Music Business Heads into the Virtual World

/ Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

In this future, the digital music files on people’s computers could join vinyl records, cassette tapes and CDs in the dusty vault of fading music formats.

via www.nytimes.com

Apple buying LaLa a couple of weeks ago has created quite a few rumors about what will happen next. This one sentence from the NYT site has me asking some new questions, namely related to how long each of the above mentioned technologies ruled their slice of the recorded music environment. Could the shelf life of the MP3 really only be ten or so years? Are we actually prepared to give up ownership of the physical representations of one of our (arguably) most prized collectible — our music? Even in a World where digital music is stored locally, we still *have* our music. Interesting stuff.

This American Life in State College

/ Cole Camplese / 6 Comments

This year, The Princeton Review named Penn State the #1 Party School in America. It's a rotating crown—last year it was University of Florida, before that it was West Virginia University. So we wondered: what's it like to beat the country's top party school? Note, Act Three was not in the broadcast version of the show. That's a web bonus.

via www.thisamericanlife.org

I listened to this over the weekend and was both somewhat amused and really disturbed. If you don't listen to This American Life you are missing out on the best storytelling around. This episode hits really close to home … my home. As a matter of fact I was in Faculty Senate the day President Spanier talked about us being the number one party school that is referenced in the episode. I'd love to know how this makes both Penn Staters and others feel?

UMWeb 2.0: UMW

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

And I think what sets UMW apart from many a school is quite simple: early on Mary Washington made a conscious choice to invest in people rather than technologies. That is the real difference in our environment, and when you think that we have a group of six people for a campus population of 4500, it quickly becomes clear why we’ve had such a great impact at UMW. But, I would be remiss here if I didn’t mention the simple fact that the UMW faculty (and students) made our success real and I, for one, have been riding on the shoulders of their hard work for over four years now. They refuse to stop innovating despite a 4/4 load and more committee work than any mortal human being should be exposed to. So while this is a celebration of DTLT—and rightfully so in many ways—I think the larger point is that our students and faculty have been willing to take this ride with us in order to realize some amazing possibilities for re-thinking the pedagogical paradigms through technology.

via bavatuesdays.com

A different platform, but the same passion for impacting teaching and learning with technology. Many kudos to my friends and colleagues at the University of Mary Washington.

Digital Strategy

/ Cole Camplese / 4 Comments

Around 2003 or 2004 I was invited to be part of a group of five Universities working with Apple called the Apple Digital Campus project. It was PSU, Duke, Missouri (their Journalism School), Stanford, and Michigan if I recall correctly. The goal of the program was to better understand what was happening in Higher Education and attempt to plug into emerging trends and ideas. I really remember working closely with the folks from Missouri and Duke on their podcasting projects — Duke with the iPod for all students and MOJO with their laptop and news production initiatives. We even had Carl Berger working with us to help each of us assess our projects. It was a great time and an opportunity that I am very thankful for.

The project I proposed was to look at digital expression as a form of academic evidence and to work to integrate the notions of digital media into a non media intensive curriculum (Information Sciences and Technology). I spent lots of hours writing and working on the white papers that kicked that off, first in the College of IST and later as a primary driver of my strategy here at ETS. The idea was that the notion of students being producers of digital media was on the rise and Universities needed to understand it and find ways to support digital expression in a systematic fashion.

Around this same I really got into the rise of social media, blogging, RSS, podcasting, and all the associated technologies. At the time I and a few friends and colleagues even hosted a weekly “From the Basement” podcast that allowed us to fully understand how it all worked and ultimately fit together. One of the lingering discoveries was how easy it was to move most of my creation and publishing online — and how that was ultimately a better way for my students to consume things. Still a driving thought for me today.

