One Post a Day

Relationships that don’t Suck

/ Cole Camplese / 12 Comments

This post is a generalization. Now that I have that out of the way, here I go … I’ve been in the instructional design/technology/etc business for over a dozen or so years and I’ve seen lots of models in place to help people get their teaching, training, and learning materials together. In the corporate space it was a very contract driven approach with Subject Matter Experts (SME) being pushed to provide content by a project manager or instructional designer. In higher education the SME is typically a faculty member and they are typically being pushed to provide content by the instructional designers — a very corporate approach to learning design. It is my thought that this relationship is, in many ways, very unhealthy. I say that only by watching what I see around me in countless course design projects.

Back when I was an instructional designer at the Penn State World Campus I worked with a faculty member to build an online Reliability Engineering course. It was made very clear to me that a big part of my responsibility was to get the faculty member to write and deliver content on some (arbitrary) timeline. I was an Instructional Designer that had been reduced to a content task master. The faculty member on the other hand was an internationally known reliability engineer whom we reduced to the notion of content provider. I can tell you the relationship was contentious at best — for lots of reasons. One of those reasons was that we didn’t find a way to build a professional relationship that centered around us talking about what our areas of focus and expertise was all about. I find it unfortunate looking back on it as I wished I would have taken the time to work to a common ground. I could tell I made him mad and he knew that I loathed his pace in the delivery of the holy grail of eLearning materials — raw content.

How disturbing is that? Raw content … it just sounds insulting, that we would categorize what this man had to offer was nothing more than several written pages of raw content. I am sorry for ever reducing the brilliance of this man’s work into a term so demeaning as that. It is no wonder he looked at me like I was nothing more than a “computer jockey” slinging his prose into some HTML container. What a crock of shit the whole thing was.

After the conversation that broke out here this week about working to see perspectives when we come together I want so badly to offer an alternative approach to what we do in a typical instructional design process, but rarely feel like we have to time to accomplish — work to come together, build a relationship, and trust the passion, energy, and expertise we all bring to the table.

On Sunday I spent some time talking with my good friend and colleague Keith Bailey about how nasty the relationship can get between an ID and a faculty member for this very reason. We work so hard to create schedules and then push faculty to just hand over some content (and we’ll take it from there) that real anger emerges. The question that emerged centered around how do we push through and learn there are many more powerful ways to go about this task?

One I’ll offer is to embrace the notion open content. What I challenged Dr. Bailey with was at the start of the next course his team in the Arts and Architecture eLearning Institute designs is to take the content outline and first go to wikipedia, wikieducator, and other open content spaces and see what exists with the faculty member as a partner. Use that moment to explore what is and isn’t there, to start the conversation about what is different and what is similar about what they discover together. It should lead to a real conversation about why it might make more sense for us to skip designing in a closed space and instead actually using what is available and contributed what we make into these open spaces? If an article about a concept doesn’t exist, construct it collaboratively and contribute it there. The idea of a Creative Commons licensed article is much more powerful than the existing lock down we place on learning materials from within the academy.

Would the overall process of working together to identify existing content and working to contribute new knowledge into the commons lead to an opportunity unlike what our current approaches provide? I’m not sure, but would like to explore that further. Any thoughts?

THON 2009

/ Cole Camplese / 5 Comments

On Sunday I was reminded of yet another reason why I think we owe it to our students to make things right. THON 2009 wrapped up yesterday after raising a staggering 7.49 million dollars to help fight cancer. The last hour is always so emotional and while we didn’t make it this year I was able to follow Twitter streams, blog posts, and the Collegian’s coverage. These are students who dance for 46 hours … 46! They do it “For the Kids” and they do it because they are all amazing.

We have this football coach here at Penn State named Joe Paterno who has seen it all — undefeated seasons, Heisman Trophy winner, National Championships, and Saturdays with 110,000 people screaming for he and his players. When he says it is his proudest moment at PSU in 58 years you have to feel humbled by the enormity of it all. I have to say, I was moved to tears and am so thankful to be a part of this community.

