I will once again be heading to western PA to address parents, faculty, and students at the Quaker Valley School District. We'll spend our time talking about the role of creativity and innovative thought as it relates to teaching with technology. I always have a blast with my friends from QV.
2010
Invited Presentation: 07/21/2010: Junior Achievement
I have been invited to the Junior Achievement National Conference to deliver recommendations from the JA Digital Strategy Task Force that I am a member of. This task force was assembled to assist JA in thinking about how to integrate digital delivery and engagement into their existing infrastructure. It has been a great opportunity to work with JA on this and I am looking forward to representing the outcomes of our team to the JA Nation Organization.
Presentation: 07/14/2010: Learning Design Summer Camp:
My good friend and colleague (and TLT Faculty Fellow), Dr. Christopher Long and I will give a talk at Penn State's Learning Design Summer Camp. Our talk, titled Hacking Pedagogy, will make the case that we as teachers, learners, designers, and administrators need to think about how to move our audiences from non-engagement to cooperation. This notion of cooperative learning can be a model for building new forms of thinking in the ways we create opportunities in our classrooms and work environments. We have made a call for community participation in the talk and hope to create a space to host an ongoing field guide of examples and approaches that others can use as they design teaching, learning, and other forms of collaborative participation.
Invited Speaker: 06/21/2010: Baylor University
My friend and colleague, Dr. Gardner Campbell, invited me to spend a few days at Baylor meeting and talking with a diverse set of people. While there I spent several hours with staff from their central ITS organization responsible for teaching, learning, classrooms, labs, and library services talking about strategic alignment and strategies for engaging faculty. I also met with a group of faculty innovators to talk in depth about PSU's approach to ePortfolio and program assessment. We were able to look and talk about how the Blogs at Penn State are powering a large collection of digital publishing projects — from blogs, portfolios, and even projects like Study Abroad. I discussed our vision as it relates to our GatherIT project. On Tuesday I toured an amazingly well designed student lab space that put the emphasis on collaborative space instead of machines. I then wrapped up with a two hour session on new forms of digital scholarship with Gardner's faculty within his Academy for Teaching and Learning faculty development program.
It was an outstanding trip. I learned quite a bit that will inform future directions for us with ETS. You may download a PDF of my slides I used while discussing ideas related to strategic alignment.
Invited Speaker: 04/16/2010: Penn State College of Communications Alumni Association
This morning I was part of an invited panel asked to speak about social networks and how they might be useful for connecting alumni. I have given quite a few talks to the PSU Alumni Association, but this was the first time it was specific to just a single College … in this case Communications. It was a fun presentation and I worked to keep it light. The highlight for me was getting to meet two additional colleagues here at PSU doing similar research related to social networks. I love when I have a chance right here in my own backyard to make new friends with very similar and overlapping interests.
Download my slides as an 18 MB PDF.
Mipper Rogers
PBS, though, hopes that Mr. Rogers will live on for children — online. Last month, PBS began streaming full-length episodes of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood†on both its Rogers site and its PBSKids site. “We think about Fred every single day,†said Lesli Rotenberg, senior vice president for children’s media at PBS. “The PBSKids site is based on a philosophy that I think he pioneered of looking at the whole child.â€
via www.nytimes.com
When I was little I would sit on the couch every evening to watch Mipper Rogers — that’s what I called him. Almost everything I know about interpersonal behavior can be traced to his lessons. The fact that his reruns aren’t shown on any of the channels I get is a crime. Am I being too nostalgic or is there nothing like him around today? Read the NYTimes piece and make sure you watch the video below (even though I’ve linked it before) … if you care about people and education it makes you smile. Even if it makes me a hippy.
Featured Speaker: 2/16/2010: Chronicle of Higher Education, Connecting to Compete
This week I will be in Washington, DC to participate as a speaker in the Chronicle of Higher Education's Connecting to Compete event. This is an event targeted at International institutions thinking about how to leverage information technology and social computing to connect with their audiences. It is a real honor to be a part of the event and I hope to share some interesting thoughts to help press the day's conversation forward.
Download the PDF of my slides.
Visualizing my Life
I was meeting with Scott McDonald this morning talking about a few things and the topic of data visualization came up. I’ve been interested in visualizing data since working on the Horizon Report, especially to get a handle on what is happening in my professional life … as an example tracking projects in meaningful ways has always been difficult for me. I’m not really all that interested in time spent on the projects, but more along the lines of where on campus we have touch points, who are we working with, and what kinds of things are we doing are all much more interesting to me. I’ve just not found a way to really map all that.
Scott showed me DAYTUM as an example of simple personal data tracking and visualization … I was instantly floored by what I saw. It gives you a really simple way to keep track of all sorts of things. I doubt it will solve the issue I mentioned above, but I am kicking the tires a bit with some personal things — at the moment I am tracking my daily exercise time either running or on Wii Fit, how I spend each day of the month (working not working, vacation, or sick), and the number of meetings I have across certain categories. I think it’ll help me get a better snapshot of where my time goes in a week. I doubt I’ll produce anything like the Feltron Report, but who knows where it could lead.
Scott and I instantly jumped to ideas on how we might use it in class. Next week we think we will be asking them to design some ways to take advantage of it and visualize their collected data over a few weeks and see what they come up with.