Digital Media Value Chain

November 27, 2007November 27, 2007 / Cole Camplese / 2 Comments

During the last few weeks I have started to see some really amazing digital media artifacts coming out of our classrooms here at PSU. Two weeks ago I came across one of the most amazing uses of a student blog I have ever seen. I hate to say it, but I am reluctant to link to it without her permission, but suffice to say she gets how a blog can work better than most of the people I talk to. This post was based around a video project she and her team did in class — a simple interview of a faculty member edited to be of interest. Here is what made it amazing, she spent time not only posting the finished product, but wrote a reflective narrative about the process she and her team used to create it. Pictures showing the team working together, a map of their storyboards, and even a discussion of the script. Just an amazing illustration of how powerful digital media can be.

If you look at the pieces that add up to that example you can see a value chain emerging. We start by doing a hot team … this usually helps us decide if a technology would be appropriate for use in the classroom. Funny that we never come up with ideas that match up to the things that actually happen in our classrooms. The hot team can lead to a call for proposals from faculty under the Engagement Project. When we select a proposal, we meet with the faculty to discuss their needs and find ways to support their activities. From there the faculty teach their course and engage the students in all sorts of cool activities that require them to create digital artifacts. On campuses where we have them installed, students typically visit the Digital Commons to work with killer technology, get hands on help, or connect virtually with a DC Consultant. Once they use the physical spaces to create something they publish it online — with the Blogs at Penn State, the Podcasts at Penn State, or ANGEL. Every step of the process is supported (or has the potential to be supported if need be). I know it is a very simple view of the value chain, but here is how I see it:

I also think of it as a stack …

Which leads me to the example that inspired me to write this evening … a faculty member who submitted an Engagement Award proposal for the Fall semester sent us a couple of examples of her students work today. The first is a virtual tour of the 2007 solar decathlon. The second is just as cool, a walking tour of the tree biodiversity at Ridley Creek State Park. All I can say is that it is amazing. She is integrating blogging, podcasting, Digital Commons, Google Maps, digital photography, and so much more into her classes. The amazing thing is that her students are doing work that will blow you away! Looking at the outputs I can’t help but feel excited that the opportunities that are being created can support it all. Just some killer stuff!

A Plea for Some eLearning Help

October 14, 2007 / Cole Camplese / 7 Comments

A few years ago the design of eLearning seemed so obvious to me — align a systematic process, a team, and a technology platform to create courses to support resident or distance education. So much has happened in the online space the last couple of years that has shattered my thinking as it relates to the technology platform choice … I still think any project must be supported by the strategic alignment of factors (you know, something like people, process, and tools), but the notion of selecting a single eLearning design and development environment seems very difficult and confusing.

Friday, several colleagues and I spent close to two hours in our conference room talking about all of this. We were getting together to explore those three elements and discuss how we should move forward to support our new eLearning efforts. When I was the Director of the Solutions Institute we created a four-tier instructional design model that was supported by our Digital Design Document tool set that our team would use to manage the creation of eLearning. In the world of the web back then, it seemed OK to build courses that were page turners — really just textbooks on the web with a few interactive (Flash) activities thrown in. Today that just seems wrong and the team on Friday came to that conclusion. If we are going to really build a model for eLearning that we are proud of then we are going to have to think very differently about how we go about doing this. Over the last two years we’ve worked really hard to bring new tools to our campus to support digital expression — we came around to the notion that to do this right we should be promoting and leveraging those platforms in new ways.

What I struggle with is the idea of what is a really good eLearning environment these days? In my mind, a handful of pages of content that link and embed objects that drive student and faculty to engage in conversations (on or off line) seems to be the goal. With that said, why not design those content pages in a blog so students and faculty (and maybe people from the outside) can have conversations in context? Why are we still struggling with what the right eLearning tool set looks like when we are sitting in a world with dozens of content creation tools? The model we are trying to avoid consists of tons of static text pages that prompt students to leave the content and jump into a discussion forum to interact — I’ve never liked that, but now the technology supports what I am after … the opportunity for conversation at every level of a course experience.

