PSU Blogging

From Blogs to Publishing Platforms

/ Cole Camplese / 2 Comments

D’Arcy wrote a post over the weekend questioning the need for an Institutionally run blogging environment … I always take notice when he asks questions like this for a number of reasons — he’s smart, he’s been in the field for a long time making smart decisions, and his posts tend to bring in smart comments. This is no exception. D’Arcy asks if, given the plethora of open/free blogging services on the Web, the University of Calgary should be running its own service. I see where he is coming from and it is something I wrestle with across the board. There is a real tension between what we can/should provide in comparison to just recommending a .com service. Blogs are the tip of the iceberg … think email, calendar, and other more mission critical things that are being outsourced by Institutions all over the country.

D’Arcy talks about how hosting your own may provide for increased integration, trust, and authority. I think these are solid reasons, but I might expand them a bit. I can honestly say the reason we adopted MovableType as our blogging platform had very little to do with blogging. We knew we were going to be able to (over time) shift it towards a very powerful publishing platform that can do all sorts of things online. When we went down the path, the immediate win was a robust, scalable, integrated, and universally available blogging tool that people could use to support teaching, learning, expression, or really anything else.

Going forward, the idea is that you arrive at your personal webspace and are encouraged to just click over to your MT dashboard and publish. It is a jump for a user to think of this outside of setting up a blog — on the surface, the environment is a blogging toolset after all. The big ah-ha moment comes when you actually watch how easy it is to extend this into the world of instant site creation, all with the affordances of a modern CMS and blogging platform — instant publishing, RSS, ping/trackbacks, categories, tags, search, and so much more.

The work of our faculty fellow, Dr. Carla Zembal-Saul, this summer illustrates just how powerful this is when the jump is made to publishing and not just blogging. And the most interesting work being done has to do with how the portfolio becomes a social environment — guess what our platform is really good at? IN the coming weeks, I am going to try and focus some energy on explaining Carla’s work and share some more tangible evidence of the new ePortfolio Platform (powered by MT) we will be promoting here at PSU. The idea that a blog can be used for any publishing task is important to grasp if we are going to move to the next level of academic utilization of the web as a platform — at least, if you agree with D’Arcy that the notion of doing it on the inside promotes integration, trust, and authority.

Shifting Social Dynamics

/ Cole Camplese / 9 Comments

The One Post a Day Challenge is already starting to add up to a big personal project for me. I’m not yet overwhelemd with it, but as I embark on a whirlwind 7 days (kicked off by an overnight trip to Madison, WI to present and punctuated by the Learning Design Summer Camp) I can see the wheels showing some signs of coming off. I’m not there yet though! I am thrilled to see the comments here, but what is already becoming evident is how nice it is to read a wealth of fresh squeezed content from my community every single day. I am enjoying hearing new voices and discovering new blogs. Very cool. One thing I am becoming concerned about is that I see a theme emerging here that I hope is meaningful to those around me — the idea of doing things in the cloud. All of my posts have been focused on using the Blogs at PSU as a personal publishing space and I am hoping it isn’t getting stale.

With that in mind, I thought I would take a stab at a similar, but slightly off topic observation about the coming shift in demographics on our campuses. I am drawing upon some of the amazing work done by our friends at the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Not too long ago I read a few of their reports that focused on online teenagers’ web behavior. Not entirely surprising to see how connected they are, but it is a little stunning to see how sophisticated they are as they participate in social environments. Some highlights that have me thinking about what my campus will look like in 5 years and if our work is going to pay dividends when this generation shows up:

  1. Nearly 50% of online teens are sharing content online. This isn’t file sharing, it is sharing pictures, text, and other forms of their media.
  2. 64% engage in at least one form of content creation.
  3. Girls dominate most elements of online content creation and sharing with 35% of teen girls blogging, and 54% sharing photos. Compared with 20% of boys blog and 40% share pictures.
  4. Boys are nearly twice as likely to share their videos online — I’m not touching that one!

