Community

Wall Streams

/ Cole Camplese / 7 Comments

When you get off the elevator on the second floor of the Rider Building you see a small plasma display hanging there that typically has a Twitter stream of ETS staff displayed on it. It is cool to see and I often notice people walking by and stopping to read what is visible. It gives an interesting view into some of the activity happening in and around our office.

If you’ve been to an education technology conference worth its weight then you have probably seen something similar — someone has set up a Twitter account so people can be followed by the event and their back channel stuff can be displayed live as people move around the event. Good enough and a smart way to get a crowd sourced idea of what is happening at the moment.

I’ve wanted something that goes beyond just the standard Twitter stream to use at our annual TLT Symposium, but haven’t wanted to take the time to build something that aggregates more of the social stuff together — Tweets, pictures, links, etc. This weekend I stumbled across a new feature by the folks at Brightkite … they call it The Wall. The Wall is a simple to setup tool that gives you a way to aggregate content posted to the Brightkite network into a very simple full screen view. It gives you the option of using the location of the event as the determining factor — which is nice, b/c once you check in with Brightkite that you are in a certain place, all your updates are counted … no need to use a hastag or anything else. You can also choose a search term which I admittedly didn’t try out (but plan to) as well as person stream. Take a look below to see what I mean …

Setting up the Wall.

Setting up the Wall.

Once it is setup, in my case, I choose to use a location — State College, PA. When I launched my Wall I was surprised to see activity talking about the Blogs at Penn State from someone I know, but who isn’t in my network. It was very cool. It even pulls in pictures posted to Brightkite from people checked in at that location. Have a look …

Full Screen View.

Full Screen View.

This will be a great addition to the Twitter stuff at any event, but the issue still exists of asking people to create a Brightkite account. I think you can join in via texting to the site … check out the Wall for 16801 and give it a try. But, now think of how cool it could be in a class where you have much more more control over the networks that your students post to. A Wall featuring updates in one spot would be very attractive to help bind community. I’d be interested in hearing other ways this could work. I am very attracted to the mash up of location, community, and content … I wonder if it works to drive additional context for a community?

Update: BTW, I have 15 invites for Brightkite. If you want one, just leave a comment.

ETS Spaces

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

Just running through a lunchtime feed reading frenzy and came across a post by my friend and colleague, Bart Pursel. Bart and I have worked together in one capacity or another for the last half dozen years or so; first when he was an Instructional Designer in the IST Solutions Institute and now as a Fellow of sorts in ETS focusing on games for education. Bart spends about a week a month in our offices … sort of a part time residency for him. Today I read a post he wrote at his excellent Virtual Learning Worlds blog titled, Evolving Spaces. It is interesting to read his view on our ever-evolving space here in ETS — another one of the grand experiments we are always talking about. Either way it was interesting to read and I thought I’d share.

Participatory Culture

/ Cole Camplese / 6 Comments

I’m starting to really think it is working. The “it” I am referring to is the adoption of not just web 2.0 tools, but web 2.0 philosophies. I have been professing the notion of the “conversation” since I re-read the Cluetrain Manifesto a handful of years ago. I say re-read, because the first time I tried it just blew past me like the wind. When I read it the second time I was starting to have success re-imagining my life with a blog, using del.icio.us, sharing on Flickr, and started discovering all the other people out there who were doing the same. I quickly started to understood that the web was a platform and we were the nodes — not the machines themselves, but the people … we are the nodes on a knowledge network that the platform empowers to connect. Once I got it, I was hooked on the idea that we can participate in a global conversation — even if the people we are talking to are two doors down.

At the start of it all, I thought it was about the tools but then it started to click that under all the tools were these basic tenets that were driving some really smart people to create them. From what I can tell they are openness, sharing, connections, and empowerment. To me, these are the basic underpinnings that drive the tools. The developers got it before we did and that strikes me as odd only because our traditional view of developers is that they work alone. Clearly, that is folklore and not the way the new economy pushes us to think. These early pioneers knew something was missing with the web and that was the opportunity to engage. Here I sit several years later — perhaps a good 10 years later — and can see we are all getting it.

So much has been going on that proves it is happening to me. My trip to Harvard for Berkman at 10 showed me tangible evidence that people can study this stuff in a practical and pragmatic fashion. My participation in the global Twitter conversation has proven to me that my local community is brilliant and willing to step up to the challenge of showing that off. My continued blogging has opened new doors and created new relationships that are more meaningful than most can comprehend. The Learning Design Summer Camp was the most recent piece of evidence that the notion of participatory culture is alive in a huge way right here on my own campus. These things are all local examples — and by local I mean happening to me. These are things that have opened my eyes to the power of the philosophies of web 2.0 … the tools are great, but seeing the people take over from the tools and rise up in a real sense has been stunning.

