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Faculty Projects and Engagement Awards

/ Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

There was an article (subscription required) in the Chronicle today about a Harvard Law professor planning to use SL to host parts of his course — not a novel idea, but one that shows there are people willing to jump at new opportunities. After reading it, I spent a few minutes bouncing around the professor’s blog and found a great pointer to a post showing some of the work in action. It may not be novel, but it sure looks interesting and could lead to some very engaging opportunities. I smell a pilot plan for the Spring.

This leads me to expose a few thoughts we tossed around yesterday as it relates to engaging faculty. Currently we do a thing called the MTO (Multimedia Teaching Object). The idea behind the MTO is that we do a scheduled call for proposals by PSU faculty and then help those that are accepted build a teaching object — usually a Flash piece or a series of illustrations. There is more to it — an open sharing license comes to mind — but for the most part it is a small program that takes some serious resources and staff time. To do something this focused well, you need a host of developers and instructional designers working at break neck pace to produce very small tangible outcomes. It has a tendency to burn people out.

We started talking about how we could take that program and expand and contract it at the same time. So if you jump out a level from a program like that and created a larger umbrella program that you could create many smaller more targeted opportunities (MTO might be one of them) we could become more strategic and agile with our faculty projects — I started calling it the Engagement Awards. The idea is if we are researching SecondLife, then we could do a targeted Engagement Award Call related specifically to that — the same could hold true for podcasting, blogging, wikis, and anything else we have running around in our collective heads. That would get us off the Flash treadmill and into a whole host of opportunities to work with faculty. Every project would be connected to a set of outcomes — a “profile in success” like piece for our webspaces, a white paper, and hopefully an invitation for the faculty members to participate in our annual TLT Symposium. I am not explaining this very well, but the idea is to create targeted opportunities to engage with faculty throughout the year that are more in line with our resources, interests, and capabilities. I could see many of these targeted calls looking at emerging things that I know faculty would be interested in.

Does this make sense and who is doing this in Higher Education that I could benchmark against?

The Casual Podcaster

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

For some reason I felt like firing up GarageBand on Thursday and creating a podcast.  Since I am stuck in PSU Podcasting Project Land I thought that would be a good topic to discuss.  I know it is probably becoming a very tiring topic for most people around me, my head is planted squarely in the middle of it all and there are times I need to get some of it out.

Even though I have the pleasure of working and talking with Chris Millet everyday, I thought having Chris join me via iChat AV would be a good idea.  Chris has been visiting all the people at Penn State who are interested in podcasting the last four weeks or so and is really starting to get the lay of the land.

In this podcast, we discuss all sorts of stuff in 20 minutes … topics run from the training he and Tim Perry are designing, to tools, to project goals, and more.  The thing that turned me on the most was Chris’ statement about wanting to create opportunities to enable the “casual podcaster.” What I loved about Chris’ comment was that his expectations are all about this being so easy that faculty, staff, and students can create digital content without thinking about the technology or the approach. You know, real digital expression. He wants it to be like when you currently want to say something in a digital sense, you click on Word and write it … this thought is about being able to capture the moment in a digital, first person sense and share it instantly. Just goes along with all the things Chris and I have been discussing for a number of years in this space.

At any rate, it may be worth a listen. Direct link to the 14 MB podcast.

iTunes U Follow Up: An Answered Question

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The other day I posted some thoughts about where we are heading with both our podcasting and the iTunes U projects here at Penn State University. I haven’t gotten comments (other than 1), but I have gotten some email from people asking more about some stuff. One of the items we immediately set out to answer was the private and public content in the same iTunes U instance … we discovered that thankfully you can do both from one space!

As an example, if you jump over to Duke University’s School of Business you’ll see something interesting … when you click the link to launch iTunes U you’ll notice you come into the site a couple of steps down the breadtrail. If you try to follow the breadtrail back out to the “main” Duke iTunes U space you are kicked back out the web to authenticate with your Duke credentials. That is very cool. It makes our lives on campus so much easier — we get to run one instance and expose some materials we’d really like to share widely without putting our private content into the wrong hands. So, there is one question answered.

