Home from Camp
Before I start, I need to give a shout-out to my Mother … it is her Birthday. Happy Birthday, Mom!
People Tags. Credits Micala
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!
Storing and Finding Your Stuff
As I head into Day 2 of the Learning Design Summer Camp here at PSU I am humbled by the power and energy of our community. If you are sitting in Foster Auditorium and can’t feel the vibe, then we need to check you for a pulse. Seriously, there are some amped up people. My colleague Chris Millet said to me that the event had the energy and spirit of the Berkman at 10 event he and I attended a while back … I have to agree this thing has raised the bar.
I took part in several conversations yesterday and most of them centered around digital stuff. From assessing content that is completely distributed in a course (how in the world do Tweets play into a participation grade) to talking about how students obtain copyright on “published” videos they produce in Digital Commons? It got me thinking a bit about the challenges we have in front of us as more and more faculty assign digital activities and more and more students create rich media as evidence of learning. That in and of itself is very interesting, but I am beginning to wonder what it means to us as it relates to storage. With Digital Commons, one of our biggest concerns is providing speedy and reliable storage for creating digital assets. When they walk away from the DC, they want to take it with them … and as they produce more, the more disk space we need to give them.
Here at PSU, we give everyone one GB for free in their personal space … I’ve been talking with people about kicking that up to 5 GB and the discussion seems to have legs. What I am wondering about is the long term personal management of all this stuff. Storing it all is one thing, while finding it quickly is another. What I am thinking about is how to empower people to use their personal space as a virtual disk drive that has real asset management associated with it. I know I keep beating the Blogs at PSU drum, but once again I could see this environment as a critical link between simply storing content and managing content.
Managing Assets in MovableType
It seems to me there is so much more to the question of storing content … we need to help our students understand how to manage it so they control it more comfortably. I wonder if this is in direct conflict with my earlier post asking if they care where it goes when they upload it. All I know is that in the coming years there is going to be so much more digital content produced and so many more students living in the cloud that we need to go beyond simply throwing disks at the problem … we need to help move the conversation forward and give them a place for it today and a path to move forward.
As a final thought, I have been doing my best to live in the cloud for the last four or five weeks with much success. I am no longer living on a machine packed with stuff — I’ve moved it google docs, IMAP mail, my blog, and more and more into Evernote (BTW, you can now do note editing on your iPhone!). Only once during that time did I have to figure out how to get access to a document that was on my old laptop. When Camp is over I plan on moving the rest of my stuff into the cloud — managing most of my digital assets with MT and seeing how that goes. I have a feeling it will be just fine.
From Blogs to Publishing Platforms
D’Arcy wrote a post over the weekend questioning the need for an Institutionally run blogging environment … I always take notice when he asks questions like this for a number of reasons — he’s smart, he’s been in the field for a long time making smart decisions, and his posts tend to bring in smart comments. This is no exception. D’Arcy asks if, given the plethora of open/free blogging services on the Web, the University of Calgary should be running its own service. I see where he is coming from and it is something I wrestle with across the board. There is a real tension between what we can/should provide in comparison to just recommending a .com service. Blogs are the tip of the iceberg … think email, calendar, and other more mission critical things that are being outsourced by Institutions all over the country.
D’Arcy talks about how hosting your own may provide for increased integration, trust, and authority. I think these are solid reasons, but I might expand them a bit. I can honestly say the reason we adopted MovableType as our blogging platform had very little to do with blogging. We knew we were going to be able to (over time) shift it towards a very powerful publishing platform that can do all sorts of things online. When we went down the path, the immediate win was a robust, scalable, integrated, and universally available blogging tool that people could use to support teaching, learning, expression, or really anything else.
Going forward, the idea is that you arrive at your personal webspace and are encouraged to just click over to your MT dashboard and publish. It is a jump for a user to think of this outside of setting up a blog — on the surface, the environment is a blogging toolset after all. The big ah-ha moment comes when you actually watch how easy it is to extend this into the world of instant site creation, all with the affordances of a modern CMS and blogging platform — instant publishing, RSS, ping/trackbacks, categories, tags, search, and so much more.
