Openness

The Revolution is in Full Swing

/ Cole Camplese / 2 Comments

I got back from an interesting little unconference experience yesterday where Brad Kozlek and I attended the WordCamp ED at George Mason University in Virginia. It might seem strange that a couple of guys working a University wide blogging solution built on MovableType would have the nerve to go and spend the day with other faculty and staff doing the same, but with WordPress as the focus. I was convinced that the trip would be worth it and the discussion would center on the power of open publishing platforms for teaching and learning. I wasn’t disappointed. Nearly the entire day focused on the outcomes and practices being realized via a campus wide blogging platform. It was cool to see people giving up a Saturday to get together and talk.

One of the big reasons I wanted to go was to get to finally meet Jim Groom in person. Jim is a passionate educational technologist who runs the Blogs at University of Mary Washington service. His work has been an inspiration to lots of people trying to free learning content across campuses. If you read his blog you know he is really into shattering the status quo and destroying the walls that have captured our institutional content for the last 10 years. Let me just say that his presentation rocked and it pushed Brad and I to spend nearly the entire 4 hour drive back to State College talking about how we are also thinking these thoughts — and frankly how to push a little harder.

It was great finally meeting Jim Groom.

It was great finally meeting Jim Groom.

His talk was titled Permanent Revolution and told the story of how important it is that we promote the use of open publishing spaces to save the academy. He told it with the intensity and emotion of a man worthy of the nickname, The Reverend. He makes the claim that the “Notion of the Permanent Revolution” is at the core of what we are trying to do with education — we need ways to rethink the digital space we are living in and how to take advantage of the affordances inherent in instant publishing. He claims that WordPress is a platform for revolution, but was quick to point to us and say the tools don’t matter just the ways we allow them to be used. His assertion is that we must work to liberate student content — in the LMS/CMS model students must pour it in and then after the course it gets packaged up, archived, deleted, and ultimately becomes inaccessible to the creator. It isolates the contribution. In the blog world, it belongs to the individual and the individual decides how to share it with the community (or the class).

A great talk that I wish was given more time. What I really wanted to do was explore the underlying principles with his talk and walk away from any thoughts of “my platform is better than yours.” I think Jim and I were both very interested in talking about affordances of the concept, not of the individual tools. He and I are going to be joining forces with Brian Lamb, D’Arcy Norman, and Alan Levine at ELI in January to present a session on the use of personal publishing tools to drive educational practice … I can’t wait to have the conversation with he and the rest of that crew.

At the end of the day, it was a very worth while trip and one that has me thinking more critically about the notion of openness on our campus — and how much louder we need to be shouting for its creation.

More Hulu and Big Media

/ Cole Camplese / 11 Comments

I am still taking in the greatness that is hulu.com … a big media company that has gotten it. This morning I bounced over and saw that they’ve recently added a new “program” called, Hulu How-To’s. Nothing earth shattering — the typical screencast of how to do things on the site. The thing that is entirely interesting to me is that the three how-to’s I saw were all about how to share their content. They teach you how to embed it (with the ability to embed only the parts you want), how to link it, and how to email it. Can you imagine a year ago a big media company teaching you how to redistribute their content?

Update … here is something I didn’t know. Hulu is unavailable outside the US. While I have no interest in supporting Internet filtering I am torn about the notion of perceived progress related to limiting access to content.

Two additional observations:

Several years ago big media started demanding that higher education take action against piracy on our networks. I have to say that I do not blame them doing so. Piracy of music, and more recently movies and software, is illegal and should not be tolerated. I think a lot of people didn’t agree with the approaches the big boys utilized and we all wished they saw the value in being more open — we’ve all heard both sides of the conversation so no need to rehash. One of the things we all did to help fight illegal file sharing was limit bandwidth on our campuses so students could push fewer bits through our pipes. We don’t monitor what gets pushed, we just make sure they aren’t using too much. When they do, we are forced to assume it is because they are sharing large media files and we turn off their access for a time. Am I the only one beginning to find it incredibly ironic that some of these same big media folks are now seeing the value in allowing open access to their properties and all of it requires a boatload of bandwidth? I am guessing they will now cry foul about our limiting the very networks they were once so concerned about.

The second observation has to do with Obama’s decision to share his Fireside Chats via youtube instead of just radio. I heard some folks on NPR bashing the decision and coming up with a handful of reasons why it is wrong. I’m not so much impressed that he chose youtube as the platform, I am impressed that he decided to do it on a social platform. Youtube allows for feedback, video responses, and the reuse of media via embed tags. Imagine what an amazing open archive these will be as we go forward. Open educational resources at their best.