If I think back to the way I was thinking around the time I was leading the Online IST project in 1999 or so. I can say I had a totally different perspective. I was closed. I wasn’t interested in sharing experiences and I certainly willing to participate outside of my group. I believed we were the smartest people and there wasn’t anything anyone could tell me to prove me wrong. I was naive and immature to believe there wasn’t so much to learn out there. In the years that followed it took quite a bit to get me to see the power and intelligence in the community — admittedly my eyes started to open only as I began to discover other smart people at other Institutions exploring the social web. I was still turning a blind eye to my local community however. It took time for me to see it emerge here … and I use the word emerge to mean that I began to pay attention to the things around me. Again, admittedly it took technology to get me to pay attention — and maturity.

Now I am more excited when I see my RSS reader light up with posts from PSU people than anywhere else. I love seeing the triple digits of PSU Tweeters following each other, and I can’t say how proud I am of watching our community grow. I now know much of it is my own movement away from being close minded and taking notice … I also know that I am excited by the affordances the adoption of not just the tools but the philosophies will provide us all going forward. If I could go back to the early days of all this I would tell myself to stop trying to hoard the ideas, stop trying to know the most, and most importantly to embrace the power in an open and engage community. I can’t go back, but I am certainly excited about the movement forward. It is nice to be part of it. Thanks.

Home from Camp

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

Before I start, I need to give a shout-out to my Mother … it is her Birthday. Happy Birthday, Mom!

People Tags. Credits Micala

People Tags. Credits Micala

So, today is my first day back in the office from the Learning Design Summer Camp 2008 that happened here at PSU the last two days. It was an ambitious reach at raising the bar on our own community of learning designers. Modeled after much of what I learned while attending the Berkman at 10 event that rocked my World a while back, the LDSC08 was designed by the community for the community. I had asked months ago if when thinking about planning an event if we could just say that maybe the community is the committee and it in my mind it played out really well for us in this instance. The planning wiki was an unreal story that unfolded before our eyes … just to give an indication of the amount of activity that went on there, when I checked the feed of recent changes before heading to lunch yesterday, there had been 96 updates. 96 edits from the first AM session to lunch. It was a striking departure from most professional development activities I have been a part of on campus.

I am still plowing through our program evaluation results, but I thought I could share a handful of comments with you from the two day event (Allan has a nice recap of day one). Not that there aren’t some critical issues for us to work through, but I feel it is safe to say that the feedback is overwhelmingly positive. People seemed to really feel energized by the grassroots feel the event had. There was participation in so many forms so it is hard to say how many people actually had a hand in it, but when it is all said and done, I imagine that at least 20 different people shared the podium and dozens more contributed questions and comments from the audience. It was stunning … at any rate a couple of comments from one of the questions where we asked attendees what was the most important thing they took away from the experience:

  • “Feeling as though I am part of a community that is supported, valued and willing to make changes.”
  • “That an organic, community planned event is more valuable to me than a national conference far away from State College.”
  • “Connections with people and resources at PSU.”
  • “Made a lot of connections that are going to help in furthering my experience.”
  • “Knowing that if I want to try something on a higher level, or something different, that I have the support of a lot of my peers on campus.”
  • “All the engagement and participation. Was hard to take all in, but wonderful experience at the same time!”
  • “New technologies to explore, widening my educational/colleague community through more connections, refining my educational philosophy and understandings, and inspiration to continue.”
  • “Twitter! No, really, I think the wiki was great – having the materials there before, during, and after. And the live question tool.”
  • “The use of the live question tool was really amazing. It’s like a back channel tool, but with very obvious educational applications. I submitted a question and felt proud that it was voted up and then addressed by the speakers.”
  • “The community. Just knowing that such a talented pool of folks works with me at PSU is a wonderful thing for me to take away.”
  • “A renewed desire and motivation to use multimedia in learning design and to open my course documents and content to my worldwide profession.”
  • “The people are engaged & ready to roll!”

Notice a trend there? The notions of community and engagement were so pervasive throughout the two days that you could almost reach out and touch it. I am hopeful that what people go forward with is the complete confidence in knowing we are all a part of a much larger whole — that what we represent is the potential to produce the leading edge of learning design in higher education. That together we can actually stop the complaining and change the conversation. That when we actually share and challenge ourselves we can make a huge difference — even at a place as big and difficult as PSU. That at the end of the day we have the power and authority to make real dents in real problems.

I think the challenge going forward is truly grabbing that power and making changes with high enrollment designs, begin to work with faculty to really engage in moving forward, and make policy changes that will push the agendas items we discussed forward — open learning, open courseware, new assessment models for distributed learning environments, digital expression, portfolios, and so much more. I am more excited about being a part of this community than I ever thought possible.

