Presentation

Wow, Teachers are Smart!

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

I have to admit, talking to a couple hundred K-12 educators scared the hell out of me. I am used to higher education and corporate audience so my talk as the lunch keynote for the Third Annual One to One conference was well outside of my comfort zone. Turns out we are all in the same boat – huge challenges in driving acceptance, adoption, and diffusion of innovation within our environments. I had an hour and fifteen minutes to cram a couple of years worth of content related to web 2.0 and how it plays in the education environment into … the talk I did was a reshaped version of my “Enabling the New Classroom Conversation” talk I assembled a while back. I had to do some new stuff with it to make it appropriate for the audience, but at the end of the day I think we engaged in some really meaningful conversation.

As always I’ll make my slides available as a PDF, but I have to admit that I am disappointed that the talk wasn’t captured … this audience could use some long term take aways to help further their cause. Is it just me or is the notion of recording talks still a big deal for conferences?

I got great feedback and the nods of encouragement left me feeling very good about the state of teachers in our world. These are people who are genuinely interested in transforming what they do with the technology that they do have at their fingertips. Here’s a huge issue I didn’t expect coming into it — the notion of schools blocking/filtering access to the tools we look at on a daily basis is disturbing. My big takeawsy is that we all need to be part of the equation and that teachers are working so hard to do great things with their students (BTW, those are our kids). All I have to say is that I wish I would’ve liked my teachers in middle and high school as much as I loved talking with this group today. BTW, thanks much for the kind words!

Web 2007 at Penn State

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

Today I had the pleasure of presenting at the 10th annual Penn State Web Conference. This is the second year in a row that I have presented at this conference and it was just as much fun this year. Jim Leous and I revived our Web 2.0 in the Higher Education Enterprise act for this year … offering a bit of a status update on the state of Web 2.0 stuff going on here at PSU. Sort of cool to look back and see that at this time last year we were presenting dreams about University wide blogging, podcasting, and general Web 2.0 adoption and this year we were able to show what our emerging services look like. What great feeling it is to be talking about reality and not just “imagine if you will …” kind of stuff. I feel like we have made real progress in the last 18 months or so.

I really enjoying getting to present with Jim … he has been an innovator on our campus for so many years and he has insight into why things are the way they are that so many others don’t. He and I try to make it a fun and light session when we do this and I hope we pulled it off this year. It was also nice to see the conference bring a blog online this year as well as encourage people to tag items in del.icio.us and Flickr with “psuweb2007” … walking the talk is an important piece to the puzzle. By all accounts it seemed like a successful day and one that hope continues to push our overall awareness towards emerging web trends forward. I will also say it is so good to see close to 300 people (all from PSU) kicking the web tires. The next step has to invovle getting members of this community together with the learning design community in some sort of un-conference way to really get the conversation rolling. No matter how you cut it, I had a good time today.

My schedule continues to be hectic as tomorrow it is off to Pittsburgh to spend time learning more about Google and what they do … that should be a blast. Back in town Wed and getting ready for another talk at the Technology in Business Education conference. Again, new audiences and new challenges … should be fun and interesting. I will attempt to post thoughts about it all as it happens.

6/12/07: Presentation: Penn State Web Conference

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

On June 12th I will be co-presenting at the 10th Annual Penn State Web Conference with my colleague, Jim Leous. Jim and I co-presented last year as well and it was a blast. Our topic this year builds on where we left off last year … this year we will take a look at the state of Web 2.0 in the Higher Education Enterprise 2.0 … we've worked very hard at PSU to make progress in this space over the last year and this talk will bring some of the outcomes and lessons learned to bear.
Slides available as PDF.

6/14/07: Featured Talk: Technology In Business Schools Roundtable Annual Meeting

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

On June 14, 2007 I will be presenting and leading a session titled, Implementing Disruptive Technologies into the Learning Process at the Technology In Business Schools Roundtable Annual Meeting hosted by Penn State's Smeal College of Business. This should be an interesting opportunity to engage a group of people that I assume will be interested in looking at how business schools should be playing in the emerging technologies space for teaching and learning. This is an important event for me as the Dean of the College of Business is Jim Thomas. Dean Thomas was the Dean of the College of Information Sciences and Technology while I was the Director of the IST Solutions Institute.
My slides are available here as a PDF.