About Open

/ Cole Camplese / 14 Comments

Lots of chatter across the edu-blogger web the last week or so about the notion of open — what does it mean, why bother to discuss it, and why should we care. The idea that we (as Institutions) would take the time to debate the value or the process by which we arrive at the notion of openness is complex to say the least. If we value the ideals of the Land Grant Institution (or education in general), then why argue when we can just be open? These are questions we deal with when we talk about the notion of open and they are difficult at best to answer. Tonight I think I found an example that may make sense of some of the conversation.

Most of you already realize Google is hosting images from the Life archive. They are brilliant and it speaks to the amazing power of not only Google, but the Internet in general. I spent only a few minutes today using the special, “source:life” search addition and the results were at once moving and inspirational. The power to see and access such historically significant works of art is nothing short of stunning. I was, for some reason, compelled to look at old Life photos of JFK … I think it is because I watched an excellent, American Experience episode on PBS last night about the his assassination. The image that struck me can be found here.

Did you look at the link? Did you notice something about the way that I referneced that beautiful and powerful image? I linked to it. I didn’t embed it. I linked to it. Maybe I am missing something with the Google/Time archive, but I didn’t see anything that asked me to use that photo in my context. I like that the images are accessible but to me, this is an example of what closed now means.

Now, when I do the same thing at Flickr in relation to Barack Obama’s campaign photos something very different emerges. You’ll notice something significant — You can see the image below in my context. Powerful imagery with unreal historical significance, within my space telling my story. Where do you see it? Right here from Barack Obama’s Flickr page, shared via a Creative Commons license. That to me is openness. Any thoughts?



Participatory Culture

/ Cole Camplese / 6 Comments

I’m starting to really think it is working. The “it” I am referring to is the adoption of not just web 2.0 tools, but web 2.0 philosophies. I have been professing the notion of the “conversation” since I re-read the Cluetrain Manifesto a handful of years ago. I say re-read, because the first time I tried it just blew past me like the wind. When I read it the second time I was starting to have success re-imagining my life with a blog, using del.icio.us, sharing on Flickr, and started discovering all the other people out there who were doing the same. I quickly started to understood that the web was a platform and we were the nodes — not the machines themselves, but the people … we are the nodes on a knowledge network that the platform empowers to connect. Once I got it, I was hooked on the idea that we can participate in a global conversation — even if the people we are talking to are two doors down.

At the start of it all, I thought it was about the tools but then it started to click that under all the tools were these basic tenets that were driving some really smart people to create them. From what I can tell they are openness, sharing, connections, and empowerment. To me, these are the basic underpinnings that drive the tools. The developers got it before we did and that strikes me as odd only because our traditional view of developers is that they work alone. Clearly, that is folklore and not the way the new economy pushes us to think. These early pioneers knew something was missing with the web and that was the opportunity to engage. Here I sit several years later — perhaps a good 10 years later — and can see we are all getting it.

So much has been going on that proves it is happening to me. My trip to Harvard for Berkman at 10 showed me tangible evidence that people can study this stuff in a practical and pragmatic fashion. My participation in the global Twitter conversation has proven to me that my local community is brilliant and willing to step up to the challenge of showing that off. My continued blogging has opened new doors and created new relationships that are more meaningful than most can comprehend. The Learning Design Summer Camp was the most recent piece of evidence that the notion of participatory culture is alive in a huge way right here on my own campus. These things are all local examples — and by local I mean happening to me. These are things that have opened my eyes to the power of the philosophies of web 2.0 … the tools are great, but seeing the people take over from the tools and rise up in a real sense has been stunning.

If I think back to the way I was thinking around the time I was leading the Online IST project in 1999 or so. I can say I had a totally different perspective. I was closed. I wasn’t interested in sharing experiences and I certainly willing to participate outside of my group. I believed we were the smartest people and there wasn’t anything anyone could tell me to prove me wrong. I was naive and immature to believe there wasn’t so much to learn out there. In the years that followed it took quite a bit to get me to see the power and intelligence in the community — admittedly my eyes started to open only as I began to discover other smart people at other Institutions exploring the social web. I was still turning a blind eye to my local community however. It took time for me to see it emerge here … and I use the word emerge to mean that I began to pay attention to the things around me. Again, admittedly it took technology to get me to pay attention — and maturity.

Now I am more excited when I see my RSS reader light up with posts from PSU people than anywhere else. I love seeing the triple digits of PSU Tweeters following each other, and I can’t say how proud I am of watching our community grow. I now know much of it is my own movement away from being close minded and taking notice … I also know that I am excited by the affordances the adoption of not just the tools but the philosophies will provide us all going forward. If I could go back to the early days of all this I would tell myself to stop trying to hoard the ideas, stop trying to know the most, and most importantly to embrace the power in an open and engage community. I can’t go back, but I am certainly excited about the movement forward. It is nice to be part of it. Thanks.