So, at the start of our meeting we were exploring an eLearning design, development, and delivery tool … it is a powerful web-based environment, but it just didn’t seem to fit where our thinking was taking us. The group started by saying we should adopt and adapt it, but as the conversation grew we came around to a different conclusion — that what we needed was an environment to create and save the design information of the course (you know, a digital design document) and an easy way to connect content that is created in blogs, as podcasts, digital movies, or whatever else. We need a project management and communication environment that can be used to support a distributed team and a collection of content management tools to deliver the results from. This is all new thinking, but I am trying to piece together in my mind a path towards aligning the people, process, and the new set of technology tools we’ll need to get to the next level of eLearning design strategy.

I would love to hear from those of you out there who design courses and what works for you … what are the right tools and approaches? Think of a design environment that a team (with specific roles) is asked to create scalable eLearning materials … what are some examples of people ditching the all in one design/development environments to create courses that are made up of small pieces? Can we legitimately ask our faculty to work with us to select and deliver killer learning environments using the platforms we constantly talk about? Any thoughts for me?

Overwhelmed with Content?

September 25, 2007September 25, 2007 / Cole Camplese / 7 Comments

I wrote a while back about the Blogs at Penn State and how we are now seeing people on campus writing in the open. One of the things I was sharing was a growing sense of un-discoverability with the amount of content being created. We created a self-service directory that allows people to add their blog URL so others can find them. Lots of people asked why we weren’t just exposing all the blogs — it is a simple thing to do, but the feedback we received from a handful of our population was that may not be a great idea. As I watch the directory grow I tend to add people to my feeds in Google Reader and that works fairly well, but there isn’t a ton of filtering that goes on there for me — I have a huge folder of PSU Bloggers now without a whole lot of rhyme or reason to how all the content gets structured for me.

I’ve said it before, my RSS habits have been changing over the last year or so. Especially now that my local community is contributing as much as they are I am struggling with ways to find the best stuff, read it, comment on it, and keep track of it. It really means my RSS reader is stacked with local content and my global RSS reading is on the decline. I have honestly followed a path from local RSS aggregation in NetNewsWire Pro to Google Reader, but I am now searching for ways to go beyond simple aggregation and organization of my feeds. I have been keenly interested in making sense out my community of content and I think I am coming around to the idea that as my community of content grows I may need to lean on that community to help organize it.

I have always loved the digg model to comment sense-making as it relates to smart mob content organization … I always wanted to have that kind of control over content (and control is a funny word to use in this situation). We recently organized a Hot Team to look at Pligg (BTW, this is our first International Hot Team — thanks, D’Arcy!). We’ve been running it for a while around here on a development box trying to get a sense for how it all works … no real customization, just working it to see it in action. I like it quite a bit! I can see it taking a very central place in our ongoing and evolving web strategy. You can take a look at it for yourself.

Pligg is essentially an open source digg toolset that does a couple of things very well and very valuable in this new world of mass-community created content.

First, it offers the social ratings features of digg … you have a little bookmarklet that lets you flag posts (sites) that are of interest, enter tags, and submit them into the pligg site. Others can then browse the “upcoming news” and vote for it. As an admin you get to say how many votes moves content into the front page. In a model like this the community gets to decide what is important and what is noise.
Second, and perhaps more important to me, is the tool’s ability to act as an aggregator. I can submit RSS feeds for all the sites in the PSU community (or anything) and the content is automatically pulled into the “upcoming news” area for the community to browse and vote on. So in this situation, I could legitimately add several hundred feeds from around the PSU community and watch the posts that the community finds interesting/important/smart/funny rise to the front page.

With that I am leveraging two very important things — the content and interestingness of the community. I have said in the past that one of the reasons I want to see members of my organization writing in the open is to expose the overall intelligence of the group … with pligg aggregating content and the community voting on it I can expose the intelligence of a much larger group. To me that accomplishes a whole bunch of my goals. I am working to understand how it fits into the landscape — and trust me, I’ll be using it in my class next semester as the aggregator of choice for my student’s blogs.