I loved the ideas we were throwing around back then and wanted to test them with a (much) larger audience. When I left the College of IST here at PSU one of my first initiatives in ETS was to bring a podcasting service to the University. Podcasts at Penn State was born along with the adoption of iTunes U. In hindsight, the Blogs at PSU should have been first out of the gate, but podcasting seemed like low hanging fruit. It still amazes me when I see numbers like the ones reported below by our Digital Commons team for the last two semesters from our public and private iTunes U space:

  • 11,197 Total podcast tracks (non-course/departmental and courses)
  • 629 unique iTunes U courses
  • 7,411 podcast course tracks
  • 108 new courses were created since April 2009 (when our new self provisioning toolset became active and we started tracking)
  • 3,786 Non-course podcast tracks (ex. departmental podcasts and podcast shows)

What has happened over the last four years has been quite an interesting story related to the continuation of that Apple Digital Campus work — we have quite literally worked to systematically support digital expression as a form of scholarship and have seen it move into a much more mainstream acceptance across the institution. Not only do we have University wide blogging and podcasting services, but our soon to be rebranded Media Commons (Digital Commons over the last two plus years) initiative has had big impact on the ecosystem.

The Media Commons is a standardized media lab environment that we have worked to install and support at 20 campus locations across the Commonwealth of PA, at three locations here at University Park, and with a couple College/discipline specific facilities scheduled to come online in the next six months or so. What goes on in these facilities is staggering … as I look at the final report for the Fall I am stunned by the increase in overall utilization across the board — faculty usage is up, student usage is up, and even staff usage is up. And at some locations it is really up. What is most interesting is how faculty are now coming to us for assistance in integrating digital media assignments — they are no longer just sending their students in to use the equipment, they are working with us to design activities that make sense within the context of their course. Then the students come and are supported at a much higher level because our staff is already familiar with the goals of the projects. I think this represents “systematic support for digital expression.”

As I sat down to write this post I was really only going to highlight the fact that podcasting at PSU continues to go strong … what emerged was an end of year reflection on a strategy that was laid out six or more years ago. I am very proud of all the people who have gotten behind these crazy ideas, have worked a ridiculous amount of time to make it real, and to colleagues across higher education and industry for helping me think through it all. It is amazing to me that a strategy conceived in conference rooms so many years ago has taken so long to come to fruition and at the same time has happened so quickly.

Goo.gl is Coming After Bit.ly

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

The new Goo.gl service is a direct attack on Bit.ly, a URL shortener developed in-house at Betaworks Studios, a New York technology incubator. Bit.ly has fast become the de facto link shortener on Twitter and many third-party Twitter clients, and the service even raised a $2 million round of venture financing from investors that included Alpha Tech Ventures along with Mitch Kapor, a software industry pioneer, and Ron Conway, an early Google investor.

via bits.blogs.nytimes.com

What I find really interesting is that the way so many of the people I follow online share content is changing so quickly. Long form blog posts have been replaced by short URLs and a bit of commentary — probably posted via a bookmarklet. We used to write big long posts with big long URLs to push people around. Now it seems the quick burst of information sharing is supported by a growing number of services that allow instant, one button publishing.

The fact that Google is getting into this game offers some interesting food for thought — if they can index and analyze more of the real time instant publishing on the web they can do more. What I will want to see is how this competes with bit.ly as it relates to the real time tracking I can do on my links — if I post anything from bit.ly I can watch the close to real time clicks. No idea if the google variety will do that. I will be curious to see how any of that will integrate with the rest of the google suite of tools I use on a daily basis. No idea quite yet.

Disruptive Technologies

/ Cole Camplese / 2 Comments

Scott McDonald and I are getting set to once again teach our CI597 Disruptive Technologies in Teaching and Learning course again. I love the reaction people give us when they ask us the title of the course. I think so many people walk around with a really negative view of how technology can be used to support learning — way too many folks think we are just shoving technology at students. I don’t think that could be any further from the truth in our course. Our goal is always to help students work to understand the affordances of technologies within the context of designing learning environments. We will once again press our students to explore notions of community, identity, and design as we ask them to participate in lots of mini experiments along the way.

We want them to see not the specific technologies but what can be accomplished along the path of teaching and learning with technology — we want them to recognize how many of the new environments we are all participating in online can create and support a much richer learning experience. We want them to sit up and take some risks and explore. I’ll be sharing more thoughts about where we are and what we are doing as the spring semester gets rolling.

What is Wrong with America

/ Cole Camplese / 1 Comment

Then I go, Look, Randall, you’re how old — about 50? He says he’s 49. I go, Okay, so you were born in 1960, so maybe you don’t remember Meet the Beatles. Or do you? Do you remember that album? Did they have record players out there in Arkansas?

via www.fakesteve.net

Well worth the read. Fake Steve is genius.