University and will not be able to be focusing on email for the next two days. Please know that I am keeping track of notes and will get back to you by Thursday at the latest. Thank you for understanding!

I can’t wait to see how we all perform.

Pandora Radio

/ Cole Camplese / 5 Comments

I know I am late to the Pandora party, but now that I am a full out lover of the wonderful (lack of) randomness that it offers me I am hooked. I’ve used it on my computer while traveling before, but since the introduction of the application for the iPhone and iPod Touch my use of it has soared. I have a handful of artist “radio stations” set up and typically just mash them all together to get an amazing mix of the stuff I know I like and the stuff Pandora thinks I like. Crazy thing is that Pandora has been right nearly all the time — we’re talking about batting close to 1000 here.

I installed it on my iPod Touch and just leave it connected to the stereo so we can listen to the mix throughout the house and in the backyard. Last night, while sitting on the patio, I asked my wife why in the World would anyone need to steal music when you can simply tune in for free? She responded with, “why would anyone need to buy any music?” What do musicians and the RIAA think about it?

Both of us were just marveling in the simple pleasure of the most intelligent radio station we’d ever listened to. Got me thinking that as we continue to do our part to help inform students to the ills of illegal file sharing and stealing music this could be part of the solution. We are getting set to release our Copyright Perspectives campaign in the coming week and I have to wonder if promoting Pandora is appropriate … I figured better ask the Internets!

I wonder how increased Pandora use would impact bandwidth — both personal quotas in the dorms and as a whole across the University. I’d like to hear from some of the more technically savvy folks out there — is this a good thing to promote across our campus as an alternative to illegal file sharing? I ask because I have no idea. We’ve had to impose bandwidth restrictions in the residence halls to help curb the constant use that file sharing causes, but what happens when more and more of the legal alternatives are all network services? I am thinking about the students who buy the online viewing package for College Football, the kids who buy all their movies and TV shows from iTunes, upload tons of RAW photos to Flickr, or tune exclusively into Pandora … what should we be thinking about?

Disruptive Technologies?

/ Cole Camplese / 11 Comments

Since it is Friday and I have been traveling I thought I’d share just a quick thought about something that came up while I was hanging out with new colleagues in Madison … we were sitting at the Union on the University of Wisconsin’s campus when out of nowhere I wondered aloud if erasable pens were still available. All of us instantly remembered the days when these were a new piece of technology. None of us could answer with any certainty if these amazing devices were still available and if the wireless would have been open, an answer would have been discovered instantly. A simple google search allowed me to discover that they still make them, but the idea of the erasable pen seemed to stick with us through the evening — for some very odd reasons.

As Disruptive as Facebook?

As Disruptive as Facebook?

Later in the evening, I recalled being in maybe 5th grade when these things hit the market — they were some serious high tech options for use in the classroom. After thinking about it for a while I remembered that my teachers at the St. Columba School in Bloomsburg, PA banned them from use. They had switched us off pencils for nearly all our work … presumably because we couldn’t erase and it would force us to be more thoughtful. Then, we started showing up with pens that could be erased. Massive disruption.

Why is this important? In my eyes, the erasable pen is not unlike the pain and suffering laptops, Internet access, and social networks are causing us all right now in and around our classrooms. It is disruptive and that means it makes us think really hard about how we manage our learning spaces. Technologies don’t have to be insanely complex to be disruptive — clearly, a little pen with an eraser was enough to send the Sisters at St. Columba off the deep end. All of sudden they had to face the reality that we could be more risky with our answers because we knew we could simply erase and start over. Of course they had their own ways from keeping us from using them.

I’m not really sure if I have anything more to say about the notion of the erasable pen, but it was an interesting and funny experience diving into the past with a view on our current context. I stopped using them quite a long time ago … maybe the follow up piece to this should be about how the delete key made the erasable pen obsolete?

New Conversations

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

I am in Madison, WI where I am presenting at the 24th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning. I am part of panel discussion looking at institutional transformation to support both resident and online learning given the shifting demographics of our students. I am going to talk specifically about Digital Expression and what it means to me and how how PSU has been working towards providing platforms to support it. I used to get asked to describe what I mean by Digital Expression, but not so much anymore — I think people are arriving at their own conclusions. From my perspective, in the most simple terms, it is providing opportunities for faculty and students to feel supported to engage in the art of sharing evidence in a digital sense. I have spent time in a lot of classrooms where I have asked students to stretch themselves to produce digital media to articulate learning and the things they come up with are amazing.

Opportunities to Engage

Opportunities to Engage

When I dig into this deeper I am left echoing the thoughts of Lessig from the TLT Symposium, these students are engaged in a new social dynamic — a digital conversation. I have been struck by the way YouTube can draw people out and how it provides affordances for them to respond in different ways. I am thinking specifically about how people will take quite a bit of time and effort to respond to a posted video, not with a text comment, but with a forked version of the original, or a video response, or a story changing event, or other creative ways to extend and engage the original producer and others. This is moving the discussion forward, it is a digital conversation at a whole new level. I doubt we’ve ever fully realized the power of the digital discussion in the traditional message board — I know the best online conversations I have had existed in the open and in very accessible locations.