A huge thank you to everyone who helped make this event the first of many annual events that can shape the future of our institution. Now it is time to head back to work!

Open Event Planning

/ Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

I’ve noted the Learning Design Summer Camp that is happening on our campus August 12 and 13 a number of times before, but I wanted to share a few additional details that have been making me very proud of the work going on around PSU. You see this event is different than anything else we’ve planned before — different because we really aren’t so much planning it as we are guiding it. I pitched the LDSC idea as a way to replace our more traditional all campus instructional design meeting that has historically happened on an annual basis. My challenges were to expand the reach to a more inclusive community of learning designers, raise the level of the conversations we could have, create a fun and robust program, and let the community shape the event. It was that last challenge that excited and scared the hell out of us.

We’ve watched others do the unconference thing and have loved the results. None of had done it so we were reluctant to try until I got back from the Berkman at 10 event and felt new energy about how communities can rise up and participate. We had been getting good participation in the ETS Wiki and felt like we could count on at least a handful of people to help out. What has happened has surprised us all. My colleague, Allan Gyorke, added a page to the wiki on May 28th with a very light skeleton structure … a few Tweets later and the pages came to life. Within days a volunteer committee had formed and met. Within a few weeks enough ideas for sessions had been proposed and discussed that we didn’t need to be concerned. A couple week later, someone from the University Libraries offered their gorgeous space for us to hold the event. Within two months an amazingly robust event had been planned. All of it without having an assigned committee or agenda. All we had was a vision, an outline, and a wiki.

Learning Design Summer Camp Wiki

Learning Design Summer Camp Wiki

If you have the time, or the interest, jump over to the LDSC wiki page and see for yourself. This event is shaping up to be outstanding. The stories and conversations that can potentially go on are both exciting and encouraging on all sorts of levels. Explore how the community has created a series of stickers that represent areas of interests or icons of themselves, take a look at how the logo for the event evolved, check out the sessions proposed by the community, and look at how many people from all over PSU decided to spend two days with us. So maybe the community can be the committee!

More Thoughts on Open Course Design

/ Cole Camplese / 14 Comments

I am going to make a quick return to some previous writing I did on the potential power of community to drive course and knowledge creation. Bear with me, as I am still getting my head wrapped around this whole thing. I am clearly not there yet, so this is an open call for discussion around this concept.

Let me just say that I am loving the wiki. I have never (in my 10 years at PSU) seen the power of the collective more clearly than I have through the use of the ETS Wiki to drive thinking forward. Nearly as many of the edits to the things we are working on internally are coming from those outside the ETS staff — amazing and very powerful. Since I said no more invitations in my last post, let me say that I was wrong. You are invited to continue to participate. It is making my work more meaningful on levels I didn’t anticipate. With that said, I am getting set to explore a new use of wikis here at PSU.

With the closing of the IST Solutions Institute, a place I called home for six and a half good years, I have been working through emotions about lots of things. One thing I am struck by is the fact that much of the work of SI in the early days centered around creating courses for use across the State of PA to help manage curricular drift, create new standards for problem based learning approaches, and unify faculty in their curricular decisions. We built the Online IST courses to serve as the basis for the core undergraduate curriculum for a brand new College at a big, geographically dispersed University. The most amazing thing about it to this day was that faculty used it! They used these centrally designed course materials as their textbooks, delivered the problem activities we designed, used the ANGEL templates to quickly generate their semester sequence, and they participated with us by offering to help edit, create, and grow the content so it better matched the needs of the curriculum. Amazing participation and for me it was career changing observation.

So flash forward to the SI closure and a note I recieved about how the course materials would be “frozen” and left in their current state — no new updates. Perhaps an opportunity to explore new thinking? Why not go the other route? Why not “defrost” the materials and turn them into wiki articles and invite the IST community in to participate? Think how a concept as simple as “Knowledge Worker” (update …compare the linked Wikipedia article with this lesson from Online IST 110 on the same concept … sorry, PSU authentication is required.) could be created and grown through active participation. Think about dozens and dozens of these articles being created and shared openly within the community so the content grows and becomes as rich a resource and it once was — only stronger with the power of community behind it.

Well, people say that is fine, but what do you do with hundreds of disconnected articles? I guess my answer is to invite the community in to create meta articles — articles that creates a narrative story about the collection of concepts you are trying to string together into lessons/topics/chapters or whatever you want to call them. Let a course committee determine how the meta articles link and drive the course structure, but do it from a wiki approach.

