One Post a Day

THON 2009

/ Cole Camplese / 5 Comments

On Sunday I was reminded of yet another reason why I think we owe it to our students to make things right. THON 2009 wrapped up yesterday after raising a staggering 7.49 million dollars to help fight cancer. The last hour is always so emotional and while we didn’t make it this year I was able to follow Twitter streams, blog posts, and the Collegian’s coverage. These are students who dance for 46 hours … 46! They do it “For the Kids” and they do it because they are all amazing.

We have this football coach here at Penn State named Joe Paterno who has seen it all — undefeated seasons, Heisman Trophy winner, National Championships, and Saturdays with 110,000 people screaming for he and his players. When he says it is his proudest moment at PSU in 58 years you have to feel humbled by the enormity of it all. I have to say, I was moved to tears and am so thankful to be a part of this community.

There are very few times in my life I’m speechless, but I am now. I wish the whole world could see and feel what’s in this room right now. Love and commitment and the dedication that just reeks from this room. In my 58 years at Penn State, I’ve never been more proud than right now.

Making Connections

/ Cole Camplese / 14 Comments

This is a rambling mess, but I’m not apologizing. You’ve been warned.

I’ve been thinking about the Twitter panel from Friday at the IST Grad Symposium and have come to see a couple of camps … one group looks at Twitter and says real connections don’t happen, that it is a waste of time, and an ego echo chamber. There is another group that sees it as full of opportunities to make real connections because it is simply a platform. There’s yet another who is like the first group, but they do participate. Seeing these three camps may be a generalization and I can deal with anyone disagreeing with me. I don’t really care too much which camp people fall into and I think I’ve arrived at a place where I’m not going to justify the technology. I’m just done with that argument — if you want to play, play. If you don’t, don’t.

What I am interested in is having opportunities to talk about the affordances and how they relate to problems of practice. I see challenges across the board in our classrooms and what I don’t see enough are people working to talk about them constructively. I hear a lot of people complain and never work to come together to do anything about them … I see way too many students sitting by themselves in classrooms not engaged, too many faculty teaching from PowerPoint, and too many administrators not pushing for reform. I’m not saying Twitter has anything to do with any of it, but don’t you think it is about time we start to really come together, make some connections, and radically do something about it all?

I can talk to the World in the blink of an eye and I know there are lots of smart people out there toiling away at what they do who are waking up to how bad it all really is. The big change here is that we can hear each other and we can change things if we want by coming together. And you know what, at the end of the day it may not be about changing the system at all, it may be about a new environment where connections happen and knowledge is shared openly. Maybe learning communities can happen without the corporate bullshit that much of our educational system is built on — I watch my first grader come home every night with nothing but worksheets from some curriculum book and I see students on campus doing nothing but reading from textbooks and taking electronic tests built from a publisher’s test bank. What kind of education is that? Why the hell do we let it happen?

I’m done with it. I’ve decided that I will work to make change happen and I’m inviting other people … anyone with a connection that wants to start a revolution knows where to find me.

Thoughts from the Twittersphere

/ Cole Camplese / 7 Comments

Yesterday I spent some time at the College of Information Sciences and Technology’s Graduate Symposium listening to Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, Twitter’s Chief Scientist give a keynote talk. I’ve written about Twitter for a couple of years now, but what is so interesting about Twitter these days is what is going on behind the scenes. While they are a relatively new company, they are really working hard to make sense of the river of data that flows through the 140 character text box they offer. Abdur was the co-founder of Summize where they used analytics to discover trends across the web … when Twitter bought it he moved over to start decoding massive trends brought about by Twitter’s user base. Later in the day I was then on a panel with him talking about Twitter to those assembled it was very interesting to hear his perspective on things and to see how he is leading the way in making sense out of all of those Twitter messages.

As an aside, one of the questions that seems to occupy lots of cycles is about Twitter’s financial model. I could tell during the question and answer period yesterday it is something that gets the folks at Twitter a little frustrated. I recently read an article in Wired where they make the claim that Twitter can go for quite some time without worrying about that and I am betting they are figuring it out behind closed doors on their own time.

One thing he spent a lot of time on was how they can pull content from peoples’ tweets and find real news trends. He referenced Mumbai several times as an example of where Twitter was able to bring the terrorist attacks to our attention even before the news. We saw it a few weeks ago with the flight that landed in the Hudson … pictures and reports came from the Twittersphere before the news had any clue. This isn’t new for people who have been paying attention, but it was a good push for me to revisit the capabilities of Twitter Search. It seems like everyone is discovering the power Twitter has to offer.