There are very few times in my life I’m speechless, but I am now. I wish the whole world could see and feel what’s in this room right now. Love and commitment and the dedication that just reeks from this room. In my 58 years at Penn State, I’ve never been more proud than right now.

Making Connections

/ Cole Camplese / 14 Comments

This is a rambling mess, but I’m not apologizing. You’ve been warned.

I’ve been thinking about the Twitter panel from Friday at the IST Grad Symposium and have come to see a couple of camps … one group looks at Twitter and says real connections don’t happen, that it is a waste of time, and an ego echo chamber. There is another group that sees it as full of opportunities to make real connections because it is simply a platform. There’s yet another who is like the first group, but they do participate. Seeing these three camps may be a generalization and I can deal with anyone disagreeing with me. I don’t really care too much which camp people fall into and I think I’ve arrived at a place where I’m not going to justify the technology. I’m just done with that argument — if you want to play, play. If you don’t, don’t.

What I am interested in is having opportunities to talk about the affordances and how they relate to problems of practice. I see challenges across the board in our classrooms and what I don’t see enough are people working to talk about them constructively. I hear a lot of people complain and never work to come together to do anything about them … I see way too many students sitting by themselves in classrooms not engaged, too many faculty teaching from PowerPoint, and too many administrators not pushing for reform. I’m not saying Twitter has anything to do with any of it, but don’t you think it is about time we start to really come together, make some connections, and radically do something about it all?

I can talk to the World in the blink of an eye and I know there are lots of smart people out there toiling away at what they do who are waking up to how bad it all really is. The big change here is that we can hear each other and we can change things if we want by coming together. And you know what, at the end of the day it may not be about changing the system at all, it may be about a new environment where connections happen and knowledge is shared openly. Maybe learning communities can happen without the corporate bullshit that much of our educational system is built on — I watch my first grader come home every night with nothing but worksheets from some curriculum book and I see students on campus doing nothing but reading from textbooks and taking electronic tests built from a publisher’s test bank. What kind of education is that? Why the hell do we let it happen?

I’m done with it. I’ve decided that I will work to make change happen and I’m inviting other people … anyone with a connection that wants to start a revolution knows where to find me.

Thoughts from the Twittersphere

/ Cole Camplese / 7 Comments

Yesterday I spent some time at the College of Information Sciences and Technology’s Graduate Symposium listening to Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, Twitter’s Chief Scientist give a keynote talk. I’ve written about Twitter for a couple of years now, but what is so interesting about Twitter these days is what is going on behind the scenes. While they are a relatively new company, they are really working hard to make sense of the river of data that flows through the 140 character text box they offer. Abdur was the co-founder of Summize where they used analytics to discover trends across the web … when Twitter bought it he moved over to start decoding massive trends brought about by Twitter’s user base. Later in the day I was then on a panel with him talking about Twitter to those assembled it was very interesting to hear his perspective on things and to see how he is leading the way in making sense out of all of those Twitter messages.

As an aside, one of the questions that seems to occupy lots of cycles is about Twitter’s financial model. I could tell during the question and answer period yesterday it is something that gets the folks at Twitter a little frustrated. I recently read an article in Wired where they make the claim that Twitter can go for quite some time without worrying about that and I am betting they are figuring it out behind closed doors on their own time.

One thing he spent a lot of time on was how they can pull content from peoples’ tweets and find real news trends. He referenced Mumbai several times as an example of where Twitter was able to bring the terrorist attacks to our attention even before the news. We saw it a few weeks ago with the flight that landed in the Hudson … pictures and reports came from the Twittersphere before the news had any clue. This isn’t new for people who have been paying attention, but it was a good push for me to revisit the capabilities of Twitter Search. It seems like everyone is discovering the power Twitter has to offer.

