Month: August 2008

Affordances

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

I have been lucky enough to work on a really killer project with some of my colleagues from the PSU College of Education related to pre-service teachers. Dr. Carla Zembal Saul (ETS Faculty Fellow) worked like mad with her colleagues to create a one laptop per student project here at the University to make sure all of the students in the Elementary and Kindergarten Education (EKED) or Secondary English Education programs have the tools they need to be dialed into the 21st Century Skills that teachers require. From the EDUCATE website:

The requirement is part of a new program, titled Exploring Directions in Ubiquitous Computing and Teacher Education (EDUCATE). Juniors who will enter the Elementary and Kindergarten Education (EKED) or Secondary English Education (SECED ENGL) majors in Fall 2008 will be the first to participate in this program.

What I find particularly interesting about this (in addition to all the laptops being MacBooks) is that the College seems to be really doing this right. They have a director in Orrin Murray who really gets it, there is an intense focus on finding new ways to engage these students in the classroom, and there is support for faculty trying to make it happen. What all this means to me is that these machines are creating new affordances for both the students and the faculty. I see faculty getting what they need in the way of pedagogical support from within the College and from a team like we have in ETS and I see students learning not how to use a computer, but how to use a computer to open doors in their own classrooms. That is a very important distinction in my mind.

Two days ago my Flickr feed exposed me to some pictures from students getting their MacBooks … the photo set tells an amazing story. It is hard to believe that these are pictures from my own campus. So cool.

The last bit to all this that has me very excited is that Carla has a big hand in what is going on in this space and she spent the Summer with ETS as a Faculty Fellow investigating the Penn State Blogs as a powerful portfolio toolset. I know she’s integrating portfolio thinking into her pieces of this and that means we have a whole group of students with the right tools, the right mentorship, and the right affordances to make progress happen.

One a Day

/ Cole Camplese / 8 Comments

When I started doing the One Post a Day project for the month of August I really wasn’t sure what would come of it. I made a couple little challenges in it to see if anyone wanted to join in and a few takers emerged. While it has been relatively difficult to keep the pace up, I’ve been able to figure it out. There has been a few very surprising things that have emerged from it.

First of all, I am taking a few more minutes everyday to think in a little more structured way. Typically my head is filled with swirling thoughts that have some structure, but not enough to really put my arms around. I find myself grabbing at those thoughts as thread starters of sorts and working to organize them into a story that I can write about. I am calling it a story, because I am working to structure the ideas in a way that I can expose them in short bursts without a ton of build up, explanation, or long term depth. I am thinking hard about how to write to the point and use examples to expose the concept I am working towards.

Another thing I am finding is that I am taking more time to comment elsewhere on other peoples’ posts. With more fresh content everyday I am working to read things and reflect on their thoughts as well. I have been trying to comment on at least one of my colleague’s post a day, but have found myself doing more than that. An added bonus is that I discovering more people through the enhanced blogging that is going on.

Finally, and this is the strangest thing I have noticed, I am more interested in getting exercise and physical activity. I’m not sure where that is coming from, but I think having my head a little clearer has given me the space to remember that I used to love to be very active. I’ve started playing tennis again and just added a second weekly match … my game is still coming into shape, but it feels great to be dead tired after a couple of sets. The coolest thing for me, given my long time love of biking, is that I have finally started to ride my bike to work. A lot of people give me shit about my Cafe Racer, but it is exactly what I wanted when I decided I needed something that was more street friendly. I actually bought it last summer and rode it to work exactly once. I’ve tripled that in the last three days and can’t say enough about how much more focused and (dare I say it) happy I feel at work. Not sure what is going on but I have exercised in one way or another everyday for the past seven days … not great for most, but with my recent track record, it is great.

Cafe Racer

So the One a Day challenge has had some surprising side effects … I think I need to consider what to tackle in September to keep it going.

Weirdly Refreshing

/ Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

SavedSo yesterday all of a sudden my blog stopped accepting comments. All of my posts were set to comments closed. No idea how it happened, but it did. Was I hacked? Did the configuration somehow get blown up? Things seemed to be OK otherwise, but the idea that all of a sudden something like comments could just be turned off is very strange. This issue came at a time when I really didn’t have the cycles to really figure it out. When I started to investigate it I jumped on IM hoping to find someone to help … no one there. So instead of sending an email to my much smarter friends I tried asking twitter. As one would assume, it worked. Within a few minutes a former student of mine Twittered the solution. Amazing and wonderful! That kind of speed is new.

To me this is the story of web 2.0 that is emerging — the speed at which connected communities can influence change has become astonishing. Would I have gotten my answer without Ben’s Twitter help? Sure … much, much later. The idea that there is a network there to help at 11:00 PM is pretty amazing. This is a reason why the State College PD and PSU itself started Tweeting — they recognize that working within targeted, connected, and interested communities works.

If I pull back from this I can begin to see interesting opportunities in the teaching and learning world. For the most part, classes don’t emerge as communities unless something very special happens. Each semester is different and it is completely unplanned (but hoped for). One semester the thing just clicks and others not so much. The results from the last class I taught were in line with this — Twitter worked. If we tried it again it may or may not. What I am seeing though is that Twitter has the power to bind communities in ways that are weirdly refreshing to me. When groups of people decide to join and participate they are creating new opportunities to create shared experiences … that tells me they are going to create a shared awareness with each other. This creates a situation where people can quickly come to the aide of each other and create change very quickly. I see this on Facebook every now and then, but Twitter has taken over the title of community creator for me.

So thank you Twitter … more specifically, thank you Ben!

A Case of the Mondays

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

If you haven’t seen Office Space, do it. I’ll wait.

OK, now that you’ve seen the movie you’ll get the “someone has a case of the Mondays” reference. People always ask me why my Twitter stream on Mondays appears to be so negative. The answer lies in the fact that I structure my weeks so that they move from very heavy on meetings at the start to very light by the end. I do that for a lot of reasons, but the biggest is so I earn time to think and reflect at the end of the week. My boss, John Harwood, gave me some great advice when I started in my current position … he told to make sure I leave time for thinking. Not just a little time here and there, but real time. I’ve listened to him and I usually find a way to keep my meetings to an absolute minimum on Fridays. I leave them for community activities like the BS Breakfast and ETS Talk. I leave them open so I can control what goes on the calendar … it makes it easy to have “pop in meetings” with different people or reserve a slot to slide something important into.

But back to Mondays. This week is not too unlike a typical Monday and you can see that I feel as though I earn my Friday time by getting as much done early in the week as possible. I am always a bit stressed on Sunday evenings looking at the week to come, but I can usually start to feel really good about it all by the time I get to Tuesday. Monday is the day I work the hardest to address administrative responsibilities. It gets me ready to deal with what is to come and to report on what happened the previous week. As you can see by the screen capture below, I’m not kidding about the density of Monday … but, it is done for a real reason. As I sit and stare at my calendar I wonder if other people do something similar? Do you stack a certain part of your week so you can spare some time to think? Do you take time to think in a systematic way? Or am I just crazy?

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!

Storing and Finding Your Stuff

/ Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

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

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.

Presentation: 8/12/2008: Learning Design Summer Camp

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Scott McDonald and I presented our thoughts from our C&I 597C: Disruptive Technologies for Teaching and Learning course at the Learning Design Summer Camp.  We shared our feelings about how integrating several layers of social opportunities into the design of the course produced some very interesting and surprising outcomes.

View the slides at SlideShare.  If you prefer, you can watch the video of the session at the PSU TLT YouTube page.