Blogs at Penn State – The Real Thing!

August 30, 2007 / Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

So this semester (after about a year of work) the Blogs at Penn State will be used in classrooms to support online conversations (and probably all sorts of other stuff). We decided after much debate to restrict the pilot to 1500 people, but probably have the capacity to jump to 2000 if requests and numbers continue to flow in. In all honesty we could probably handle more, but the point of a pilot is to learn. We’ll be doing a while bunch of that this semester! As I type there are students clicking the links for the “self-enroll” process so they can start blogging right away within PSU. To me it is very exciting — the Daily Collegian even ran a little story about the new opportunity this morning.

We are already evaluation Moveable Type 4 as it offers all sorts of new features we think will be critical. We are also starting to build our list of features we think we should be providing when this thing hits production status and the whole of the University can have at it. One thing I am noticing is that the Blogs at Penn State Community Hub is picking up steam — people are showing up and posting questions and answers. It is very cool to see the community rise up and work to support itself. One of the things I thought I’d link to is a page that has a bunch of links to help faculty get the most out their blogging experience. I’ll be reporting numbers and reaction as they roll in. Exciting stuff!

Opportunities for Digital Expression

August 24, 2007September 23, 2007 / Cole Camplese / 10 Comments

I’ve written about my personal interest in providing opportunities for faculty, staff, and students to engage in the creation of digital media — text, graphics, podcasts, videos, and whatever else this group needs to use to communicate ideas. One of the things I have been working towards over the last few years is envisioning what a platform for digital expression in an educational environment might look like. I have also written quite a bit about the projects that we’ve been investing lots of time and energy into here at PSU to power this approach — namely Blogs at Penn State, the Podcasts at Penn State, the Digital Commons, Streaming Servers, and our Course Management System (ANGEL) to name a few. We’ve also been spending all sorts of time engineering our processes and programs so that we are more appropriately positioned to attack and create opportunities to engage our audiences around this space. We’ve created a new way to investigate emerging technologies and trends through the Hot Teams approach, built new models for working with faculty through the Engagement Projects, rethought the way we can use students as part of the adoption and diffusion process via the Technology Learning Assistants (TLA) program, engaged the community through the Community Hub concept, opened the walls of ETS by being more transparent and adopting podcasting and blogging as another way to reach our audiences, and really cranked up our efforts around the TLT Symposium. All of these things are part of the eco-system to support and promote Digital Expression on campus.

Two days ago, Chris Millet and I were having lunch and we were sharing some thoughts in this space. This is a reoccurring theme with us as this work dates back to the time we spent at the IST Solutions Institute and working with Apple on the Apple Digital Campus project. It was in those early discussions that we both made a commitment to exploring and promoting digital expression as a means to demonstrate learning. During our conversation I was telling Chris how I’d been thinking about trying to create a visual representation of how we have been striving to align our thinking around Digital Expression with our new projects, programs, and existing (and emerging) University infrastructure. I sketched some stuff on a napkin or two and when I got back to my office I drew a crude illustration on my window trying to visualize it all. What emerged from that is what I will attempt to articulate below. I am asking for feedback and thoughts about all of this — and keep in mind, much of it is the product of both a ton of thinking and quick execution.

The images below are my best shot at creating a visual representation of how I have worked to strategically align all of the work in the area of building a leading University example of a platform for Digital Expression.

This is the foundation of the stack … here is where we can utilize existing enterprise level infrastructure to make sure our platforms can exist. In this case, I have selected our single sign on web access environment as a key ingredient … identity management is a critical component of all of this and having a powerful access architecture in place is critical. Personal web space is also an important piece to this as it is a University provided service that allows us all to store and manage our content in our own spaces. This also has strong identity ties and provides a basis for much of what we will build upon it. Our streaming environment will become even more important as we supplement the excellent QuickTime Streaming Server with a Flash Media Server. Finally our lab images give us the ability to offer high end software to thousands of faculty, staff, and students in a supported and consistent fashion. This not so basic infrastructure is critical to the rest of the stack.