Why is this the case? Well I have a few suspicions, but the fact that Pew tells us that 89% of them report that people comment on these artifacts some of the time tells me a lot. Wow. So it means to me that they are engaging in a new form of social dynamic that looks a hell of a lot like a digital conversation. I am wondering as a follow up is if they actively market their online lives in a face to face world or if they just know their friends are connected to it and are silent about the publishing? Do they show up at school and say, “did you see my pictures, video, or blog post?” I’m not sure, but Pew also tells us that most of them use their social networks to control access — this is a big reason why Facebook is the number one photo sharing site on the Internet.

With that said, I am reminded of a meeting I had with my colleague, Glenn Johnson, early last week about the blog platform. Glenn has been the “ePortfolio Guy” at PSU for several years and has done an outstanding job socializing the notion of student portfolios. He was showing us how he has traditionally shown people how to use WYSIWYG tools along with our PASS explorer (really an online SFTP like client) that visualizes your personal webspace as files and folders. A metaphor that has been in play for years. When we started talking about teens and their use of social tools for sharing we started to wonder if they had any clue as to where their items were going?

Are Directories Dead to our Next Student?

Are Directories Dead to our Next Student?

Does a directory structure matter to this generation? Where the hell are my pictures when I upload them to Facebook anyway? Should we care or should we make the jump into just managing assets through tagging them on the way in? I think Pew tells us we have some real decisions to make as it relates to enterprise learning environments and some of our old school preconceptions are not going to match up with emerging trends. I am especially interested in what people think about this and how we can be positioning ourselves to deal with the shift.

Collaboration in the Cloud

/ Cole Camplese / 5 Comments

I am going to continue to explore the Blogs at Penn State as a note and workflow tool to support in and out of the classroom work … I am going to focus on something a little different than the individually focused approach I discussed last week. Collaboration within the context of coursework among our students seems to be growing on campus. This is encouraging because it seems to me that it points to new approaches in our classrooms and indicates that more faculty are encouraging students to work together to solve interesting challenges. I think cooperative problem solving is a 21st century skill, so helping students develop them while in college is critical. The FACAC survey indicates that both undergraduate at 40% and graduate students at 56% report sharing documents to complete coursework. What we didn’t dig into was how they are sharing documents to complete coursework, but from my experiences in the classroom it is probably to wrong way — emailing them back and forth still seems to be the norm.

Last week I was thinking out loud about students creating individual blogs to be used as notebooks across their classes. Today I’d like to ask how blogs could be used to create a team or group based set of collaborative opportunities to support coursework. I have a couple things in mind and would be more than happy to expand on any of them as a follow up post.

With the Fall release of the Blogs at PSU anyone can easily add additional authors to a blog so they can contribute, edit, create, or manage posts. I would love to see students skip using Word as a “collaborative” tool and find new ways to work together. Blogs aren’t ideal for collaborative authoring, but I can’t see how they are worse than passing Word documents back and forth. Collaboration can be easily achieved via multiple posts, comments, or even by managing drafts. This is an area we should be investigating more.

The best tool I’ve seen for true collaboration is the word processor in the Google Docs suite. With an email address it is easy to set up an account and even easier to add others to the document. More and more Universities are signing up with Google under the Apps for Education program … we’re thinking about what it would mean to be a part of that world and there are some very interesting opportunities there. The funny thing is as I walked into a meeting with some folks from Google I was thinking that the best part of the suite had nothing to do with email, but with the google docs tools. It was great to hear they feel the same way. It shouldn’t be a surprise that they think real collaboration happens during the document creation, not after.

If you’ve never used the word processing application in Google docs then you’re missing quite a bit. It has all the power of Word, but cloud based and the ability to actively collaborate. What that means is that people can be in the same document at the same time and see each other’s changes. Where things get really interesting is that a document can be instantly published into a blog. That means teams can work in the best collaborative tool on the web for group writing and then push it into a personal repository (Blogs at Penn State). The document can be edited repeatedly in Google Docs and instantly republished into the blog. This combination of group and personal editing is a big step forward for empowering collaboration and taking advantage of personal repositories.

Publishing from Google Docs to Blogs at PSU

Publishing from Google Docs to Blogs at PSU

I’d really like to hear more about ideas and scenarios where we could more actively explore these ideas. We are building quite a team within ETS to explore how blogs can impact teaching, learning, and scholarship in general. Help us form the right kinds of opportunities to continue exploring.

