ETS

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!

Social Stuff at PSU

/ Cole Camplese / 2 Comments

Tomorrow I am presenting to folks from the PSU Libraries. Originally this was going to be a small discussion, but it appears as though it has turned into a bigger deal. The talk will be available via the Libraries use of Media Site Live (Windows Media Player required) so tune if you are at all interested. The talk is tomorrow at 9 AM here on the east coast.

I think I’ll probably reuse much of what I did at Maricopa with a little more hands-on demo time. We shall see how it all shakes down. What I am hoping for is an active audience and lots of conversation. Again, we shall see. Should be fun!

My slides are available over at my PSU Blog.

TLT Symposium and Hubs of Activity

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The title says it all. Our annual Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium is upon us once again and it has turned most of the people I spend time with lives’ upside down. We do it to ourselves and wouldn’t have it any other way, but it is all I can think about. We’ll be up to our eyeballs in social computing themes come Saturday. If you are interested, head over and check out the Symposium site — a Drupal space that has become the hub to a ton of activity. There are blog posts, comments, podcasts, and all sorts of stuff going on over there. Take a peek and let me know what you think.

And speaking of hubs of activity, we are managing two good ones here at PSU — the ANGEL Community Hub and the Adobe Connect Community Hub. I think the whole community supporting community thing is the future of all this teaching and learning with technology thing. Stuff changes so fast, that getting smart people to help other people implement these technologies are so critical. At any rate, this is my bridge post to get me a much larger Symposium story thing I am working on. Stay tuned.

69,000 Reasons to Pay Attention

/ Cole Camplese / 7 Comments

In the past I have always railed against the “one system to rule them all” approach to classroom eManagement. I have always found ways to use tools outside the mainstream to achieve my goals — it could be a WordPress blog, Drupal for a large class experience, iTunes U for podcasting, or whatever else seemed interesting at the time. I have a feeling as I go forward I will continue to use these spaces to stretch my understanding of the social software space. With that said I am thinking differently about how we need to leverage our enterprise LMS/CMS environment, ANGEL.

Let me put this into perspective, at Penn State there are currently 69,725 students with at least one course in ANGEL. Let me think about that for a minute … yeah, that’s a lot. To me that says that faculty have adopted the platform. I just spent the last two days in Chicago with peer institutions across the CIC listening to what they are doing in the enterprise LMS space and I can tell you that we are doing just fine at PSU.

My team is looking at ways to innovate and change (for the better) how faculty use technology for teaching and learning … for the past year or so we’ve invested a lot of energy in relationships with other (non-ANGEL) venders trying to introduce new technologies into the teaching and learning landscape — think podcasting and blogging in particular.

The other night, Chris Millet and I were talking about the overhead associated with introducing not only a new approach but a whole new tool to support it … we started to think out loud what it would look like if we spent half that energy working with the ANGEL people on the kinds of things we need from their tools. Would that allow us (long-term) to focus more on the actual adoption of the approach and less time on the adoption of the toolset? I’m not at all saying it is time to bail on innovation — what I am saying is that we have a huge uphill battle in getting faculty to try the things we talk about, why create more issues by pushing multiple platforms at them? What I am now thinking about is how do I spend my time helping the conversation move forward.

I have to wonder what people think about this … does it just absolutely laugh in the face of small pieces or is it the right thing to think about? I honestly can’t see us jumping out of anything we are doing, but it sure would be nice to not have to think about running servers, managing accounts, and holding hands through new tools. Looks to me like there are some serious relationship activities on the horizon for me and those around me. I am up for it … any thoughts on using enterprise tools to support innovation?

TLT Symposium is Back!

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Last year one of the big things I spent a ton of time on after arriving at ETS was the TLT Symposium. The Symposium is a full day event on our campus that serves to gather faculty and staff to look at how technology is being used to impact teaching, learning, and research. Last year I put a lot of effort into integrating an open feel to the event — I pushed to have the site come alive as a blog, we podcasted sessions and in the hallways, and more. It turned out to be a very good event and it sparked a lot of interest in the social computing space.