New Rules, One Post a Day

/ Cole Camplese / 13 Comments

I’ve decided to try and write a meaningful post every week day during the month of August. From the comments on my post yesterday it sounds like it would be an interesting test. As people mentioned to me, the only way for it to work is to write things that go beyond the “mailing it in” posts … instead focusing on a particular theme and trying hard to make each post have some depth.

So, to get this kicked off the right way, I’ll add a few rules that I will attempt to stick to during the One Post a Day effort for the month of August … I am writing this mostly so I have some parameters to follow, but I am also interested in seeing if anyone else feels like trying to create with me for a month. It could be interesting to see what would happen if a bunch of us tried to follow some basic rules and publish meaningful content for a month. I would think if we could grab a few other people in this, the aggregated content could be really interesting. At any rate, here are my “new rules” for the One Post a Day project:

  • I’ll post every week day during the month of August. I am giving myself the weekends to think about other things.
  • Posts have to be meaningful to count. I’m not going to simply point at an external site and say “this is cool.” I’ll try to find things that could be of value to the community.
  • Sticking to a theme seems like a good idea. From a few the comments it seems important to have a focus and I think I know what I want to focus on … I’ll work to expose interesting results from both our and national statistics that have emerged in the last year. I’ll draw upon data we’ve been collecting and attempt to add a layer of context to it that explains where we are going and why.
  • Trying to create conversation will be a big part of the effort. I’d like to share stuff that gets people anxious, angry, excited, and interested in talking back.
  • Having fun and writing are really what it is all about. If I’m not having fun, I’m done. That doesn’t mean I am dropping out if it gets hard, but it means that if I am having a good time exploring ideas then it is a waste of time.
  • There are no invitations required to join in. If you want to write along with me, let’s come with a shared tag and I’ll aggregate stuff together on a public page shared via Google Reader. I you want to come along, establish your own theme, and torment yourself with me then leave a comment and share an idea for a shared tag.

That’s it. I hope I can follow my own guidelines and make this go.

On Changing Roles

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

As the First Annual Learning Design Summer Camp approaches I am struck by how different the list of participants looks than a more “traditional” ID meeting has in the past. I am amazed by how many people there are attending that a more conservative view of ID would deem too far outside the path … that there are people attending that are librarians, marketing people, programers, developers, faculty, students and others who impact learning design in a team environment, but who have traditionally been left on the outside looking in when it comes to these kinds of events. Let me say one thing about it all — I love it.

I have always looked at the design process as one that is so much more powerful when we are inclusive of people with many perspectives. I think we are all being asked to rethink our roles as we find new ground to populate in the academy. We are no longer being asked questions about what tool to use, how to write an objective, test items, or add resources to a CMS powered course space. I see something else happening — we are being asked to help extend the reach of classrooms to connect communities. Even if the ask isn’t overt, the notion of openness and connectedness is living just under the surface of nearly all the questions I am asked. I like this on a lot of levels, but I especially like that it is forcing us all to rethink where we add value to the bigger picture.

I really like the idea that everyone coming to the LD Summer Camp can have an impact on the design of learning — they can impact small pieces or entire learning opportunities. This is not meant to be a call to arms for more traditional instructional designers (I may actually be one), but it is a call for the entire Learning Design community to see this change coming and to embrace it — to level the playing field and to participate openly with colleagues as we explore this new territory. It is a truly exciting time to be in the Learning Design field — unprecedented access to content, knowledge, peers, teachers, learners, and all the others in our space has made our jobs that much more interesting and critical. We need to understand that our value will be finding new ways to connect learners to teachers, classrooms to larger communities, and education to 21st century skills that can take students into the next three decades in a holistic fashion. I am working on changing my thinking and I am inviting those around me to do the same.

Did I mention I am excited? Thoughts?

More Thoughts on Open Course Design

/ Cole Camplese / 14 Comments

I am going to make a quick return to some previous writing I did on the potential power of community to drive course and knowledge creation. Bear with me, as I am still getting my head wrapped around this whole thing. I am clearly not there yet, so this is an open call for discussion around this concept.

Let me just say that I am loving the wiki. I have never (in my 10 years at PSU) seen the power of the collective more clearly than I have through the use of the ETS Wiki to drive thinking forward. Nearly as many of the edits to the things we are working on internally are coming from those outside the ETS staff — amazing and very powerful. Since I said no more invitations in my last post, let me say that I was wrong. You are invited to continue to participate. It is making my work more meaningful on levels I didn’t anticipate. With that said, I am getting set to explore a new use of wikis here at PSU.