The next layer is comprised of physical spaces. Our CLC Managed environments give faculty and students environments to tap into the tools that they would otherwise not have access to. Again, through access accounts, identity is playing a huge role here — everything they do is tied to that ID and the ability to walk in anywhere and log in and see and interact with your stuff is critical. The Digital Commons is obviously a big piece to the whole Digital Expression puzzle. These facilities will provide faculty, staff, and students at all locations of our institution access to the best equipment, software, and expertise to physically interact with digital media.

Our publishing platforms have really come alive in the last year or so … ANGEL has been a huge part of the teaching and learning with technology story on our campus for quite some time. At the end of last semester we had around 70,000 students active in ANGEL. While those are impressive numbers, we have attempted to create new publishing platforms to share content across our digital environment. The Blogs at Penn State project has, over time, the potential to change the way people publish on the web. The Podcasts at Penn State has already had impact — through both our use of iTunes U for public and course-level content and via our own platform. No matter how you look at it, podcasting has captured the imagination of a whole new set of faculty on our campus. PSUTube is in the earliest stages of thinking, but could have far reaching potential as a digital media distribution platform. By building it on top of the QTSS and FMS we can create an environment that promotes legitimate sharing of digital content for our populations. The idea is to use the best of social video sites for educational purposes.

Our platforms would be nothing without powerful support opportunities. This may seem obvious, but providing support across multiple layers is critical. For early adopters and awareness we tap into the ITS Consultants. They help educate the PSU environment to the opportunities and provide a first layer of support. ITS Training Services does the same thing but at a second level — this is when people are getting ready to really use the stuff. The help desk gives us a full on support group to lean on. All of it is critical for so many reasons — happy users, freedom for other staff to think about what is next, and so much more.

Finally we provide opportunities for communities to form and support to reach a new level of engagement. Engagement is what we are striving to get to … we want our audiences to be invested in where they are spending their time. I feel if you can get the community to grow up around the opportunities you are providing you have something very powerful. We’ve started by opening the organization and supporting traditional marketing channels with blogs and podcasting … this is a much more direct and natural voice and is sometimes easier for people to follow. We’ve tried to create methods for working together internally and have pushed ourselves to bring in people from the outside to participate through the Hot Teams. There is so much more here, but coupling all of the online activities with real face to face opportunities is also critical. The Symposium has honestly changed our relationship with our faculty audiences. I hope that it all has provided new opportunities for engagement at all levels of the eco-system.

So at the end of the day, the goal is to provide a leading platform to support Digital Expression in Higher Education. Are we getting there? Maybe … time will tell. I know we’ve been working hard to make the right decisions (which sometimes makes it all look and feel slow) and we will continue to do that. So, after all that stuff if you’ve made it this far I’d love to hear your take on it all.

The Intranet — Gee, That’s Exciting

August 6, 2007 / Cole Camplese / 4 Comments

That seems to be the general reaction I get from people when I start talking Intranets. Back in the day we didn’t really think about how we worked to use the web to influence what was going on inside an organization — we were so damn busy just trying to build and launch some sort of externally facing site. I recall our first Intranet at Cogence Media back in 1996 … it was an old Apple FileServer that we discovered we could deep link into via a browser. The funny thing was that we didn’t do this deep linking via web pages, we did it from a bunch of individual Word documents that we kept on the shared space of the file server. I embarrassed to say that I was part of the web team and it just didn’t dawn on us to use real web pages to manage the knowledge of the organization. But when I really step back and think about it, we were doing the best we could with the tools of the day — sort of.