I would have to think new affordances would present themselves … here are a couple I am thinking about:

  • Faculty could weave their work into the articles in a more seamless way. By exposing their research and citing their publications in a wiki article students would get a more complete perspective of what the field is all about. Encouraging debate within the articles would open up new perspectives on otherwise mundane topics.
  • Students could be asked to contribute new knowledge and make it available to the course committees for inclusion in the meta articles. Students are often out in front of us on emerging trends and getting them to contribute seems really exciting and very appropriate.
  • Alumni, Doctoral students, and industry partners could participate in new ways that brings in perspectives that would otherwise be locked out. One of my former colleagues at IST, Shawn Clark, has done amazing work with an advisory board member and letting him work side by side (virtually) with the students. The reason it works is because Dr. Clark gets that there are people outside the academy that have much to contribute to the work going on inside the academy. His futures site is a model of open collaboration and contribution. If Shawn can pull it off, don’t you think other interested parties connected to IST could as well? Wiki content could help that.

There are more, but at the end of the day this would be a ton of work — not at all hard to move content out of existing systems, but really hard to socialize the whole approach. Someone would have to apply that energy and someone would have to see the value in it all to make it real. With the closing of the Solutions Institute, I’m not sure who that person is.

Invitations? Not Anymore.

/ Cole Camplese / 20 Comments

Running through a lazy Saturday read of the feeds and I noticed that my long-time colleague and friend, Chris Stubbs, has written another one of his great posts. I have to admit reading Mr. Stubbs’ blog is one of my favorite things to do. If you don’t read it, go on and give him a shot. At any rate, Stubbs has a particularly good post today titled, No Invitation Required in which he comes right out and says what so many of us feel — don’t wait to participate.

Its not so much that he says it, it is that he says it well. I was particularly interested in his closing paragrph (right before he goes and quotes John Mayer … not that I don’t listen, just surprised):

So if you are reading this and you’ve ever hesitated to participate in the web 2.0 world – to comment, to friend someone, to offer up your $0.02 or jump into a conversation, take heed: don’t wait for an invitation. Not only is an invitation not required, but frankly it may never come. Even with the best analytics, the internet is closer to a one way mirror than a transparent piece of glass. Just because you are interested in a web 2.0 idea, podcast, or post, doesnt mean that the creators know it. The web is too big for invitations. And if you are worried about sounding stupid, worried you don’t have anything important to contribute, or are not willing to take the initiative, to speak your mind and to join in the conversation, you will never be recognized. Your voice will never be heard. You lose a chance to participate. The world loses your contribution. No one wins.

I think too many of us forget that the spaces we live in are very new to whole bunch of folks and that they aren’t aware of the protocol — they don’t know the rules are different in the web 2.0 space and many are very uncomfortable interrupting their understood social norms. I hear it from people quite a bit myself, “I didn’t know I could participate in the [insert name of event/opportunity/space here].” I just never really took a minute to step back and think that I am contributing to the problem by not being more overt, by not going beyond assuming people know they have an open invitation, by not being more clear. For that I am sorry, but as Stubbs says if you are waiting for the US Postal Service to show up with an invitation to the conversation you could be waiting a long time. But with that said, let me go ahead and say it so those who are here can read it for themselves — You are Invitied to Participate!

Now, how to get to the rest of the world who doesn’t know I have a blog?

C is for Community

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

As is the case with most Fridays when the weather is nice in State College I came home and spent the majority of the evening outside in the yard with the kids listening to music. This evening we decided to forgo the typical “Dinner Mix” playlist of grown up favorites and instead played selections from the Sesame Street gang. My little boy, who will be two in September, fell in love with Cookie Monster’s “C is for Cookie.” I’m not going to make the parallel that we are doing the work of children or anything, but I will say that there was a line that resonated with me — “C is for Cookie and that’s good enough for me.” What struck a chord with me is that our approach to community is very similar to what my little man’s interest in cookies feels like … serious. I must say that the power of the local community is emerging and it is good enough for me.

A stretch perhaps, but on target for what I am feeling on and around campus. Let me share a living example … today we had the first meeting of the Learning Design Summer Camp committee members. Typical stuff for higher education in most cases other than the simple truth is that not a single person was assigned to their post. All we did was establish a wiki, share some opening thoughts, and Tweet the existence of the thinking out to those who were listening. A strange thing happened — lots of people contributed. And then they volunteered. Then another even more amazing thing happened — people outside the standard Twitter stream joined the conversation. Community happened.

Our Summer Camp is shaping up to be quite the event. I am personally hoping it pushes a conversation forward related to the tools we’ve been building on campus to support new thinking for teaching and learning. The idea is to get people together to actively engage in discourse that is well beyond the typical “how to” format we all deal with. No matter what I am hopeful to see about 100 of my colleagues working together to think critically about how we design learning spaces. Seems like a very cool thing. It is time we all start to raise the level of our conversations.

All of it shows me once again the power of the collective. It also reminds me just how open and engaged the community is on our campus. I am very proud to be a part of it!