Duke iTunes U

Podcasting at a Big Univeristy and iTunes U Thoughts

/ Cole Camplese / 5 Comments

Podcasting at Penn State is getting closer and closer … we’ve worked very hard since January to provide an end to end podcasting opportunity that supports both in and out of the classroom activities. In the last few weeks we’ve gotten quite a few pieces of the puzzle figured out … our podium machines are getting Audacity, LAME encoder, and potentially ProfCast (for the Macs). That is in addition to the standard and growing suite of audio tools currently installed in all of our classrooms and labs. Wireless microphones are coming in to support this activity as well. We are launching a call for participation program next week that we hope will get faculty engaged. Both our Faculty Multimedia Center and student centered, Studio 204 are gearing to help get people moving as well. All in all, things are moving fast as we race towards Fall.

In addition to all that, we are getting closer and closer to testing iTunes U here on our campus. With that in mind, I thought I’d jot down some of the major questions I am getting as I am sharing the news with people. I get asked some basic questions from faculty and staff every time I start the iTunes U discussion. We will be maintaining our public podcasting site as a portal to open and free PSU content as well as a big front door to iTunes U on our campus. The big questions I hear going in look something like:

  • Can we have both public and private content in our our single iTunes U implementation? You know, I have heard a couple of different takes on this and am very interested in seeing this in action. There is so much content that we would want open to the public while keeping a bunch of other items closed. We did a very limited pilot this past Spring and there were some serious concerns about posting lecture-based podcasts in the open. The single biggest concern was that the microphone would pick up some sort of private conversation between instructor and student — a real concern. I am hopeful that we can simply designate certain areas open and certain areas private … that would make life much easier.
  • How will iTunes U play with our CMS, ANGEL? For now I am telling people that every space in our iTunes U space can expose a URL that will allow instructors to easily provide a direct link to the space itself. I think for the first few months that is the direction we’ll explore. After we get our ideas straight and really understand how it all works, I am guessing we’ll explore a greater level of integration with ANGEL. Imagine tools in ANGEL that allow instructors to manage much of their iTunes U spaces without jumping around different environments.
  • How easy will it be for faculty to use? I have no idea … I am assuming it is very easy, but time will tell. I’ll be able to report on that soon enough. For now, from what I have seen there will be a small learning curve, but once it is climbed we should be OK. We have amazing adoption of ANGEL on our campus, but that took time. I am expecting that this will take time as well. I doubt we’ll have explosive use of the service without solid programmatic initiatives in specific Colleges and disciplines. In the early going that is what we will focus on — getting specific partners moving and see what we learn from there.
  • What kind of content can be delivered? This to me is the exciting part of the whole thing … instructors can use the space to deliver audio, video, and PDF documents. When I get to that part in my discussions with people I can see light bulbs going on. Once they get the whole subscription model, the next thing they get is that things they want their students to get just show up. If managed correctly, this could have profound effects on efficiencies in the classroom. Imagine not having to worry if your students get their feedback, assignments, or whatever it is you currently push around via email or LMS/CMS? That is a powerful thing … it also gives us the chance to look at how an iTunes U space can be a dynamic syllabus environment.
  • Does it support teams? No idea, but I seriously doubt you can make certain tabs and spaces private to sub-groups within a class. We shall see.

So there’s a quick brain dump to get me back on the blogging bandwagon. I have been off for a week or so … been crazy busy and dealing with some things that have sapped my writing energy. Any thoughts from people out there about these questions or have questions of your own?

Big Week Coming Up

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

Now that Dr. C (my Dad) has entered the blogoshpere with his first comment here at my blog I feel as though worlds are colliding … this is just the latest sign that technology is impacting so much of our daily existence … dare I call it ubiquitous? I knew things were being turned upside down in their house when I watched him on the couch at their house clicking away wirelessly on the couch last weekend. I just never thought he’d figure out how to drop sarcastic comments on me. 😉

In my real life, I have been spending a great deal of time meeting with people who until recently have not embraced technology as a cornerstone to academic pursuits. It has been an amazing few days — creating new opportunities on campus that will extend our reach into more corners of the University. Yesterday for example was spent meeting with faculty and department heads from two very different colleges here at PSU looking to enhance and extend their curriculum with eAnything. Today was equally as exciting … having lunch with one of the smarter guys on campus and talking about both the rich history of eLearning at PSU and the great potential for the future. Good stuff.