The last couple of years that has all changed though — especially for me. I have become just as interested in the conversations that go on inside an organization as the ones that are directed at customers, readers, audiences, or whatever else you want to call the people you are speaking to on the outside. The emergence of web 2.0, especially in the last year or so has given rise to many new ideas I am banging around in my head related to increasing opportunities for internal dialog. I have started reading more and more about the notion of Enterprise 2.0 (mainly from Andrea McAfee from Harvard) and I have to say it seems to be a perfect blend of my interests in communication technologies, organizations, and people. One of Dr. MacAffe’s posts that I have gotten a ton of mileage out of is a simple profile of one organization’s use of MediaWiki as a very powerful Intranet tools et. In it, he profiles this organization and the way they are using this site as a hub to both changing internal and external communication. To me it is a fascinating, yet simple study in how to get organizations to pay attention to important internal conversations.

One of the things I discovered when coming to ETS 21 months ago is the importance of an online place for sharing organizational information. This stuff takes the form of posts, stories, wiki pages, travel reports, and all the things that make a medium to large sized work-group go. What I found is that without some sort of hub at the center, keeping up on it all is just too difficult. Once we jumped the hurdle of simply providing a platform and the encouragement for people to participate as a part of the organizational story, we have started to think about how to better organize it all.

I have been working with one of my colleague here at ETS to rethink our Intranet space … let me say that I feel our local Intranet (it supports about 100 people within Teaching and Learning with Technology) is successful at helping us all share information in a somewhat organized way. We still struggle with architecture, but we are getting better at it. We are also getting better at bringing content from outside sources in … currently there are dozens of staff who are blogging, tagging links in del.icio.us, and photos in Flickr that are relevant to what we do and we are working on. The goal is to make all that “meta-content” seamlessly integrate with our internal content. It has been fun and an interesting little project. Just today I did a wire frame to share my thoughts on how we could mix the internal with the external to provide access to dynamic and organizationally important content in one location. As it comes to life, I’ll share more of it. Now that people are writing as much as they are around here I am struck with the need to have greater access to it all.

At any rate, the real reason I am posting is a cry for help … I have recently been asked to help with creating a new Intranet strategy for my parent organization here at PSU — Information Technology Services (ITS). ITS at Penn State is a very large and diverse organization that takes residence in no less than a dozen buildings on campus. This creates all sorts of challenges as it relates to sharing information in an efficient and effect manner. We do a good job, but it is high-touch and requires a ton of work. With that said, we are just too big to get together as much as we should and now that many of us are blogging the discoverablility of content is very low. One thing I would love to learn more about from all of you is what type of Intranets are you using within your organizations? How are you leveraging your understanding of information technology, people, communities, and web 2.0 to create new opportunities for computer mediated communication? I’d like to know more and I’d like to find ways to talk with you and explore what you are thinking and how you feel it is impacting the organization. Any takers?

FUD: Web 2.0 in the Enterprise

July 15, 2007July 15, 2007 / Cole Camplese / 9 Comments

I am sure regular readers of this (and my other blogs) won’t be surprised by the fact that I embrace Web 2.0 technologies and approaches. I am all for openness and sharing and I deplore hoarding of knowledge that can enrich a community if exposed. I am also very interested in both using Web 2.0 tools to help shape an organization and adopting web 2.0 philosophies to overcome traditional support challenges. One of my colleagues, Jason Heffner, dropped a link in my del.icio.us network recently that made me think harder about the way my organization has attempted to adopt both tools and philosophies born out of the Web 2.0 space. The article Jason sent me is a little light on depth, but does scratch the surface of something serious … that many existing people have an inherent fear associated with these tenants … that openness is not encouraged and sometimes ignored. The article, Facing Web 2.0 Fear in the Enterprise paints a picture that we all need to understand what is happening in this space and we really ought to embrace it because it is critical to communicate, collaboration is key and our future colleagues are growing up with it.

I feel lucky in that most of the people I work with or for find this sense of openness as important as I do. We focus a lot of energy on our Intranet, for example, trying to make it a place where staff can spend time collaborating and communicating in a quasi-open sense. I say quasi only because as an Intranet it is closed to our group. This has proven to be a solid practice ground for writing and sharing knowledge as many of the staff within ETS are now writing in public blogs. The content that is being shared certainly doesn’t appeal to all people at all times, but it is a move towards tearing down the walls around a knowledge-based group and exposing the intelligence that is contained within.

