Print?

/ Cole Camplese / 5 Comments

It makes me wonder once again if a group of like minded folks couldn’t do the same sort of thing with Teaching with Technology|Penn State? I think so. I’d love it.

via www.personal.psu.edu

I loved the idea of a real physical print piece focusing on teaching and learning with technology at Penn State the first time my friend and colleague Dave Stong suggested it. I just wonder if print is the right medium. Perhaps I am being too closed minded (and I am inviting anyone to tell me so) about the idea. I love the Penn State Research magazine for lots of reasons … and it honestly makes me wonder if I’d be more or less likely to read its stories in print or online. I only now even looked to see if there is an online companion and it doesn’t come close to living up to the print version. It is screaming for a digital version that makes sense and captures the same visceral feeling the print version does — I’m not sure HTML can do that.

What I wonder is if the kinds of stories we want to tell wouldn’t benefit from a more stylized monthly digital aggregate of the content we are currently producing. Jamie Oberdick in ETS does a great job producing daily content — some with companion videos and podcasts that probably wouldn’t translate to a print only format. Would we just end up with a magazine that said, “to hear more about X, visit our website at http://tlt.psu.edu?”

What I do see is the potential to reach new stakeholders. People who might want to bowled over by what we do, but don’t spend a heck of a lot of time online — especially looking for our content. We are reaching a certain percentage of the market (so to speak), but could be ignoring a whole other demographic … reaching them is a worthy goal.

In my estimation we ought to figure out how to auto create ePub versions of our content for the iPad or other ePub capable devices given where mobile reading might be going. I worry about the cost, distribution, and everything else that goes with physical printing — but given I know very little of the process I could be wrong. If we could roll our web content out the way we do online and have it move into a flexible workflow that would produce both a print and ePub version we’d be hitting a much larger percentage of people … and we’d be satisfying people across lots of dimensions of the spectrum. One thing having a regularly published print piece would give us is a long term historical artifact that could actually be stored at the Library … but at the end of the day my guess is that they would scan them and store them as PDFs. Any thoughts?


Credit Dave Stong

Yep

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

I pre-ordered a 32 GB wifi iPad, a standard dock, and a VGA adaptor. I thought I’d share the results of my totally unofficial quick Twitter poll from the other day where I got (a whopping) 32 responses … eight have have pre-ordered iPads with six of those being wifi only. Another eight said they would be buying an iPad with half going for the wifi only. Seven aren’t at all interested in buying an iPad. We shall see.

Yep

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

I pre-ordered a 32 GB wifi iPad, a standard dock, and a VGA adaptor. I thought I’d share the results of my totally unofficial quick Twitter poll from the other day where I got (a whopping) 32 responses … eight have have pre-ordered iPads with six of those being wifi only. Another eight said they would be buying an iPad with half going for the wifi only. Seven aren’t at all interested in buying an iPad. We shall see.

There are No True Emergencies

/ Cole Camplese / 6 Comments

My wife shared this little gem with me last night as we were talking about the culture in higher education and our tendency to meet all the time. I was thinking it was specific to higher education as I haven’t been in industry for 12 or so years and at that time it was a small start up where we had lots to keep us continuously busy. I especially like the part about managers … how many of us (I’m a manager) perceive our needs for updates and information to more important than the people we manage. I think there is a huge lesson to take away from open conversations like the one Jason Fried (from 37signals.com) engages in throughout the video. In so many ways it shows us that we may need to rethink the way we create emergencies and have to react to them nearly every single day within our organizations and instead think about the work that should be getting done as the goal.

“And the truth of the matter is, there are really no true emergencies in business.” I love it … now to remember it.

Touchscreen Mobile Device Explosion

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

According to Gartner, the worldwide market for mobile devices with touchscreens will grow over 97% this year. Last year, consumers bought 184 million devices with touchscreens. Gartner predicts that this market will surpass 362 million units this year. By 2013, Gartner predicts, touchscreen mobile devices will account for 80% of all sales in North America and Europe. Once the domain of high-end devices, touchscreen are now finding their ways into midrange phones and a growing number of consumers now expects all of their screens to be touch-enabled.

via www.nytimes.com

I wonder if they are including the iPad in their description of "mobile devices." If they aren't, they are undershooting … even though it seems bold, the notion that "by 2013 80% of all sales in North America and Europe" claim, I think they may be underestimating its impact. Let's check back after people starting touching the iPad before you tell me I'm crazy.

From the WTF Files: Obama’s Weight

/ Cole Camplese / 4 Comments

Please let this be satire …

President Obama is weighing the nation down with his weightlessness-ness. I’m not going to use big words or fancy words. I’m just going to say what hockey moms and soccer moms around this great nation are wondering and that’s how can we trust a leader who might weigh less than a Victoria’s Secret model?

Leadership is about weight. It’s about weighty issues. Issues involving weight and heavy things and people who have weight to them. Leaders who are men like Churchill or Roosevelt or what’s his name there, that U.N. fellow from way back, Dag Hammarskjold. Meat on their bones.

It’s American to have weight. Get up on a scale, move the little thing there at the top. Hockey moms do it. Soccer moms do it. But jeez. About the only people who don’t do it are the French. And they’re Socialists. So you do the math.

via www.nytimes.com

Guess who said that one on Meet the Press … yep, Sarah Palin. Now we have to sit through Weight Gate? No wonder we can’t come to terms with health care … we are wasting our time on the speculation of a healthy weight or from sarah’s perspective, getting enough meat on our collective bones to not be a socialist. I am placing this in the WTF category.