Next week we host the Web 2006 conference here on our campus and it proves to be an exciting event. Over 350 web professionals from all over PSU will be descending on us for two days of peace, love, and music — no, wait, that’s not right … two days of hands on information rich sessions that will hopefully bind us together like the event on old man Max Yasgur’s farm. I am actually doing two talks … one on podcasting and the other on Web 2.0 in the higher education enterprise. Should be interesting. The highlight for me is the fact that Jeff Veen is the keynote … I am looking forward to hanging out and talking with him Monday night and hearing his talk Tuesday morning. I’m not even close to being done with my talks, but I imagine it’ll get done sooner or later. Then I spend some time with my friends from Apple at Harvard at their Apple Digital Campus Leadership Institute … I am looking forward to that as I am traveling with Kyle Peck, who is an amazing educator and world-class thought leader. Three days with him will be a real treat. At any rate, now that it is close to the weekend I can hunker down and get my presos done — oh, and spread eight yards of mulch in my yard.

I Thought There Would Be More …

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Hmm … maybe it is true. Maybe only 2-3 people actually show up here. Maybe it is a tired question … I don’t know. I thought I’d get more response to the question about blogging at a big University. I thought more edu-bloggers would have something novel to say to help move the thinking forward. Chris dropped the social notion on me, but I am looking for more insight before the next big PSU Blogger meeting. Any help?

Blogging at a BIG University

/ Cole Camplese / 7 Comments

As the three people who regularly read this blog know, I work at Penn State. Those of who know Penn State know it is big. Somewhere in the 80,000 student range across all the campuses. There over 40,000 here at our University Park campus alone. We are starting to talk about giving blogs (as James Farmer would say). Clearly we’ve thought about why it would be a good thing and are now moving into the land of what we would do and how would we do it. Our IT people are very smart and understand scale in a way I do not, so I am not going to argue with them when they discuss things like server load and security. I am lucky enough to be a guiding member of the team, so I am taking my thoughts public … I usually stay away from large-scale work projects here, but I thought since this is a blog project what a better place to start than to solicit feedback from the blogosphere. So please help us think about this!

What follows are some general thoughts about where we are after a bunch of general conversations and one meeting … oh and a lot of this is my thinking along with one other colleague — in other words, this doesn’t represent Penn State’s position on any of this. Please feel free to leave comments or email me ideas. First the basic assumptions:

Blog installation/activation managed centrally (vs. local installations) a lot like blogger.com to provide:

  • activation via an easy to use control panel
  • no access to underlying code
  • blogs are published into individuals’ personal web space via a static publishing model (a lot like MoveableType or remote Blogger publishing). At PSU we provide faculty, staff, and students with 1 GB of hosted web space.

Why would we do this? Well, for one reason we can maintain a single code base for all blogs … so when things need upgraded we don’t have to do 40,000 updates at once. It also facilitates integration, ensures security, professional look and feel can be maintained on blogs (esp. important if student blog being used like ePortfolio), and we absolutely don’t want to end up with scattered, disjointed collection of blogs, and have no way to fully leverage this service.

Some of the Features

  • Group blogs with multiple authors
  • RSS 2.0 with support for enclosures to allow for podcasting
  • Control Panel model
  • Allow individuals to create and post to multiple blogs
  • Access controls to enable public/private blogs as well as public/private posts on blogs
  • XMLRPC – if it can be secured
  • Tagging at some level — to be discussed further
  • Categories – critical feature for the creation of custom URLs and custom RSS feeds
  • Themes so end users can skin their blogs
  • Blog Rolls – manage a group of links in multiple link categories
  • Track backs
  • Allow local search on a per blog basis
  • Spam protection
  • Allow for comments
  • Comment controls — approval, edit, delete, etc.
  • Text formatting — do we use a WYSIWYG editor for posting?
  • Plug-in architecture?

So as we are going forward we have many questions and are in the early stages but are very excited about what is going on … we still have questions and are very open to suggestions. I would be curious to hear about others are doing at their schools to enable blogging in a quasi-controlled environment.

Simple Twist of Fate

/ Cole Camplese / 2 Comments

Not the Dylan rendition of the song of by that title, but a pointer to an interesting read over at the Edupodder blog, “Revolution from the edge: students posting class recordings“. Going into the whole Podcasting for Penn State, we never really thought the content would be posted by students. It only makes sense as they become more and more savvy with today’s web publishing tools that they will engage in this type of behavior. I wonder how it will feel when the tables are turned? I post my class lectures as podcasts because I think they belong to me … but if you listen carefully you’ll hear students talking. Doesn’t that make them ours?

Going forward I am curious as to how this will play out. Will faculty be ok with this notion? A lecture recorded, maybe even edited, by the students for the students. Should I get to sign a release form? How does this change the notion of the commercial “note trade” that goes on at major Universities? Is there a new business model in here? Podcast Notes … hmm.