6/18/07: Keynote Talk: Third Annual One-to-One Computing Conference

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

On June 18, 2007 I will be delivering a keynote talk to the participants on the Third Annual One-to-One Computing Conference. This annual event is held at Penn State University on the University Park campus. I am looking forward to this as it is an opportunity to talk with a whole new audience — mainly K-12 teachers. I will be talking about how we can leverage emerging technologies in the classroom to help extend the conversation. I am looking forward to the event and to the opportunity. Another big reason I am very excited is that the Father of the conference is Kyle Peck and many of my good friends in the College of Education have had a big hand in its overall success.
Link to presentation. Download the PDF

My Maricopa Thoughts

/ Cole Camplese / 4 Comments

I spent the first three days of this week in Arizona presenting at Maricopa Community College’s 20th Annual Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference. I was invited to be the event’s featured speaker and also present at a breakout panel. I have to say I enjoyed the opportunity tremendously and enjoyed the campus, the people, and the event even more. One thing to keep in mind if you are traveling out to the valley of the sun — it is hot. It took exactly one minute after we landed for someone to give me the, “yeah, but it is a dry heat” line. It didn’t feel all that dry to me … jeez I don’t think it ever dipped under 100.

A very smart and passionate group of faculty took part in a day-long event that saw somewhere in the neighborhood of what looked to be 150-170 people. One of the really cool things about the whole thing is that the Maricopa system is made up of a very diverse set of campuses — all of them do a nice job of coming together around the topic of teaching and learning though. The event also drew a bunch of people from other area schools — the brief conversation I had with the folks from Arizona State was very interesting and it gave me some instant ideas on integrating all the tools we’ve been working on to make it easier for faculty to select the services they want in their classes. I have to say it makes me think of the Edison Services toolset we built while I was at the Solutions Institute.

My breakout session was essentially the Web 2.0 in the PSU Enterprise talk I have been giving for quite some time now … I added a piece on using Web 2.0 philosophies to support and grow communities as well. The talk was well received, but I didn’t feel the typical energy in the room. I have a hard time talking to other schools about the stuff we are doing at PSU … I just don’t like that vibe all that much. It worried me a bit for the featured talk, but when the time came the audience was ready and willing to rock along with me. The talk felt great and it seemed like it struck a chord with a majority of the audeince.

My talk was titled, “Enabling the New Classroom Conversation.” I literally changed it up an hour before because of the intense focus on the Net Generation that the morning keynote provided. I ended up making some quick changes right before going on stage … I actually like what emerged better. It was greared again at taking the underlying notions of Web 2.0 and applying them to the classroom — not solely as technology, but as consistant princliples for cooperation, collaboration, and participation. The point I was trying to make is that there is something very exciting and interesting going on with the new breed of social tools out there that we should be paying very close attention to. These tools do amazing things to engage people and we should be working very hard to integrate these types of approaches. I was working to make the case that these tenants can lead us towards David Warlock’s School 2.0 concept … this is where I am spending all of my time these days … All in all, it went well.

Cool thing is that one thing usually leads to another. I’ve been asked by a couple of the participants if I would be interested in keynoting their events in the near future — of course! I have to give a shout out to the CogDog for making the recommendation to the good people at Maricopa. When I mentioned his name during the lunch talk several people clapped! They love you there, Allan! Thanks again for introducing me to a passionate group of faculty and staff.

5/15/07: Featured Talk: Maricopa’s 20th Annual Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

On Tuesday May 15, 2007 I will be the featured speaker at Maricopa's 20th Annual Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference. I will also be presenting a breakout session related to Web 2.0 and PSU. My featured talk, "Enabling the New Classroom Conversation" will focus on three main drivers in opening the classroom to new ways of extending learning.
The presentation is available as a PDF. Download.