Being on the panel reminded me of how interesting the Twitter experiment Scott McDonald and I did in the CI 597C course we taught last year. I got to talking with Abdur about it and the research we had planned to do … talking about it all has made me even more interested in using Twitter to better understand what is going on in my classroom. When I did a google search on how far back tweets go, I came across Twistory. It is a site that uses the API to pull out the exact time and content of any given user’s Twitter account. What is really cool is that you can then use Google Calendar to subscribe to the output to visualize the data.

Seeing Twitter Conversations

Seeing Twitter Conversations

Now this is where it gets really interesting to me … you can put anyone’s name into it and add their twitter stream to the calendar. This set off an ah-ah moment for me. What it means is that in a class you could easily visualize the backchannel conversation between and among students. Imagine how rich the data can be now looking at what happens in class — are students passing twitter notes, digging deeper into the conversation, exchanges resources, etc? This is the first time I’ve been able to create a tangible paper trail of the interactions happening behind the scenes. I can’t wait until Spring 2010 when Scott and I teach our Disruptive Technologies course. We met this morning at the coffee shop to start talking about how we would integrate this and we’ve decided that while we are focusing on our themes of community, identity, and design that we’ll ask students to do research into how the community is coming together and evolving by mining Twitter data in this form (or another). I can’t wait to see how it goes down and to explore other ways to use Twitter and its API.

My Local Reading List

/ Cole Camplese / Leave a comment

Its actually Friday … is that real? It has been a long week, but it is coming to a close. Later today I am going to hopefully sit down and record an ETS Talk and then head off to the College of IST’s Graduate Symposium where I will join a panel focusing on microblogging. Fridays usually rock, so here’s to hoping this one lives up to its advance billing!

Since its the end of the week and so many people are taking part in our One Post a Day challenge at PSU, I thought I’d share my ETS reading list. This doesn’t expose the brilliant writing that goes on across PSU in general, just the brilliant writing that goes on within ETS. Since we’ve launched the Blogs at Penn State we’ve seen an explosion of local blogging — for all sorts of reasons. One thing I have to say is that I love seeing my RSS reader light up with new content from my own corner of the edu-blogosphere. I hope you take the time to dig through some of it and discover some amazing new blogs from some really smart and talented education technologists, instructional designers, programmers, marketing, and media people. I’ve used Google Reader to create a public feed of my ETS folder and I’d love for you to experience the collective intelligence of our organization.


Reflections on Academic Computing

/ Cole Camplese / 14 Comments

I know I’m not even remotely qualified to do the topic of reflecting on academic computing justice. I am a newbie at all this with less than a dozen years of experience in this environment. Quite frankly I didn’t really understand my role in higher education until I came to ETS as the director a little over three years ago. I didn’t realize that my work was done to support and promote the scholarship of the academy. I had this strange idea that it was to do what I wanted to do. I guess one thing that has kept me around is that (without even knowing it) somewhere along the line my interests aligned with some of the needs of my environment. Lots of this thinking is coming from participation in Project Bamboo, an initiative designed to think about what research support looks like in the Arts and Humanities. Its made me rethink how we can really engage with non-traditional computing disciplines in important ways.

With that said, I have been thinking very intensely about what it means to return to the notion of academic computing. Not too long ago my parent organization, Information Technology Services, was called the Center for Academic Computing — the CAC. I still hear faculty ask me if I work in the CAC … I think the change was made when some folks recognized that we had taken on the overall responsibility for running a bulk of the centralized information technology services — not just supporting academic computing. Computing used to happen in a lab or in small verticals where faculty were doing new and interesting things with their research. Computing is now just technology and it is everywhere. The verticals are gone … we live in a flat horizontal world on University campuses just like everyone else out there. Everywhere you turn technology is a part of it — and our organization (for the most part) provides the infrastructure for that to happen. We do services, and we do them well (IMO). That’s not to say we aren’t supporting academic computing, but it isn’t the overt assumption for us as a whole like our name once implied.

Even in ETS where our mission is to support the appropriate use of technology for teaching and learning we find ourselves in the services business. In many ways I think I want that to stop. I want to explore how our infrastructure is empowering a new stack, one focused on the production of knowledge. I know that sounds a bit crazy when you look around and see a staff built to do design and development … but when I stand back I see that we are positioned perfectly to extend our reach through a greater investment in supporting intellectual activities. That doesn’t mean we stop making things — on the contrary we may make more things, we just work to expose them at a deeper level to help others connect dots in their practice.