A Follow Up: Cooperative Notes

/ Cole Camplese / 10 Comments

After my post on taking notes in the cloud last week I got a number of comments. One of them that seemed to really spark some needed thought was how to engage not just students in the notion of blogging their notes, but how to get faculty into the idea of posting lecture assets in places where the “embed” code lives. Kyle points out that it might make a ton of sense if we could find new ways to help faculty see the value in publishing their slide images, diagrams, or other rich assets to social sites as well to empower students to simply annotate existing assets in the cloud via the use of a simple embed code. I love the idea and I will be discussing it with my team.

Slide with Student Notes Below

Slide with Student Notes Below

Then as I was sitting around thinking more about it over the weekend I started to wonder why faculty would need to publish to the .com social web world when they could use their PSU blog spaces to upload, share, and manage their rich media assets. My friend and colleague, Brad Kozlek, manages a big portion of the Blogs at PSU project and he is very keen on the whole embed thing. As a matter of fact, he has worked out a simple little template addition to the MT code we use to enable simple YouTube-like embed capabilities. Most of this work is modeled after some amazing work by Alan Levine with his Feed2js work and Brian Lamb and his absolute insistence on remixing and reusing content.

Having faculty take advantage of our own blog platform to enable students to enrich their notes is a huge step forward in my eyes. I was talking about students taking pictures of slides and Kyle reminded us that it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to have faculty share each slide as an embedable asset from any number of social sites. I love it, but why not right from their blog? Each of these slides could easily be pulled into a student’s post with little more than an embed code. Faculty, over time, could create their own slide repository that could be easily shared with their students as embedable content in their blogs, or even within their own courses in places like ANGEL and blog powered pages. Big potential here that we need to really explore.

I like the idea and I wonder how feasible it is to push towards a solution that asks faculty to allow students to take electronic notes in class, share digital representations of their slides/diagrams, and to think about how to best protect and share their own intellectual property in a teaching and learning context. Those are a lot of things to socialize, but I would guess given the time, energy, and ability to share success stories one could get a decent sized percentage working in that direction. In so many cases, we think publishing to the web gives up IP, but I would argue that taking this approach would empower the use of IP in a more open and responsible way. Not sure, but I sure would like to hear some thoughts on this.

Finally, Arriving at the Blog is Not Just a Blog

/ Cole Camplese / 6 Comments

I can’t believe it has been two years since we made the claim that the Blogs at Penn State could be so much more than a blog and should be viewed as a personal content management system. In that time, we’ve made huge progress related to the notion that our blogging environment can and should be used for all sorts of things — most recently we’ve been doing some important work as it relates to blogs as portfolios. Our Faculty Fellow, Carla Zembal-Saul, has been working with Brad Kozlek and others here in ETS to rethink how we frame the portfolio opportunity … what we are coming to is that the win in the portfolio space is associated with the social opportunities the blog platform affords. We’ve been doing our thinking in the open over at the ETS Wiki, so please take a look. We have several pilots taking advantage of this approach this fall, the coolest one being with the Schreyer Honors College … check out Dean Chris Brady’s post seeking volunteers. Some of the scholars’ comments are very encouraging.

At any rate, that is not what I am focusing on here … with the latest release candidate of Moveable Type 4.2, we’ve started testing out the new template set concept they’ve introduced. When we pitched the Blogs at Penn State project I made sweeping promises that we could use this one platform to easily support blogs, portfolios, note taking spaces, personal websites, course pages, and more. Well, with template sets that is coming true. I did a little screencast showing how easy it will be to create personal websites using the MT environment. This has far reaching potential. Take a look at the screencast below and let us know what kinds of templates would be compelling (or watch the QT version). BTW, sorry about the watermark on the screencast … I tried ScreenFlow and have yet to purchase it. A little tough to see, but you can get the idea. Another BTW, the wonderful music in the background was written, composed, and performed by Penn State’s Stephen Hopkins. The track is Ian Grove Blues and is available from Stephen’s Penn State Blog. Steve was an early guest on ETS Talk as well.