Being on the panel reminded me of how interesting the Twitter experiment Scott McDonald and I did in the CI 597C course we taught last year. I got to talking with Abdur about it and the research we had planned to do … talking about it all has made me even more interested in using Twitter to better understand what is going on in my classroom. When I did a google search on how far back tweets go, I came across Twistory. It is a site that uses the API to pull out the exact time and content of any given user’s Twitter account. What is really cool is that you can then use Google Calendar to subscribe to the output to visualize the data.

Seeing Twitter Conversations

Seeing Twitter Conversations

Now this is where it gets really interesting to me … you can put anyone’s name into it and add their twitter stream to the calendar. This set off an ah-ah moment for me. What it means is that in a class you could easily visualize the backchannel conversation between and among students. Imagine how rich the data can be now looking at what happens in class — are students passing twitter notes, digging deeper into the conversation, exchanges resources, etc? This is the first time I’ve been able to create a tangible paper trail of the interactions happening behind the scenes. I can’t wait until Spring 2010 when Scott and I teach our Disruptive Technologies course. We met this morning at the coffee shop to start talking about how we would integrate this and we’ve decided that while we are focusing on our themes of community, identity, and design that we’ll ask students to do research into how the community is coming together and evolving by mining Twitter data in this form (or another). I can’t wait to see how it goes down and to explore other ways to use Twitter and its API.

My Local Reading List

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

Its actually Friday … is that real? It has been a long week, but it is coming to a close. Later today I am going to hopefully sit down and record an ETS Talk and then head off to the College of IST’s Graduate Symposium where I will join a panel focusing on microblogging. Fridays usually rock, so here’s to hoping this one lives up to its advance billing!

Since its the end of the week and so many people are taking part in our One Post a Day challenge at PSU, I thought I’d share my ETS reading list. This doesn’t expose the brilliant writing that goes on across PSU in general, just the brilliant writing that goes on within ETS. Since we’ve launched the Blogs at Penn State we’ve seen an explosion of local blogging — for all sorts of reasons. One thing I have to say is that I love seeing my RSS reader light up with new content from my own corner of the edu-blogosphere. I hope you take the time to dig through some of it and discover some amazing new blogs from some really smart and talented education technologists, instructional designers, programmers, marketing, and media people. I’ve used Google Reader to create a public feed of my ETS folder and I’d love for you to experience the collective intelligence of our organization.


Reflections on Academic Computing

/ Cole Camplese / 14 Comments

I know I’m not even remotely qualified to do the topic of reflecting on academic computing justice. I am a newbie at all this with less than a dozen years of experience in this environment. Quite frankly I didn’t really understand my role in higher education until I came to ETS as the director a little over three years ago. I didn’t realize that my work was done to support and promote the scholarship of the academy. I had this strange idea that it was to do what I wanted to do. I guess one thing that has kept me around is that (without even knowing it) somewhere along the line my interests aligned with some of the needs of my environment. Lots of this thinking is coming from participation in Project Bamboo, an initiative designed to think about what research support looks like in the Arts and Humanities. Its made me rethink how we can really engage with non-traditional computing disciplines in important ways.

With that said, I have been thinking very intensely about what it means to return to the notion of academic computing. Not too long ago my parent organization, Information Technology Services, was called the Center for Academic Computing — the CAC. I still hear faculty ask me if I work in the CAC … I think the change was made when some folks recognized that we had taken on the overall responsibility for running a bulk of the centralized information technology services — not just supporting academic computing. Computing used to happen in a lab or in small verticals where faculty were doing new and interesting things with their research. Computing is now just technology and it is everywhere. The verticals are gone … we live in a flat horizontal world on University campuses just like everyone else out there. Everywhere you turn technology is a part of it — and our organization (for the most part) provides the infrastructure for that to happen. We do services, and we do them well (IMO). That’s not to say we aren’t supporting academic computing, but it isn’t the overt assumption for us as a whole like our name once implied.