This year things are being taken to whole other level. We’ve moved the event to the conference center on campus, opened it up to more attendees, and have invited two featured speakers. Our own Studio 204 and podcasting groups will again be podcasitng sessions and in the hall, but we’ve added an onsite podcasting studio to the mix. We’ll also have all sorts of demo stations where we’ll be showing off social tools in a teaching and learning context. We’ll also have bloggers keeping track of sessions as they are running. Should prove to be interesting. It is isn’t for another month, but thought I’d share a brief program overview I got yesterday.

The Penn State Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology is an opportunity for faculty to gather and share the ways they are using technology to enhance teaching, learning, and research. This year’s theme, “Social Computing and the Culture of Teaching and Learning” addresses many of the concerns and opportunities presented by tools such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, and social networking sites. How does Wikipedia change concepts like intellectual property and publication? How are faculty using tools like podcasts and Second Life to teach foreign languages? How are faculty using Adobe Connect (aka Breeze) and videoconferencing tools to teach courses that are offered at multiple locations?

This year’s Symposium will be held at the Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel on April 14 from 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM. It will begin with a keynote presentation from Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, who conducts research on topics like social computing and the digital divide. The featured speaker over lunch is Bryan Alexander, Research Director for the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, who investigates emerging technologies for a consortium of colleges and universities. The Symposium will close with a Horizon Panel of our speakers and Penn State administrators and students, who will discuss their thoughts on the future of educational technologies. In addition, the Symposium has 27 concurrent sessions throughout the day for Penn State faculty to share their latest work.

I’d love to know what you do on your campus to get faculty together to share their work.

ETS Talk 17 is Available

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I feel like all I do at the end of every week is post news of the latest ETS Talk all over my available websites. I post it to the Podcasts at Penn State site, PSU on iTunes U, the ETS Blog, and here at my personal blog. I think this week I’ll even post it over at my PSU Blog (that is running on the new PSU Blog Platform we talk about in the episode) as well just to keep the content flowing. It begs the question of where is the best place to link this stuff? I get good stats from Apple on what is being downloaded out of iTunes U but it is increasingly difficult to know where people are getting the ETS Talk Podcast from. At the end of the day I may have too many places sitting out there on the Internets.

At any rate, the ETS Talk Gang welcomes Jeff Swain this week to talk about building online communities. Jeff manages the ANGEL Community Hub for us here at ETS and has done a wonderful job getting it off the ground and growing it. For some reason we end up calling Jeff and the podcast, “the total package” … not really sure why. We also get a chance to listen to and respond to a phone message by Chris Long about blogging in the classroom. At the end of the show we spend a little time talking about how long the University should maintain content for students and what we should be thinking about to help preserve online content over the long haul.

Direct Link to Podcast | iTunes U

ETS Talk 16 with D’Arcy Norman

/ Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

This week Cole, Allan, and Brad have the pleasure of hosting D’Arcy Norman from the University of Calgary in the 210F Studio … well, he comes in via iChat AV, but that’s close enough. D’Arcy is an international Edu Blogger Rock Star who spends most of his time creating opportunities to engage those in educational contexts with emerging technologies. We spend most of the show talking about how to get strategic about selecting technologies that can have an impact on the educational process and how we look at scaling them. Clearly we are all still talking Twitter, but the new item this week is Yahoo Pipes. We hop you enjoy!

Podcast on iTunes U | Direct Link to Podcast

I Hesitate Doing This

/ Cole Camplese / 2 Comments

Yesterday PSU was in the news twice for our podcasting project. First we were in the Daily Collegian with a relatively well written piece on podcasting lectures. Then in the afternoon, our local CBS affiliate showed up at my office (on 15 minutes notice) to interview me for the same purpose. Both pieces have a little part about students getting out of going to class b/c of the podcast … we aren’t seeing that, but the pilot is still young. At any rate, I woke up this morning to about a dozen or so emails about the TV piece last night — it was already on youtube.

When I first watched it I realized I have some weight to lose and when I told my wife that the “camera adds 30 pounds” she asked quickly, “how many cameras did they have on you.” So, I reluctantly post the piece below and will have to look the other way for weeks when I visit my blog so I don’t have to be reminded of it all … actually I’ll probably pull it after enough people make fun of me.