The work of our faculty fellow, Dr. Carla Zembal-Saul, this summer illustrates just how powerful this is when the jump is made to publishing and not just blogging. And the most interesting work being done has to do with how the portfolio becomes a social environment — guess what our platform is really good at? IN the coming weeks, I am going to try and focus some energy on explaining Carla’s work and share some more tangible evidence of the new ePortfolio Platform (powered by MT) we will be promoting here at PSU. The idea that a blog can be used for any publishing task is important to grasp if we are going to move to the next level of academic utilization of the web as a platform — at least, if you agree with D’Arcy that the notion of doing it on the inside promotes integration, trust, and authority.
Off to Camp
When I was as kid I went off to camp every summer … I attended sports camps every summer, working to hone my tennis, basketball, and soccer skills. I never did the full on all summer camp thing that lots of kids did. I did a lot of time at Bloomsburg University camps primarily because my parents worked at the University and it was our home town. But I also went to Russ Houk’s camps every single summer from the time I was 9 until I was a senior in High School. Russ’ camps were in the mountains and amazingly separated from reality. I went for soccer, but always learned so much more.
Each summer I’d head off and have to play in the blazing summer heat, to work harder than I ever had with coaches from all over the World, and deal with an environment that was very primitive. It was awesome! It was at these camps that I stretched myself to play with quite literally some of the best players in the state and sometimes the World … I learned how strong I could be and most importantly I learned how much work it took to be really good at something. Russ’ camp were about stretching yourself physically, emotionally, and at times, psychologically. It was a blast and a disaster at the same time.
Heading into tomorrow’s Learning Design Summer Camp here at PSU I am reminded of my time heading off to camp at this time of year. I am nervous about how it all plays out, but I am anxious to put our collective intellegence to the test. Our goal was to raise the level of the conversation related to learning design and we will see how it all plays out. I know this from Russ’ camps — it is up to everyone to bring their A-Games. Can we do it?
I plan to engage … I set my “vacation” message for autorespond on email to read:
I am taking part in the ETS Learning Design Summer Camp at Penn State University and will not be able to be focusing on email for the next two days. Please know that I am keeping track of notes and will get back to you by Thursday at the latest. Thank you for understanding!
I can’t wait to see how we all perform.
Pandora Radio
I know I am late to the Pandora party, but now that I am a full out lover of the wonderful (lack of) randomness that it offers me I am hooked. I’ve used it on my computer while traveling before, but since the introduction of the application for the iPhone and iPod Touch my use of it has soared. I have a handful of artist “radio stations” set up and typically just mash them all together to get an amazing mix of the stuff I know I like and the stuff Pandora thinks I like. Crazy thing is that Pandora has been right nearly all the time — we’re talking about batting close to 1000 here.
I installed it on my iPod Touch and just leave it connected to the stereo so we can listen to the mix throughout the house and in the backyard. Last night, while sitting on the patio, I asked my wife why in the World would anyone need to steal music when you can simply tune in for free? She responded with, “why would anyone need to buy any music?” What do musicians and the RIAA think about it?
Both of us were just marveling in the simple pleasure of the most intelligent radio station we’d ever listened to. Got me thinking that as we continue to do our part to help inform students to the ills of illegal file sharing and stealing music this could be part of the solution. We are getting set to release our Copyright Perspectives campaign in the coming week and I have to wonder if promoting Pandora is appropriate … I figured better ask the Internets!
I wonder how increased Pandora use would impact bandwidth — both personal quotas in the dorms and as a whole across the University. I’d like to hear from some of the more technically savvy folks out there — is this a good thing to promote across our campus as an alternative to illegal file sharing? I ask because I have no idea. We’ve had to impose bandwidth restrictions in the residence halls to help curb the constant use that file sharing causes, but what happens when more and more of the legal alternatives are all network services? I am thinking about the students who buy the online viewing package for College Football, the kids who buy all their movies and TV shows from iTunes, upload tons of RAW photos to Flickr, or tune exclusively into Pandora … what should we be thinking about?