Even in ETS where our mission is to support the appropriate use of technology for teaching and learning we find ourselves in the services business. In many ways I think I want that to stop. I want to explore how our infrastructure is empowering a new stack, one focused on the production of knowledge. I know that sounds a bit crazy when you look around and see a staff built to do design and development … but when I stand back I see that we are positioned perfectly to extend our reach through a greater investment in supporting intellectual activities. That doesn’t mean we stop making things — on the contrary we may make more things, we just work to expose them at a deeper level to help others connect dots in their practice.

Last summer we invited Dr. Carla Zembal-Saul to be a resident Faculty Fellow. She came here to work with us to explore the Blogs at Penn State as an ePortfolio platform. What we are now left with is an amazingly deeper appreciation for her work, our work, and what the notion of reflective practice is really all about. Her engagement here at ETS was so successful it has pushed me to create a systematic Faculty Fellow program where we will hopefully be able to attract the best minds from across our campus who want to work with smart people doing interesting things. What we hope to do is align faculty scholarship to our areas of interest and expertise. We already have one slot filled for this summer and I am am working on two additional Fellowships that would be hopefully as transformative as Dr. Zembal-Saul’s.

What I am imagining is an environment that is built around innovative thought, faculty participation, and a continuous cycle of investigation. If I return to Carla for a second I can share how this works with a real example. We do Hot Teams to investigate emerging technologies and identify ways they can be used to support teaching, learning, and research. We introduce these technologies via pilots and get interested faculty involved with using them in their classrooms. In some cases faculty participate in our Engagement Projects and start to really do interesting things by redesigning learning environments. Some of these faculty push us and ask us really hard questions that require us to work really closely over a period of time — this can lead to a Fellowship. During the Fellowship we stretch to understand their research and they stretch to understand the affordances of the technology … we build something new together, test it, and share what we learn locally and nationally. In the case of Carla, we just released the Pack it Up feature for ePortfolios that allow students to submit large quantities of digital evidence from their online ePortfolio in a simple package for program review and general assessment offline. It never would have happened without the collaboration.

From Idea to Implementation

From Idea to Implementation

So as I reflect on the notion of academic computing I realize we are still participating as we were designed to, but perhaps aren’t thinking that way. I may have simply lost sight of how hard it is to put it all together, but when we attack it as a strategic direction some really important things tend to emerge. I am going to be gathering more of the stories about how we are doing really interesting work in support of scholarship and they will be exposed more widely over at the ETS site. For now I’m interested in how you see all this playing out … are we crazy? Is this is worthy of a get together to discuss? I am also thinking about how to invite those from the outside to be Affiliates of ETS, but that is a post for another day. Thoughts?

Browsing the News

/ Cole Camplese / 9 Comments

I get nearly all of my news online and have since the web really came alive for me about 15 years ago. I remember a feeling of power being able to not wait for the Weather on the 8’s or for scores to games. The web was the place where traditional news went to die for me. I think lots of people feel that way now.

Recently traditional newspapers in particular have felt the pain associated with not just the arrival of the web, but the masses’ emerging awareness of its amazing capabilities. With that said, I find it mildly amusing and very disturbing that the news industry did a lot to set itself up to have to deal with the reality of a sea of free and endlessly available content. Most of it produced by them.

One of the things I’ve never been able to understand really has nothing to do with the failing financial models. Why is it for all the great things we get from online news that newspapers have insisted on making their websites “look” like physical newspapers? Why must the first iteration of anything mimic the existing model? I’m not sure if they realize it or not but a web browser doesn’t support what a physical paper has to offer. Why not skip that same old and take advantage of the way the modern web can manage complex interfaces?

I haven’t seen much innovation in the news space online until recently.