When you look at PSU students and the fact that 17% reported creating video for a class while 15% reported creating a video for personal reasons last year, you know something is changing. I don’t have the data to support it, but this feels like a very big jump in only a year or two time. To me, it is early evidence that we are well positioned with the Digital Commons, but pushes me to continue to think about how to make the service more obvious. Only 2% report using the DC resources last year and I can tell you from the usage data I received yesterday, that number will be much higher next year.

I’ve written before about how we are working to position ourselves with a platform to support digital expression and I intend to share a bit of that story during my presentation. I’ll highlight the Digital Commons as a place where faculty and students can be supported in the art of being digital. Additionally, I’ll share insight into our vision for our blogging platform as a personal digital publishing environment. I won’t have time to go into podcasting, game design, community hubs, or the other things we’ve been doing to promote a more open and community driven environment. I hope it is the start of a real conversation that we can continue to push forward on all of our campuses.

Digital Expression Alignment Stack

Digital Expression Alignment Stack

We are getting to these opportunities in a systematic way by aligning emerging services with existing infrastructure. We don’t get it right every time, but getting new tools and opportunities out to our audiences seems to be the winning proposition. Going forward, where do we need to be focusing additional energy? One area for me is in the appropriate use of these environments. Are there other thoughts?

Shifting Social Dynamics

/ Cole Camplese / 9 Comments

The One Post a Day Challenge is already starting to add up to a big personal project for me. I’m not yet overwhelemd with it, but as I embark on a whirlwind 7 days (kicked off by an overnight trip to Madison, WI to present and punctuated by the Learning Design Summer Camp) I can see the wheels showing some signs of coming off. I’m not there yet though! I am thrilled to see the comments here, but what is already becoming evident is how nice it is to read a wealth of fresh squeezed content from my community every single day. I am enjoying hearing new voices and discovering new blogs. Very cool. One thing I am becoming concerned about is that I see a theme emerging here that I hope is meaningful to those around me — the idea of doing things in the cloud. All of my posts have been focused on using the Blogs at PSU as a personal publishing space and I am hoping it isn’t getting stale.

With that in mind, I thought I would take a stab at a similar, but slightly off topic observation about the coming shift in demographics on our campuses. I am drawing upon some of the amazing work done by our friends at the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Not too long ago I read a few of their reports that focused on online teenagers’ web behavior. Not entirely surprising to see how connected they are, but it is a little stunning to see how sophisticated they are as they participate in social environments. Some highlights that have me thinking about what my campus will look like in 5 years and if our work is going to pay dividends when this generation shows up:

  1. Nearly 50% of online teens are sharing content online. This isn’t file sharing, it is sharing pictures, text, and other forms of their media.
  2. 64% engage in at least one form of content creation.
  3. Girls dominate most elements of online content creation and sharing with 35% of teen girls blogging, and 54% sharing photos. Compared with 20% of boys blog and 40% share pictures.
  4. Boys are nearly twice as likely to share their videos online — I’m not touching that one!

Why is this the case? Well I have a few suspicions, but the fact that Pew tells us that 89% of them report that people comment on these artifacts some of the time tells me a lot. Wow. So it means to me that they are engaging in a new form of social dynamic that looks a hell of a lot like a digital conversation. I am wondering as a follow up is if they actively market their online lives in a face to face world or if they just know their friends are connected to it and are silent about the publishing? Do they show up at school and say, “did you see my pictures, video, or blog post?” I’m not sure, but Pew also tells us that most of them use their social networks to control access — this is a big reason why Facebook is the number one photo sharing site on the Internet.

With that said, I am reminded of a meeting I had with my colleague, Glenn Johnson, early last week about the blog platform. Glenn has been the “ePortfolio Guy” at PSU for several years and has done an outstanding job socializing the notion of student portfolios. He was showing us how he has traditionally shown people how to use WYSIWYG tools along with our PASS explorer (really an online SFTP like client) that visualizes your personal webspace as files and folders. A metaphor that has been in play for years. When we started talking about teens and their use of social tools for sharing we started to wonder if they had any clue as to where their items were going?

Are Directories Dead to our Next Student?

Are Directories Dead to our Next Student?

Does a directory structure matter to this generation? Where the hell are my pictures when I upload them to Facebook anyway? Should we care or should we make the jump into just managing assets through tagging them on the way in? I think Pew tells us we have some real decisions to make as it relates to enterprise learning environments and some of our old school preconceptions are not going to match up with emerging trends. I am especially interested in what people think about this and how we can be positioning ourselves to deal with the shift.

