Clickity-Clack

SecondLife in Bloomsburg, PA

/ Cole Camplese / 4 Comments

I am from Bloomsburg, PA … I was born just down the road in Danville and spent my whole pre-college life there (except for a little while in Lewisburg, PA while my Dad was a professor at Bucknell). When I finished undergrad at WVU and after failed stint at NC State, I returned to Bloomsburg. After several months of painting houses, cutting weeds, and failing to find myself I entered the Institute for Interactive Technologies at Bloomsburg University. I got my masters degree there — it was the first program that brought together my two main areas of interest — technology and learning. It was an amazing and eye-opening experience.

These days there is some very interesting stuff still going on at the IIT. One of the big things happening there is revolving around Dr. Karl Kopp. I didn’t know Dr. Kopp when I was an IITer, he wasn’t there yet, but his work in the serious games for education and training space is getting some major play across the industry. He does some very insightful blogging and from what I know, he is hell of a good speaker. One his great pieces is the video linked to his latest post — it is essentially a six minute video looking at SecondLife in the learning/training space and how important immersion can be. Well done and worth a look. I am still not convinced SL is anywhere near being the end all be all, but Dr. Kopp makes some interesting points.

Game On!

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

By my own admission, I am not much of a gamer. Back in the day when I was a kid I would play text based games by Infocom on my 128K Mac … after that, I’ve stayed away from computer games for the most part– small amounts of time here and there, but serious addictions. Sure, I’ve had game consoles, but other than my Wii I haven’t gotten the fever like most of my friends have since way back in the day. We’ve been doing a lot stuff in Second Life, but like we said in ETS Talk 25, SL isn’t a game.

The last couple of weeks I have been into a game though — not a million dollar production, but a simple little Flash game called, Desktop Tower Defense. I was at my sister’s tonight for a picnic and all the guys were talking about it. Let me say it is good. Two things make it perfect in my mind … the first is the simple game play. Those of us raised on the simplicity of the Atari 2600 know that one button is enough. The second thing that makes it really interesting is the social component. They make it really easy to set up a group and play against your friends. Just really smart stuff.

Looks like people are noticing. I came across a nice little post over at Giga Om that nails it. We need to be thinking about games in education, but we cannot ignore the simple options out there. Things don’t have to be over the top to work. Desktop Tower Defense is the proof.

We Know This – Kids are Digital

/ Cole Camplese / 6 Comments

Running through the feeds this morning I came across a post over at GigaOm related to a tech panel the author, Liz Gannes, moderated recently. What makes it an interesting post is that the panel was made up of teens. We’ve been telling folks on campus and beyond about the habits of the net generation, but this post nails it. When people outside the academy begin discussing the traits of these kids I think we’ll see great acceptance that what we say about them is true. I get the feeling that most of the time people think we are inflating the characteristics of this population. But for what it is worth, I am more of a believer that the current group of young people in and getting set to enter college are a special bunch. To me it means we can offer more interesting technical opportunities that they will use to support their time in higher education — if we can gather some mind share from the place they all seem to love, the FaceBook.

Hidden Gems on PSU Podcasting

/ 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?

Web 2.0, The Machine …

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I have to say that this video by Michael Welsh, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State U is one of the most well done pieces I have seen in recent times. He is obviously passionate about what he does and this short film steps up and smacks you in the face. I’m not sure it works for those who aren’t web 2.0 aware, but for the folks who run in that circle, this thing pulls it all together so well. Although it doesn’t paint the googlzon picture of Epic 2014 it does a very effective job of exposing us as the primary ingredient in the growing collective knowledge that is the new web. All I can say is that it is well worth the time to watch.

A Transparent Organization

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I’m not really sure why I haven’t been posting all that much … things in the real world have been busy I guess. Between work and life I haven’t felt the need (or urge) to write much — here. Maybe that is it as well, I have been writing and creating content in various areas at work the last several weeks that my attention is split. something to share.

I have now been at ETS for over a year (I started last November 1st) and I am seeing and feeling real momentum. One of the things I most excited about is the simple fact that many people around our offices are now creating and exposing content of their own. A few examples of this are:

That doesn’t seem like that long of a list, but it is just a few things that are going on. One of the goals of mine is to run a transparent organization — one where the outside can see in. I am excited about the world discovering the collective intelligence of the ETS team. I am so proud of the fact that when I log into Penn State on iTunes U I see new content being shared there by my group. I love it when my RSS reader lights up to tell me one of our community spaces has been updated. I am thrilled to see the amount of faculty engaging us in real conversations. All in all I am happy with the way we are doing business.

The next month or so will be insane with new projects being announced, the opening of the first of our new engagement initiative, and changes to how things are done … it will continue to be interesting to me and will continue to challenge me. With all that is happening in the open, you are invited in for a look as well.

Ready, AIM, Develop

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Not too long ago AOL (remember them) came out with something they called OpenIM … it was essentially an API that allowed you to write desktop apps that could take advantage of the AIM system.  It was nice and all, but the lionshare of apps that matter to me are web-based.  Now I guess directly integrating IM into some sort of office suite would be nice, but at the end of the day I (and so many others) live in the browser.

Now AOL is opening the doors for developers to integrate AIM into web apps.  In higher education, many students use AIM as a primary mode of communication — I am guessing it is right up there with writing on someone’s FaceBook Wall and texting on a phone.  I can also tell you that from experience having students sign into AIM in class to pass files to me quickly can be quite a pain.  If it works from within the learning spaces we can score another one for getting students interested in spending a little of their time in there.

I ran into all this over at GigaOm … their take is that this is how AOL keeps AIM relevent in the face of Jabber.  While I agree that is where the future is, most students I deal with don’t know Jabber from AIM — they just know they use the AOL client.  At any rate, as I am typing my mind is spinning with the ways AIM could be brought into custom web apps to support all sorts of things in learning designs.  Has anyone started on any of this?  Anyone have ideas?  I bet my students would!