Tonight Chris Millet and I sat down to talk about the blogging study he is conducting at the IST Solutions Institute here at Penn State. Chris and I headed down to the basement in our old studio to talk a bit about the study and to share some thoughts with the faculty participating … this is a 50 minute, unedited discussion. We didn’t have notes or any real notion of what we wanted to talk about other than how we’ve used blogs to power our classrooms. There are some interesting things. Enjoy it … the podcast is around 45 MB. Thoughts?
Current Projects
Orlando Grab Bag
So, I’m in Orlando … hmm, Orlando. The land of magic, fun, and all around interestingness (?) … I finally have a little bandwidth for the moment. I am standing in the Apple Podcast Suite just wrapping up a nice interview with James Hilton and Lynne Johnson from the University of Michigan … we spent the better part of 40 minutes talking about their use of iTunes in their School of Dentistry. Really interesting stuff. Later in the day I’ll be hanging out with some folks from Ohio State about teaching and learning with technology. Should be cool — but what is it with me and the Big Ten schools. The U Mich people gave me a little grief about the football game last weekend, but not on tape. At any rate, here is the feed that will pump out all the Apple ADCE Podcasts.
I spent the first several days down here with my wife and little girl, Madeline … we went to the Disney kingdom. We hit the Animal Kingdom and Epcot on day one and then did the Magic Kingdom and back to Epcot on day 2. Here’s the deal, that Disney stuff is expensive but it does grab the attention of a 4 year old. The thing we noticed is how the folks at Disney allow you to purchase adult beverages in Animal Kingdom and Epcot but not the Magic Kingdom — hence the 2 trips to Epcot. If you’ve been there then you know all about the countries … we like Great Britain. And we spent a lot of time there drinking pints of Stella while Madeline slept on day two. I can’t tell you much easier the whole Disney experience is with a buzz. Here’s the evidence, when you go to the Magic Kingdom (no adult beverages allowed) you notice how all the parents will lose their shit on their kids at least once or twice. It is actually funny to hear everyone going nuts in different languages … see we are all the same down deep. By the time we got to Epcot, Madeline was sleeping and it was straight to the pub for a few pints … that made it all much easier.
Mixing work with vacation can be a drag, but you gotta do what you gotta do. Several things left this week here with Apple and then it is back home and back to reality. At any rate its been fun. Oh, by the way … I got to see and hold one of the new iPods — you know with video. It is an amazing device … a lot cooler that I thought it would be. One huge disappointment is that you cannot do ratings on videos. That is just lame — imagine how easily you can use those 5 stars to assess student work on the fly. If you are going to give us new features, don’t take away old ones! I want that back in. Ok, that’s it. I’ll be back later this week or over the weekend. Later … back to spending money in the land of Disney.
On the Road Again!
Off to Florida today for Educauase … oh, and for a little vacation. I’ll be staying in a condo, so I will not have high speed (or any other sort of Internet access)! What am I going to do … and it isn’t just me. My wife and daughter are coming along … my wife is a blogger (a good one at that) and she is going to go a little crazy not being able to write or read her favorite sites. I just downloaded the iPod map of the wifi spots in the part of Orlando we’ll be staying, so maybe we’ll find time to get our high speed fix. Pathetic.
On a related note … at the conference, I’ll be workign with Apple (and several others) to produce podcasts for the Apple Digital Campus Exchange. Should be a lot of fun. Look for posts about that next week, with pointers to the content. Until then, enjoy the silence!
WordPress Upgrade
I finally did something about my WP install. I went ahead and moved to the latest release — I was trapped at 1.5 because of all the hacks I had done to get it looking how I wanted. I just decided it was a godd idea to start clean. For some reason everything feels so much snappier — from creating new posts, to doing admin stuff, to load times, and more. I dumped Kubrick for K2 … So far I really like it. I also couldn’t fall too far behind D’Arcy … Lots to get working again … you know, I was all about the rotating banner images (someone want to create a plugin to do that?). If there’s anyone out there who knows how to get that rolling again with K2, let me know — I’ll buy beers. I miss that. There are other things, but since I am making all sorts of changes in my life, I thought my blog should follow.
More posts in the coming days … lots to discuss.
Base Camp Really Works
I have been doing research realted to project management toolsets … I have always been good at keeping track of multiple projects, but the time has come to really upgrade the tools we have in place so everyone at the Solutions Institute can be in the loop. We had been using some decent open source tools to keep track all sorts of things, but the interface seemed to keep us from really taking advantage of the stuff and it was a real pain giving our student workers and clients access to our file shares. Recently I started really looking into the tools that 37signals builds — both Backpack and Basecamp are very well designed and fit the needs they are addressing. Yesterday we went ahead and got our own Basecamp account and are loving how it all works.
One of the things we wanted was obviously a strong suite of project management tools, but the other reason we went with the 37signals stuff was that it is a lesson in good design. We are moving so much further towards new ways of building interfaces and applications that having these tools gives us a glimpse into the minds of some very smart people.
So far,a day into it, we are really enjoying the tools. It is nice to know we have a document storage solution that is accessible by the team anywhere at anytime, lets all my staff see the big picture, and gives us a way to organize all of our project tasks. Good stuff.
AJAX … Nice.
I’ve been tracking this for a while now, but I am becoming more and more interested in this AJAX stuff, AKA Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. I am really seeing it as a major piece to the web 2.0 puzzle — I know, duh. If you couple that with the whole Ruby on Rails stuff that is going on, you have the building blocks of the new read/write web interfaces. Just thought I’d write that down … sorry if its old news. I can see how we can use this to change quite a bit in education.
First Student Podcast … Actually Really Well Done
I know I’ve been talking about the Blogs@PGSIT space for some time now … well the program is a week old and the space is a hit. What is even cooler is that the first videos and podcasts are making it to the site. The first podcast is really well done. The scholars talk about the role (pros v cons) of computer mediated communication … what sort of blows my mind is that I didn’t assign that at all! Furthermore, I didn’t tell them how to do this stuff — either from a technical side or a style side. They just showed up in our new podcast studio and laid down a great podcast. It might be worth subscribing to the site’s feed (via iTunes 4.9 of course) and listen to them as they come through.
Blogs@SI … Interesting Events
I just posted over at our pilot Blogs@SI site … the numbers are exploding — for us. Tonight there were over 600 visitors online. That’s up from a high of about 40 the last couple of days. I am really interested in figuring out where people are hearing about the space and how they are getting there. Any comments about that?