Collaboration in the Cloud

/ Cole Camplese / 5 Comments

I am going to continue to explore the Blogs at Penn State as a note and workflow tool to support in and out of the classroom work … I am going to focus on something a little different than the individually focused approach I discussed last week. Collaboration within the context of coursework among our students seems to be growing on campus. This is encouraging because it seems to me that it points to new approaches in our classrooms and indicates that more faculty are encouraging students to work together to solve interesting challenges. I think cooperative problem solving is a 21st century skill, so helping students develop them while in college is critical. The FACAC survey indicates that both undergraduate at 40% and graduate students at 56% report sharing documents to complete coursework. What we didn’t dig into was how they are sharing documents to complete coursework, but from my experiences in the classroom it is probably to wrong way — emailing them back and forth still seems to be the norm.

Last week I was thinking out loud about students creating individual blogs to be used as notebooks across their classes. Today I’d like to ask how blogs could be used to create a team or group based set of collaborative opportunities to support coursework. I have a couple things in mind and would be more than happy to expand on any of them as a follow up post.

With the Fall release of the Blogs at PSU anyone can easily add additional authors to a blog so they can contribute, edit, create, or manage posts. I would love to see students skip using Word as a “collaborative” tool and find new ways to work together. Blogs aren’t ideal for collaborative authoring, but I can’t see how they are worse than passing Word documents back and forth. Collaboration can be easily achieved via multiple posts, comments, or even by managing drafts. This is an area we should be investigating more.

The best tool I’ve seen for true collaboration is the word processor in the Google Docs suite. With an email address it is easy to set up an account and even easier to add others to the document. More and more Universities are signing up with Google under the Apps for Education program … we’re thinking about what it would mean to be a part of that world and there are some very interesting opportunities there. The funny thing is as I walked into a meeting with some folks from Google I was thinking that the best part of the suite had nothing to do with email, but with the google docs tools. It was great to hear they feel the same way. It shouldn’t be a surprise that they think real collaboration happens during the document creation, not after.

If you’ve never used the word processing application in Google docs then you’re missing quite a bit. It has all the power of Word, but cloud based and the ability to actively collaborate. What that means is that people can be in the same document at the same time and see each other’s changes. Where things get really interesting is that a document can be instantly published into a blog. That means teams can work in the best collaborative tool on the web for group writing and then push it into a personal repository (Blogs at Penn State). The document can be edited repeatedly in Google Docs and instantly republished into the blog. This combination of group and personal editing is a big step forward for empowering collaboration and taking advantage of personal repositories.

Publishing from Google Docs to Blogs at PSU

Publishing from Google Docs to Blogs at PSU

I’d really like to hear more about ideas and scenarios where we could more actively explore these ideas. We are building quite a team within ETS to explore how blogs can impact teaching, learning, and scholarship in general. Help us form the right kinds of opportunities to continue exploring.

A Follow Up: Cooperative Notes

/ Cole Camplese / 10 Comments

After my post on taking notes in the cloud last week I got a number of comments. One of them that seemed to really spark some needed thought was how to engage not just students in the notion of blogging their notes, but how to get faculty into the idea of posting lecture assets in places where the “embed” code lives. Kyle points out that it might make a ton of sense if we could find new ways to help faculty see the value in publishing their slide images, diagrams, or other rich assets to social sites as well to empower students to simply annotate existing assets in the cloud via the use of a simple embed code. I love the idea and I will be discussing it with my team.

Slide with Student Notes Below

Slide with Student Notes Below

Then as I was sitting around thinking more about it over the weekend I started to wonder why faculty would need to publish to the .com social web world when they could use their PSU blog spaces to upload, share, and manage their rich media assets. My friend and colleague, Brad Kozlek, manages a big portion of the Blogs at PSU project and he is very keen on the whole embed thing. As a matter of fact, he has worked out a simple little template addition to the MT code we use to enable simple YouTube-like embed capabilities. Most of this work is modeled after some amazing work by Alan Levine with his Feed2js work and Brian Lamb and his absolute insistence on remixing and reusing content.

Having faculty take advantage of our own blog platform to enable students to enrich their notes is a huge step forward in my eyes. I was talking about students taking pictures of slides and Kyle reminded us that it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to have faculty share each slide as an embedable asset from any number of social sites. I love it, but why not right from their blog? Each of these slides could easily be pulled into a student’s post with little more than an embed code. Faculty, over time, could create their own slide repository that could be easily shared with their students as embedable content in their blogs, or even within their own courses in places like ANGEL and blog powered pages. Big potential here that we need to really explore.

I like the idea and I wonder how feasible it is to push towards a solution that asks faculty to allow students to take electronic notes in class, share digital representations of their slides/diagrams, and to think about how to best protect and share their own intellectual property in a teaching and learning context. Those are a lot of things to socialize, but I would guess given the time, energy, and ability to share success stories one could get a decent sized percentage working in that direction. In so many cases, we think publishing to the web gives up IP, but I would argue that taking this approach would empower the use of IP in a more open and responsible way. Not sure, but I sure would like to hear some thoughts on this.