My favorite online newspaper is the New York Times for lots of reasons. The first is their content — it works for me on so many levels. But at the end of the day one of the things I’ve fallen in love with lately is how much they are working to innovate online. I wrote a few months ago about Times People and I still can’t figure out why more people aren’t pointing to this little innovation as a glimpse into the the future of what we should see as the course management system in coming years. The ability to have a controllable social network that works together to build an active reading list so easily on the fly is quite interesting. Imagine that same interface as the LMS/CMS — allowing a faculty member or student to submit any evidence into the commons of the course. But as cool as it is, the Times People isn’t the only innovation that has me praising the spirit at the Times.

They recently introduced a new interface for browsing the paper in a really compelling way. It is yet another example of smart newspaper people rethinking the web as a platform to interact and engage with the news — something the rest of the industry needs to figure out if they are going to stay viable. The Times calls it the Article Skimmer and it is a really nice way to move around a paper. It actually feels a lot more like spreading a paper out and browsing the titles and picking what to read. I found a blog post from the NYT web team about the new view really interesting and it got me thinking about how different the web is than a giant piece of paper. Now, how it can integrate advertising in a compelling way will dictate its success as an interface over the long haul.

Article Skimmer

Article Skimmer

I think as we watch what happens in such a traditional place we need to be watching where they are going. When combine the above examples with the Time’s open APIs and free content the old school is looking a lot like what the new school should be all about. Shouldn’t we be thinking about how these kinds of interfaces should be built into the future of our learning management systems? Why do our LMS/CMS environments insist on living on the same old metaphors since they emerged? What does the open web teach us about how our environments need to support teaching and learning in a new era? Can we be as bold as the NYT?

Perfect Status

/ Cole Camplese / 11 Comments

It comes as no surprise that I like Twitter for lots of reasons … the primary reason for me is that it seems to solidify connections in close to real time. Facebook has surprised me in its ability to do something similar in the recent months. Both seem to be really interesting steps forward in the online conversation space. The one thing that both of them have going for them is a very powerful, “what are you doing right now” approach to status updates. This simple question pushes people to participate and to me it is the most powerful piece to coalescing community.

With that in mind I read a really good piece at the NY Times the yesterday called Being There, about the art of the status update. My favorite line from the whole thing was a simple statement about what a status update really is …

Spontaneous bursts of being

I really enjoyed the article and decided to conduct my own status update InstaPoll on my network to see what I got back. What I found was that people want to be drawn into a conversations via a status updates. Most are interested in the notion of engaging with those “around” them. That is really interesting to me … some people view the status update as shouting into an empty room, but what it looks like from my very informal and unscientific data gathering is that people crave engagement … they want to respond to where others are in the moment.

Seems to only make sense given our intense interest in not only providing constant updates, but our incessant need to know what people think in 140 characters or less. Some of the better responses to my question, “What makes a great Twitter/Facebook status update?” are below … if there is anything you might want to add to this conversation leave as a comment.

  • @colecamplese re: your survey. I think good status updates offer a chance to continue a conversation. personal/professional items are good.
  • @colecamplese asking a question everyone has wondered but never asked?
  • @colecamplese I think they are (should be) different… Tweets for more frequent (often mundane)…Facebook for daily/weekly “bigger stuff”?
  • @colecamplese Small, mundane little things that when taken out of context seem oddly amusing….and lots of punctuation.
  • @colecamplese whatever you feel in the moment.
  • @colecamplese NOT where I am or what I’m cooking. New blog post, new idea or concept, looking for discussion – yes
  • @colecamplese totally depends on the reader IMO. Interesting stuff to ME makes it a great post. (news, games, VW stuff, etc)
  • @colecamplese I totally agree with Bart. I love opinions, what peeps are doing, where they’re headed, etc.
  • @colecamplese something that makes me laugh
  • @colecamplese re instapoll Posts that helps me learn/think. Links to interesting stuff, plus reasons why I should click. News, questions
  • @colecamplese layers.
  • @colecamplese witty comment about common activity.
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