Last summer we invited Dr. Carla Zembal-Saul to be a resident Faculty Fellow. She came here to work with us to explore the Blogs at Penn State as an ePortfolio platform. What we are now left with is an amazingly deeper appreciation for her work, our work, and what the notion of reflective practice is really all about. Her engagement here at ETS was so successful it has pushed me to create a systematic Faculty Fellow program where we will hopefully be able to attract the best minds from across our campus who want to work with smart people doing interesting things. What we hope to do is align faculty scholarship to our areas of interest and expertise. We already have one slot filled for this summer and I am am working on two additional Fellowships that would be hopefully as transformative as Dr. Zembal-Saul’s.

What I am imagining is an environment that is built around innovative thought, faculty participation, and a continuous cycle of investigation. If I return to Carla for a second I can share how this works with a real example. We do Hot Teams to investigate emerging technologies and identify ways they can be used to support teaching, learning, and research. We introduce these technologies via pilots and get interested faculty involved with using them in their classrooms. In some cases faculty participate in our Engagement Projects and start to really do interesting things by redesigning learning environments. Some of these faculty push us and ask us really hard questions that require us to work really closely over a period of time — this can lead to a Fellowship. During the Fellowship we stretch to understand their research and they stretch to understand the affordances of the technology … we build something new together, test it, and share what we learn locally and nationally. In the case of Carla, we just released the Pack it Up feature for ePortfolios that allow students to submit large quantities of digital evidence from their online ePortfolio in a simple package for program review and general assessment offline. It never would have happened without the collaboration.

From Idea to Implementation

From Idea to Implementation

So as I reflect on the notion of academic computing I realize we are still participating as we were designed to, but perhaps aren’t thinking that way. I may have simply lost sight of how hard it is to put it all together, but when we attack it as a strategic direction some really important things tend to emerge. I am going to be gathering more of the stories about how we are doing really interesting work in support of scholarship and they will be exposed more widely over at the ETS site. For now I’m interested in how you see all this playing out … are we crazy? Is this is worthy of a get together to discuss? I am also thinking about how to invite those from the outside to be Affiliates of ETS, but that is a post for another day. Thoughts?

Browsing the News

/ Cole Camplese / 9 Comments

I get nearly all of my news online and have since the web really came alive for me about 15 years ago. I remember a feeling of power being able to not wait for the Weather on the 8’s or for scores to games. The web was the place where traditional news went to die for me. I think lots of people feel that way now.

Recently traditional newspapers in particular have felt the pain associated with not just the arrival of the web, but the masses’ emerging awareness of its amazing capabilities. With that said, I find it mildly amusing and very disturbing that the news industry did a lot to set itself up to have to deal with the reality of a sea of free and endlessly available content. Most of it produced by them.

One of the things I’ve never been able to understand really has nothing to do with the failing financial models. Why is it for all the great things we get from online news that newspapers have insisted on making their websites “look” like physical newspapers? Why must the first iteration of anything mimic the existing model? I’m not sure if they realize it or not but a web browser doesn’t support what a physical paper has to offer. Why not skip that same old and take advantage of the way the modern web can manage complex interfaces?

I haven’t seen much innovation in the news space online until recently.

My favorite online newspaper is the New York Times for lots of reasons. The first is their content — it works for me on so many levels. But at the end of the day one of the things I’ve fallen in love with lately is how much they are working to innovate online. I wrote a few months ago about Times People and I still can’t figure out why more people aren’t pointing to this little innovation as a glimpse into the the future of what we should see as the course management system in coming years. The ability to have a controllable social network that works together to build an active reading list so easily on the fly is quite interesting. Imagine that same interface as the LMS/CMS — allowing a faculty member or student to submit any evidence into the commons of the course. But as cool as it is, the Times People isn’t the only innovation that has me praising the spirit at the Times.

They recently introduced a new interface for browsing the paper in a really compelling way. It is yet another example of smart newspaper people rethinking the web as a platform to interact and engage with the news — something the rest of the industry needs to figure out if they are going to stay viable. The Times calls it the Article Skimmer and it is a really nice way to move around a paper. It actually feels a lot more like spreading a paper out and browsing the titles and picking what to read. I found a blog post from the NYT web team about the new view really interesting and it got me thinking about how different the web is than a giant piece of paper. Now, how it can integrate advertising in a compelling way will dictate its success as an interface over the long haul.

Article Skimmer

Article Skimmer

I think as we watch what happens in such a traditional place we need to be watching where they are going. When combine the above examples with the Time’s open APIs and free content the old school is looking a lot like what the new school should be all about. Shouldn’t we be thinking about how these kinds of interfaces should be built into the future of our learning management systems? Why do our LMS/CMS environments insist on living on the same old metaphors since they emerged? What does the open web teach us about how our environments need to support teaching and learning in a new era? Can we be as bold as the NYT?

