Social Stuff at PSU

May 22, 2007May 23, 2007 / 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.

Hidden Gems on PSU Podcasting

February 17, 2007February 17, 2007 / Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

As I was browsing through the Podcasts at Penn State analytics data for the week I noticed a huge jump in the number of visits (about 2,000 additional for the week). When I jumped over to the specific page that was getting all the hits I was surprised to see the “Honey Bees in Crisis” podcast being done by Carla Zimbal-Saul and her students. Really well done and pulling in some major attention and traffic. It is well worth a visit!

I am heading to Apple with Carla and some of her colleagues from the PSU College of Education very soon to talk to them about some of the great work that is being done in our College of Ed. Things like this show just how well they are at integrating technology in appropriate ways to support teaching and learning. I’d love to get Carla to do a guest post on the project … I wonder if she would consider that?

I Hesitate Doing This

February 1, 2007 / 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.

Penn State on iTunes U and Podcasting Talk

November 30, 2006November 30, 2006 / Cole Camplese / 4 Comments

I gave a talk at the ITS Forum yesterday with a colleague here at Penn State related to Podcasting and Penn State on iTunes U yesterday. Jimmy V focused on the hard core technology behind making the iTunes U system work in our environment, while I did a more general talk focusing on why we would do podcasting at the Institutional level, an update on the state of podcasting in general, and a full on demo of our iTunes U space. Reaction was fairly positive … at any rate here is a QuickTime file of the slides without audio or any real content, but there they are … there is a podcast and a videocast of the session being produced — I’ll link that when it is available.

Studiocode

October 24, 2006 / Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

Another Hot Team result from the ETS team … this one is focused on Studiocode. SC is a software tool that enables an amazing set of video tagging and analysis features. No need for me to describe it all here when you can jump over to the ETS Blog and read about it for yourself. As always with a Hot Team, there is a white paper to download and enjoy.

iTunes U vs Roll Your Own

September 7, 2006September 7, 2006 / Cole Camplese / 4 Comments

Yesterday I did a quick post on iTunes U here at Penn State — really it was a plea for help on meta data management … but, since we have not really announced iTunes U in a formal way I think it has started an interesting question, what do we do with our own Podcasts at Penn State site now? I had originally posted this as a reply to the comment on yesterday’s post, but it got me thinking about the question of iTunes U vs Rolling Your Own …

It is a good question and one that we are constantly tossing back and forth. On one hand, having developed our own space gives us the opportunity to innovate on our terms — that is a good thing. On the other hand Apple is good at this stuff and is likely to continue to create new thinking in the space that we may be just playing catch up to. If I did a balanced score card — not a bad idea — I think at the moment it would come out tipping towards iTunes U. The lure of not having to maintain and grow yet another service (YAS) for my team is a very attractive alternative.

At the moment the Podcasts at Penn State site does not give us an authenticated podcast space … in other words, if you post it in our space anyone can see it. That doesn’t matter to me, but for the vast majority of faculty that doesn’t fly. iTunes U is by nature a secure podcasting platform — obviously we can control the public v private content, but it is much more like a CMS/LMS toolset. Some have criticized Apple for creating a “walled garden,” but in the realities of higher education it is the model people are used to and seemingly prefer. I see a day somewhere in the future where we can open this stuff up, but we aren’t there yet.

Our vision for the Podcasts at Penn State site are to move it to a “podcasting hub” of sorts — a place where faculty, staff, and (eventually) students can go to learn how to podcast, get equipment recommendations, listen to sample podcasts, collect lesson ideas, discuss how they are using podcasts, and other applied things that support the appropriate use of the technology. When our Fall pilot is over, I envision posting the final report there as well. Could it grow into a home for a community of practice? I also see it as a space that will evolve into a directory to highlight the best content at Penn State on iTunes U. I wonder what others would like to see?

Can it be compared to where we all were 10 years ago with the LMS/CMS decisions that we were facing? A lot of people set out to build their own, a lot of people just sort of hung back and waited, and a lot of people went out and bought WebCT, FirstClass, or whatever at the time. I’m not sure it is the same thing, but I have been through the, “let’s build our own solution” cycle too many times and with something as potentially complex (and popular) as this I have to ask myself if it is worth it. I would much rather be in the business of inspiring and supporting the appropriate use of technology for teaching and learning and leave the heavy lifting of designing, developing, and supporting enterprise applications to the big boys. At the end of the day I just hate it when something jumps up and bites me in the ass — for either building or buying. What is the right long term move? Good question …

Faculty Projects and Engagement Awards

August 30, 2006August 30, 2006 / Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

There was an article (subscription required) in the Chronicle today about a Harvard Law professor planning to use SL to host parts of his course — not a novel idea, but one that shows there are people willing to jump at new opportunities. After reading it, I spent a few minutes bouncing around the professor’s blog and found a great pointer to a post showing some of the work in action. It may not be novel, but it sure looks interesting and could lead to some very engaging opportunities. I smell a pilot plan for the Spring.

This leads me to expose a few thoughts we tossed around yesterday as it relates to engaging faculty. Currently we do a thing called the MTO (Multimedia Teaching Object). The idea behind the MTO is that we do a scheduled call for proposals by PSU faculty and then help those that are accepted build a teaching object — usually a Flash piece or a series of illustrations. There is more to it — an open sharing license comes to mind — but for the most part it is a small program that takes some serious resources and staff time. To do something this focused well, you need a host of developers and instructional designers working at break neck pace to produce very small tangible outcomes. It has a tendency to burn people out.

We started talking about how we could take that program and expand and contract it at the same time. So if you jump out a level from a program like that and created a larger umbrella program that you could create many smaller more targeted opportunities (MTO might be one of them) we could become more strategic and agile with our faculty projects — I started calling it the Engagement Awards. The idea is if we are researching SecondLife, then we could do a targeted Engagement Award Call related specifically to that — the same could hold true for podcasting, blogging, wikis, and anything else we have running around in our collective heads. That would get us off the Flash treadmill and into a whole host of opportunities to work with faculty. Every project would be connected to a set of outcomes — a “profile in success” like piece for our webspaces, a white paper, and hopefully an invitation for the faculty members to participate in our annual TLT Symposium. I am not explaining this very well, but the idea is to create targeted opportunities to engage with faculty throughout the year that are more in line with our resources, interests, and capabilities. I could see many of these targeted calls looking at emerging things that I know faculty would be interested in.

Does this make sense and who is doing this in Higher Education that I could benchmark against?

Podcast Training Session

August 23, 2006 / Cole Camplese / 6 Comments

Today we hold our first training session on the Podcasts at Penn State project. We are bringing together somewhere around 25 faculty today to get a hands-on opportunity with the new system. We’ve been making lots of upgrades to the Podcasts at Penn State site to be ready for the Fall. One of the big things we’ve done is to make it much easier to create and organize a course podcast or a podcast show. This gives us the ability to give each faculty member a structured place to create and manage their episodes and students an easy to place to find it all. Here is an example of the way things are now being structured … still to do is to roll out the new directory and front page design that will highlight specific courses or shows. I’m hopeful that by the end of the session today we’ll have 25 new podcasters.