To me it is a very interesting swing … just as interesting to me is how my RSS reading has radically changed along with this move. Three or four months ago I was an avid NetNewsWire Pro user with hundreds of feeds coming in from all over the world. I had a decidedly global view on the content I was consuming — I am now a Google Reader user with only a hundred or so feeds, with close to half of the them being local. In other words, I am now spending my RSS time consuming content that is much closer to my community and guess what … I am better informed about what is happening down the hall, across campus, and in my communities (State College, University Park, an PSU all qualify).

These shifts are also accompanied by other thoughts … one is that email my be a part of the modern communication channel after all. I know that sounds crazy, but there are lots of people lamenting the state of email — too much email, too much spam, too little clarity, too many back and forth, etc … I am finding as my community gets more localized and better informed I can use email more efficiently to help point people to interesting activities happening within these communities. When I read something at a colleague’s blog, I can send a quick note to my team pointing them in that direction. I also tend now to post it in the Intranet and drop the links into those who are in my del.icio.us network. I guess what I am saying is that all of our modes of communication add up to the Web 2.0 philosophy of openness and sharing. Its not all tools.

Back to the article … in my view, Web 2.0 isn’t to be feared as a radical approach to communication. It is nothing more than an opportunity to engage in communication appropriately. Trust me, it is scary to make the jump from being a knowledge hoarding person to a knowledge sharing organization. It takes practice and it takes administrative patience. But if you can get enough people on the bus and you give them a safe place to practice eventually the walls around an organization will begin to come down. When that happens fear turns into opportunities that are much more easily capitalized on.

Was this a rambling train wreck? If you have thoughts on it, share them — it is the right thing to do.

Being Digital

June 20, 2007 / Cole Camplese / 2 Comments

I really couldn’t think of a title for this post … I wanted to share a quick story about the Digital Commons project we are currently working on. The Digital Commons is an initiative to provide a common set of tools at all locations of Penn State that enable students to create digital artifacts in a supported way. Too often we (we being administrators and instructors) have these expectations that all our students can easily envision and create digital media. I mean if you look at some of the reports that people like Pew Internet and American Life Project provide you may get the picture that every single person under the age of 25 is capable of creating content that will be shared at youtube. While it is true that there are a whole bunch of these kinds of kids running around our campuses it is just as true there are a whole heck of a lot more who can’t. Just reality.

The Digital Commons is an attempt to help promote and support the notion of being digital. We work hard to encourage faculty to allow evidence of learning in the form of videos, blog posts, podcasts, and more but when they assign it we just sort of assume the kids will just figure it out. Most of the time these kids do, but they do it on their own machines with substandard software tools and without access to things like digital cameras, green screens, lighting, etc — and forget about any education as it relates to things like using lighting, production, planning, or even copyright. That’s where the Digital Commons comes in — it provide more than the equipment, it provides a framework. It is a killer project that has potential for real transformation written all over it.

We are working really hard to install five of these studios across the Commonwealth of PA this Summer. That is tough — there are more factors at play here than are imaginable. Communicating the potential and requirements to each campus is very difficult given the time and geographic challenges. Today we made the first attempt at doing that … instead of getting in the car and visiting each campus we ate some of our own dogfood and used Adobe Connect Pro (you know, Breeze). We have a killer ACP setup here at University Park so we paired it with a call in line and delivered the hour long briefing to multiple campuses from the comfort of one of our conference rooms. I couldn’t be there — I was scheduled to be off site having a meeting at a local restaurant … the place had wifi, so I got there early and pulled out the MacBook Pro. I simply plugged in my earphones, fired up the browser, connected to the ACP meeting, and dialed the conference call with Skype. It was nothing short of amazing — the technology worked and the briefing went exceptionally well. I took a screen cap of the whole thing:

The Digital Commons project is one to watch … I will be sharing more as it all becomes clear, but this is one that we feel very good about. By providing a common platform at all locations there is so much we can bundle under the overall umbrella. Things are off to a very good, but very demanding start. Stay tuned …