Movable Type as an Open Content Toolset

/ Cole Camplese / 7 Comments

I have been thinking more and more about the opportunities we have at our fingertips now that we have an enterprise blogging toolset in place here at the University. I’ve watched my online colleagues discussing open courseware and blog tools for about a week now and am ready to chime in with my own thoughts. I am impressed with the progress and ah-ha moments that have gone on around the edu-blog web for the better part of a week, although I am slightly surprised in that many of these same people are the ones who have been banging the “blog is more than a blog” drum for quite some time. I spent the better part of a year working that angle in hopes of getting our own decision makers to buy into an enterprise blog tool — “no, its a personal content management system …” So as I watched D’Arcy, Brian, Jim, and David show off the work they’ve done and the excellent thinking they are sharing I was a little confused by the excitement.

But then it hit me. The glorious piece to this is not the software, it is the philosophical underpinnings it is supporting. Openness. Open content that can be easily created, managed, searched, and then shared out (using a number of interesting methods) to other platforms so it can be customized and treated the way people want to treat content — ironically, as their own. What I mean is that we’ve all talked about online repositories for the last 10 or so years, what I see as the difference here is that I can find good open content, grab it, move it into a drop dead simple environment (like wordpress.com), and manipulate it and make it more like the environment I want it to be. We always wanted that but we (at least) couldn’t make it happen. Maybe we can now.

So, we have Movable Type as our enterprise blogging tool here at PSU. That means that anyone with an access account and webspace can log in and create a blog. A couple of clicks, some typing, and you are publishing. To me it spells a platform to support all sorts of learning content design and development. What if for a minute we envisioned a second install of MT that is built to be specifically for course design and development? A design team (including faculty) could build in this space using all the collaborative tools to do so, take advantage of tags, categories, and other meta-like data to help keep things straight, and create killer learning objects. This isn’t really new thinking. But what if all these things were just open and waiting to be exported (in MT format) and imported (in MT format) directly into our enterprise blog tool by a single faculty member who was interested in taking what was available and adding the parts they wanted the most — their own personal contexts to bring it to life.

A project like this would allow us to explore some things at an Institutional level and actually answer some questions … a few things that come to mind include:

  • Platforms: The blog environment is the perfect kind of place to hang all sorts of opportunities off … I am thinking about podcasts, streaming media, google maps, links to ANGEL, and all sorts of other small pieces.
  • Best Practices: What does it mean to use an environment like MT to produce learning content or objects … could we build a roadmap for others to follow?
  • OER Standards: We need to establish all sorts of baseline constructs if we are going to move into a more OER space … what is the granularity of content, what kinds of tags should be used, how do we manage assets, and all the other things we worry about with learning object design.
  • OER Policies: Even more critical to the long term vision is how do we position ourselves (and our content) for use and reuse? I know there is at least one College on campus already playing in the OER space, but what does it sound like as an Institutional conversation?
  • Attitudes: How will our stakeholders react and what do people really think about sharing?
  • Usability: Does this type of environment lend itself to use, and maybe more importantly is it the right kind of space to use in the first place?

It isn’t fully baked and I know there are holes in it, but I am willing to put a group of people together to aggressively explore it … what should we be thinking about — and at the end of the day, why shouldn’t we do it? I know this post is not articulate enough to really illustrate the vision, but it is my feeble attempt to get some input and get a conversation started around the concept. Anyone care to share some thoughts or participate in a larger discussion?

MT Goes Open Source

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

Just a quick pointer to the fact that after a few months of talk and lots of whispers Moveable Type 4.1 has gone open source. This makes our decision to adopt MT at PSU that much stronger, IMHO. This gives us a chance to really do some very interesting things with a very scalable and stable platform. Obviously I love WordPress (as it powers this blog), but the MT 4 release is a gorgeous piece of software. Everyone I have shown it to at the University has been very happy to see its interface, learn about its features, and can’t wait to get their fingers on it. The open source move is just icing on the cake for us.

mt4-bug-mt-white.png

Local Feed2JS

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

So after a couple of days of talking with people around the office, Brad Kozlek executed a sweet little piece of thinking. He was interested in creating a local version of Feed2JS that would be auto-published by the Blogs at Penn State. The content below is coming right out of his site … still needs a little work as it is only a listing of his latest posts, not the full text like I am really after … but that can’t be that far off. Very cool.