Telling Stories and Lending a Hand

/ Cole Camplese / 21 Comments

Last week I was doing some reading and came across a post that made me very happy. It is about a new project to find ways to crowd source the notion of helping out in our local schools. Dave Eggers, the author of the wonderful book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, had a dream — he wanted to find ways to connect with and help local schools. He acted on that dream. Behold, Once Upon a School. I’ve been relatively vocal here about my recent dissatisfaction with schools in general. I’m now seeing the public school system at work and I am concerned for how it is all going to turn out for our kids. I’m in school myself and I am looking at all of it with a very critical eye … I have become very interested in helping to find ways to connect with and improve education — across the board.

I’m lucky in that my job allows me to feel good about what goes on in higher education. What I am concerned about is that most of our students aren’t getting to experience great learning environments every single day. They get some good ones and some less than perfect ones. I think it is even more spotty in the K-12 space — not because of the teachers, but because of the unfortunate realities of the system. I watched Dave’s presentation and fell in love with the idea of finding new ways to connect with my own local schools. I went to the site, put in my area of expertise, added my zip code, clicked submit and waited to see what classroom I could spend time in. There was the reality right in front of me, not a single classroom in State College. What could we be doing more of as a community to connect with teachers and schools? We’re a powerful bunch, what should be done?

Interviewed

/ Cole Camplese / 3 Comments

Last week I visited my colleague Ellysa Cahoy’s blog to find that she was participating in an interview meme. I usually avoid these things but given I am pushing to keep moving on the One Post a Day challenge, I figured having a little extra content wouldn’t kill me so I took Ellysa up on the offer. The other thing is that Ellysa is going to spend some time with us in ETS this Summer as one of our Faculty Fellows … never hurts to get on the good side of the innovators!

Here’s the part I don’t like about meme’s — the chain letter aspect Even so, I’ll follow the rules that were laid out to me. If you’d like to try this too, just follow these instructions:

  1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
  2. I’ll respond by emailing you five questions. (I get to pick the questions.)
  3. You’ll create a new post on your blog with the answers to the questions. Be sure you link back to the original post.
  4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
  5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

You’re designing the next killer iPhone app. What would it be?

I’d design an open platform for designing iPhone Apps for newbies. One thing I’ve noticed is the level of expertise needed to build native apps. If that is too much of a cop out then I’d build a location aware social network aggregator that would sync with my email, direct me to a place to get a good cup of tea, and tell me where to eat … maybe that app exists though!

Is traditional blogging dying a slow death at the hands of Facebook / Twitter updates?

I don’t think so, but I’d have to know what “traditional” blogging looks like … I think people are figuring out where and when to publish. The new tools that are making their way into the mainstream all seem to be built around short bursts of content or status updates. Blogging is a much more thoughtful process in my mind. When I only have something quick to say I post it to Twitter, but when I am really working through some ideas I tend to write blog posts. The other tools also seem so tied to a dedicated social network, while blogging seems much more open. I may be different than others, but I see all of these tools to be part of a larger eco-system … one that is built on personal publishing and online identity. With all that said, I just think we are seeing a shift in the amount of content being created because the micro post is now more acceptable in an environment like Twitter. We’ll have to wait and see where it all goes.

If you viewed your life as a piece of software, what version number would you be? (i.e., Cole 2.7)

That is a really tough question. I know that I am a different version than I was before I had children, but other than that is tough to say. My children have changed my perspective in ways that no other single event in my life has. So I am clearly not a 1.0 release. I doubt I’m 2.0, but would be willing to put my self somewhere in a 3.0 release schedule. I think before I went away to College I was a totally different person with a very limited world view. That, graduate school, working, and having kids have fundamentally changed me for the better. So all that to say I’m changed, but not done changing. I’m into my third decade on this planet and I hope to continue to grow and learn. I’ll say I’m 3.6 (for my age). Fair enough?

The mobile Web: Platform for new teaching and learning opportunities, or just a unique interface design format?

Its both, but the mobile web is here to stay. I think I’d skip over the mobile web and think more about connectedness in general. What I think is the big story is the ability to grab information from really anywhere. We’ll see new opportunities emerge because of ubiquitous nature of Internet access. I’m thinking about a device like the Amazon Kindle and while it doesn’t really shine as a web browsing appliance, its instant connectivity and access to the Amazon store is a big deal to me. I’d really like to see students with those devices being able to buy chapters of books at a time instead of paying way too much for textbooks that are rarely used. I think the mobile web is going change quite a bit and will provide us all with new things to explore.

What’s your favorite children’s book to share with your kids?

Hands down, the Giving Tree, by Shel Silverstein. Nothing better. I still try to read it to my son and daughter every time I pick a book. I’ve always loved it!