On Monday I presented to the members of the Penn State Online committee a short talk focused at Web 2.0 and how we are addressing needs at Penn State. Slides are attached as a PDF.
Get the PDF of the slides.
PSU
PSU Tweet Meet
I didn’t take any pictures, but I am guessing some of the new faces emerging on the campus Twitter scene did to document the first PSU Tweet Meet. Funny, I tried to pull the trigger on something like this last year, but it never happened … no matter. I have to say I am constantly amazed at how my digital connections continue to materialize into real live people — right before my eyes. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, Twitter has afforded new opportunities to engage the local community like nothing I have been involved with. My colleague, Stevie Rocco, said it best when she described how Twitter is so much more effective for her in her local space — it has shaped new relationships right here on our campus and for that I am thankful.
So, I want to offer I heart felt thank you to all who attended and want to apologize for being in a sub-colecamplese mood … crazy day and without a doubt the Tweet Meet was a very bright spot! It was a pleasure meeting new people and reconnecting with others.
ETS Year in Review
We had our last staff meeting of the year this morning here at ETS … I was going to cancel given the amazingly bad weather we are having, but late last night I decided not to do that and instead to forgo the usual house cleaning, project updates and operational policy discussions and simply say thank you to the group for an amazing year of work and effort. I tried to share some of the highlights from the year with them … a list of things way too long to cover as quickly as I wanted to came to mind. So instead of a huge laundry list of stuff I picked a handful of our largest impact initiatives and shared some highlights and some thoughts. I linked to the slides below without audio in Flash format. If you are interested, just click the image below to check them out (it is 5 MB). As always, comments are welcome!
It is also important to note that there are people all over ITS and the University in general who have had a big hand in these things.
Digital Commons in the News
I was pleasantly surprised to see an article about the Digital Commons today at the Penn State Live site. Nice to see it getting a little attention … we are getting set to do the next five campuses and we are getting really solid feedback from those who already have DC facilities. Our own facility here at University Park is seeing massive usage — much more now that we’ve integrated our faculty and student support spaces into the one Digital Commons. Very exciting!
Discoverability in an Emerging Space
With the Blogs at Penn State project fully opened as a controlled pilot (can you be fully open in a pilot?) I am finding it difficult to discover blogs across our new PSU Blogosphere. When I do come across new PSU Blogs I instantly add them to Google Reader and have been enjoying getting to know people on campus via their blogs very much.
The Blogs at Penn State is a centrally managed environment that allows users to create and publish blogs into their personal webspace. At PSU we give people 500 MB of default webspace that they can easily expand by asking politely … this webspace can be used for anything they want — as long as they adhere to some basic policies. The nice thing about this is that people’s bogs seem like they really do belong to them and that they are part of an already established technological cultural understanding — whatever the hell that is.
The big issue for lots of people is finding these blogs. Yesterday the stats told me we have about 700 active blogs out there in the PSU Blog Cloud … finding them is tough. Sure, we can create a directory that lists every blog, but I’m not sure that is the right thing to do. I have talked to more than one person who doesn’t want their blog listed in a directory — sure they know it is open, but the effort it takes to discover it makes them feel better. My colleague, Brad Kozlek, recently created a self-service Blog Directory where individuals can choose to list their blogs. This seems to work, but as we go from pilot to production what really is the best thing to do.
I have seen other schools where they do pull out the latest posts, comments, and links to display on a Blogs at the University home-page — that scares the hell out of me. Remember, these spaces are tied to personal webspace for a reason … they are personal. Not everyone is down with that kind of exposure. So for now, the self-service model is what lives on … it just feels silly asking people to visit another site to “register” their blog. There has to be a better way.
Blogs at Penn State – The Real Thing!
So this semester (after about a year of work) the Blogs at Penn State will be used in classrooms to support online conversations (and probably all sorts of other stuff). We decided after much debate to restrict the pilot to 1500 people, but probably have the capacity to jump to 2000 if requests and numbers continue to flow in. In all honesty we could probably handle more, but the point of a pilot is to learn. We’ll be doing a while bunch of that this semester! As I type there are students clicking the links for the “self-enroll” process so they can start blogging right away within PSU. To me it is very exciting — the Daily Collegian even ran a little story about the new opportunity this morning.