With the closing of the IST Solutions Institute, a place I called home for six and a half good years, I have been working through emotions about lots of things. One thing I am struck by is the fact that much of the work of SI in the early days centered around creating courses for use across the State of PA to help manage curricular drift, create new standards for problem based learning approaches, and unify faculty in their curricular decisions. We built the Online IST courses to serve as the basis for the core undergraduate curriculum for a brand new College at a big, geographically dispersed University. The most amazing thing about it to this day was that faculty used it! They used these centrally designed course materials as their textbooks, delivered the problem activities we designed, used the ANGEL templates to quickly generate their semester sequence, and they participated with us by offering to help edit, create, and grow the content so it better matched the needs of the curriculum. Amazing participation and for me it was career changing observation.

So flash forward to the SI closure and a note I recieved about how the course materials would be “frozen” and left in their current state — no new updates. Perhaps an opportunity to explore new thinking? Why not go the other route? Why not “defrost” the materials and turn them into wiki articles and invite the IST community in to participate? Think how a concept as simple as “Knowledge Worker” (update …compare the linked Wikipedia article with this lesson from Online IST 110 on the same concept … sorry, PSU authentication is required.) could be created and grown through active participation. Think about dozens and dozens of these articles being created and shared openly within the community so the content grows and becomes as rich a resource and it once was — only stronger with the power of community behind it.

Well, people say that is fine, but what do you do with hundreds of disconnected articles? I guess my answer is to invite the community in to create meta articles — articles that creates a narrative story about the collection of concepts you are trying to string together into lessons/topics/chapters or whatever you want to call them. Let a course committee determine how the meta articles link and drive the course structure, but do it from a wiki approach.

I would have to think new affordances would present themselves … here are a couple I am thinking about:

  • Faculty could weave their work into the articles in a more seamless way. By exposing their research and citing their publications in a wiki article students would get a more complete perspective of what the field is all about. Encouraging debate within the articles would open up new perspectives on otherwise mundane topics.
  • Students could be asked to contribute new knowledge and make it available to the course committees for inclusion in the meta articles. Students are often out in front of us on emerging trends and getting them to contribute seems really exciting and very appropriate.
  • Alumni, Doctoral students, and industry partners could participate in new ways that brings in perspectives that would otherwise be locked out. One of my former colleagues at IST, Shawn Clark, has done amazing work with an advisory board member and letting him work side by side (virtually) with the students. The reason it works is because Dr. Clark gets that there are people outside the academy that have much to contribute to the work going on inside the academy. His futures site is a model of open collaboration and contribution. If Shawn can pull it off, don’t you think other interested parties connected to IST could as well? Wiki content could help that.

There are more, but at the end of the day this would be a ton of work — not at all hard to move content out of existing systems, but really hard to socialize the whole approach. Someone would have to apply that energy and someone would have to see the value in it all to make it real. With the closing of the Solutions Institute, I’m not sure who that person is.

C is for Community

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

As is the case with most Fridays when the weather is nice in State College I came home and spent the majority of the evening outside in the yard with the kids listening to music. This evening we decided to forgo the typical “Dinner Mix” playlist of grown up favorites and instead played selections from the Sesame Street gang. My little boy, who will be two in September, fell in love with Cookie Monster’s “C is for Cookie.” I’m not going to make the parallel that we are doing the work of children or anything, but I will say that there was a line that resonated with me — “C is for Cookie and that’s good enough for me.” What struck a chord with me is that our approach to community is very similar to what my little man’s interest in cookies feels like … serious. I must say that the power of the local community is emerging and it is good enough for me.

A stretch perhaps, but on target for what I am feeling on and around campus. Let me share a living example … today we had the first meeting of the Learning Design Summer Camp committee members. Typical stuff for higher education in most cases other than the simple truth is that not a single person was assigned to their post. All we did was establish a wiki, share some opening thoughts, and Tweet the existence of the thinking out to those who were listening. A strange thing happened — lots of people contributed. And then they volunteered. Then another even more amazing thing happened — people outside the standard Twitter stream joined the conversation. Community happened.

Our Summer Camp is shaping up to be quite the event. I am personally hoping it pushes a conversation forward related to the tools we’ve been building on campus to support new thinking for teaching and learning. The idea is to get people together to actively engage in discourse that is well beyond the typical “how to” format we all deal with. No matter what I am hopeful to see about 100 of my colleagues working together to think critically about how we design learning spaces. Seems like a very cool thing. It is time we all start to raise the level of our conversations.

All of it shows me once again the power of the collective. It also reminds me just how open and engaged the community is on our campus. I am very proud to be a part of it!