We are already evaluation Moveable Type 4 as it offers all sorts of new features we think will be critical. We are also starting to build our list of features we think we should be providing when this thing hits production status and the whole of the University can have at it. One thing I am noticing is that the Blogs at Penn State Community Hub is picking up steam — people are showing up and posting questions and answers. It is very cool to see the community rise up and work to support itself. One of the things I thought I’d link to is a page that has a bunch of links to help faculty get the most out their blogging experience. I’ll be reporting numbers and reaction as they roll in. Exciting stuff!
Talking Design with Designers
Day before yesterday my colleague, Allan Gyorke, and I gave a talk to the Instructional Design and Development group at the Penn State World Campus related to Digital Expression. It is a talk I’ve done before and it really focuses on the platforms PSU has been working to deliver for the last 18 months or so. The talk frames the need by looking relatively deeply at the changing characteristics of our undergraduate resident population — they are very mobile, very smart, and very plugged into social spaces (read, Facebook). I use a bunch of PSU statistics gathered by our assessment team as well as numbers from the Pew Internet and American Life Project team.
After the warm-up I tend to dive into the tools we are highlighting — Blogs at Penn State, Podcasts at Penn State, Wikis at Penn State, as well as the Digital Commons initiative and a few others. What made this conversation different was the fact the audience was a group of instructional designer and technologists — certainly a fun group to talk to. I was struck by how interested most of them seemed to be in the tools and how willing they were to discuss how we might think about using them. I was also struck by how excited many of them got as we continued to talk. It was a very fun hour and a half … it left me thinking two things — I would very much like to spend more time with groups of interested designers who are in the midst of creating lots of learning spaces and that I have now done this presentation for about a dozen audiences at Penn State but have failed to deliver it to my own staff. That last point hit me last night as I sat on the back patio with a glass of wine — talk about having one of those reality check, “duh” moments. That is obviously something I have to do.
The thing about the talk is that it really tries to define one of my core strategies — enabling opportunities for faculty, staff, and students to engage in the art of digital expression within the context of higher education. One of my goals is to create a platform that provides for supported use of digital tools to not only enhance teaching and learning, but that can creep into everyday life. The other thing it does is illustrates how quickly we are all moving … two years ago these platforms didn’t exist in a coherent way on our campus. The talents of many people have made it a reality.
At any rate, my slides are available as a PDF — it is big. I have learn how to shrink these things down a bit! I’d love to talk more about this with any of you.
Being Digital
I really couldn’t think of a title for this post … I wanted to share a quick story about the Digital Commons project we are currently working on. The Digital Commons is an initiative to provide a common set of tools at all locations of Penn State that enable students to create digital artifacts in a supported way. Too often we (we being administrators and instructors) have these expectations that all our students can easily envision and create digital media. I mean if you look at some of the reports that people like Pew Internet and American Life Project provide you may get the picture that every single person under the age of 25 is capable of creating content that will be shared at youtube. While it is true that there are a whole bunch of these kinds of kids running around our campuses it is just as true there are a whole heck of a lot more who can’t. Just reality.
The Digital Commons is an attempt to help promote and support the notion of being digital. We work hard to encourage faculty to allow evidence of learning in the form of videos, blog posts, podcasts, and more but when they assign it we just sort of assume the kids will just figure it out. Most of the time these kids do, but they do it on their own machines with substandard software tools and without access to things like digital cameras, green screens, lighting, etc — and forget about any education as it relates to things like using lighting, production, planning, or even copyright. That’s where the Digital Commons comes in — it provide more than the equipment, it provides a framework. It is a killer project that has potential for real transformation written all over it.
We are working really hard to install five of these studios across the Commonwealth of PA this Summer. That is tough — there are more factors at play here than are imaginable. Communicating the potential and requirements to each campus is very difficult given the time and geographic challenges. Today we made the first attempt at doing that … instead of getting in the car and visiting each campus we ate some of our own dogfood and used Adobe Connect Pro (you know, Breeze). We have a killer ACP setup here at University Park so we paired it with a call in line and delivered the hour long briefing to multiple campuses from the comfort of one of our conference rooms. I couldn’t be there — I was scheduled to be off site having a meeting at a local restaurant … the place had wifi, so I got there early and pulled out the MacBook Pro. I simply plugged in my earphones, fired up the browser, connected to the ACP meeting, and dialed the conference call with Skype. It was nothing short of amazing — the technology worked and the briefing went exceptionally well. I took a screen cap of the whole thing:
The Digital Commons project is one to watch … I will be sharing more as it all becomes clear, but this is one that we feel very good about. By providing a common platform at all locations there is so much we can bundle under the overall umbrella. Things are off to a very good, but very demanding start. Stay tuned …