I spent the first half of this week at the ANGEL User Conference in Cincinnati.  

On the positive site, I got a chance to see where they are planning to go with the product in future versions.  For example, 7.4 should have a rubric tool (to help with grading subjective assignments), they are planning to integrate searching for and including materials like YouTube videos and Flickr images, and they are adding tools to help instructors grade discussion forum assignments.  I went to one pre-conference session where they showed their prototype for the rubric tool and I gave them some feedback on the design.

During the conference, I went to two sessions that were useful.  In both sessions, the presenters were talking about ways that they were integrating other tools such as RSS feeds and Google Apps into ANGEL.  I have a few things that I would like to try out -- I'm thinking there could be a way to have students submit feeds via a survey and have those feeds aggregated and displayed in ANGEL without instructor intervention.  They also showed ways to create extra tabs in ANGEL courses (either within one course or throughout the institution).

They also picked some nice resturaunts and organized group reservations -- a nice touch for people who aren't familiar with Cincinnati.  We ended up at Nicholson's (Scottish Tavern) the first night and Nada (Mexican) the second.  Both were very good.

On the negative side:

• no wireless access
• lack of advanced-topic sessions
• no "What's new in ANGEL 7.3" pre-conference training (which I always found to be useful)

They are sending out a survey this week.  I plan to give them this feedback and suggest that they hold more open discussion sessions around particular technical/administrative issues (policies, scalability, K-12, medical schools, etc...).

They also announced that the next ANGEL User Conferences would be in Chicago (2009) and Florida (2010).

For the past two years, we've had stickers at the Symposium.  In 2006, they were the "Blog This...Symposium" stickers.  Last year, we had moo card stickers and Twitter stickers (with a write-on wipe-off coating).  This year, we're going to encourage People Tagging.  Essentially, people can tag themselves with one or more of the 14-different stickers that we have that relate to some of the major topics of this year's Symposium.  We're getting these stickers from moo.com and they should be about 1-inch square.  You can see them below, but the actual images are 240x240 resolution, so these are scaled-down copies.

This idea is a mashup of Adobe icons and an activity that I saw at NMC last year.  Audrey did the designs, based on pallets from the web site colourlovers.com.  I love how they came out.  [Edit: Audrey and Dave worked together to create these pallets on their own.  I'm leaving in the colourlovers site though since it's a pretty interesting community.]

Audio and Video Tags

Online Communities

New Learning Environments

I started off with three blogs at Penn State.  One for my professional portfolio, one for Symposium thoughts, and one for my thoughts about educational technologies.  Now I've combined all of those into one place since they all relate to me and my work.  I'll probably add some thoughts from my courses as well, so if you start seeing posts about adult education and research methods, that's why.  I have to say, it's a relief to have everything in the same place!

Today, I met Chris Long and Kathleen Brown, two of the faculty who are being highlighted as part of our Symposium materials that highlight faculty success stories. I was struck by how enthusiastic and open both of them were to talking about their use of technology to enrich their teaching and research.

Kathleen said that she just published an article about students and community engagement as a way to retain students -- so you have a benefit to the students, community, and campus. She also said that her dissertation looked at teacher development when a school introduced laptops to their K-12 system and she is interested in faculty development issues. She may be a good person to work with if I explore training/development issues with tenure track faculty as part of my dissertation.

A student is on campus for the day and in between classes, she decides to listen to an interview that one of her professors did with an expert in her field to get some ideas for a term paper. So she pulls out her iPhone, goes to the iTunes store, finds her course in Penn State's iTunesU space, and downloads the interview.

I really hope that's how the new iTunes Store on the iPhone is going to work -- but it doesn't look that way. The posting from Apple talks about needing to be at a WiFi hot spot and touts the 6 million songs that will be available, but there is a LOT of other content in iTunes aside from music: TV shows, public podcasts, iTunesU content, movies, games, and ringtones are all available. Most of these can generate income and should be relatively simple file downloads. Okay, granted that downloading a 3+ hour movie to your iPhone may tax the phone and the WiFi network that you're on, but the rest of the content should be free game.

So if any of you know someone at Apple, please pass this along. The next time I'm stuck in an airport, walking into work, or out with friends, I'd like to be able to browse all kinds of content. Honestly, I don't listen to that much music these days, but I consume podcasts like mad and I'm willing to pay for a good show.

In the Fall of 2006, I was asked to investigate a tool called Studiocode. It's tool that lets you play a video and tag the video with keywords. Later, you can go back and quickly call up instances where those keywords applied or intersected. For example, if you're doing research on body language within classroom lectures, you could video record several class sessions and then create keywords like "nodding", "crossed arms", "leaning forward", "doodling", "writing on whiteboard", "student presentations", etc... Later, you could search through all of the video recordings and watch a movie of all cases where students were doodling while the instructor is writing on the whiteboard or when students are nodding during presentations by other students.

This has applications to any type of video-based analysis: animal behavior, athletic events, theatrical performances, weather pattern videos, group dynamics, focus groups, assembly line analysis, user interface testing, etc... If this sounds interesting, here are a few things you may want to check out:

• First, we had a small group of faculty and staff use Studiocode and write a whitepaper that summarizes what it can do and how it can be applied to an educational setting
• Next, Jamie Oberdick interviewed me and Carla Zembal-Saul (from the College of Education) so we could discuss what StudioCode can do and how Carla was using it
• Then, we had Ryan Peck from the Studiocode Business Group come to Penn State and give a training session
• Carla Zembal-Saul and Scott McDonald (College of Education) gave one presentation and John Messner (College of Engineering) and George Otto (Visualization Group) gave another presentation at the 2007 Teaching and Learning with Technology Symposium.
• As part of the ETS Talk Podcast, we made the official announcement that Penn State is getting a university-wide site license for Studiocode that will cover all university-owned macs.
• We recently created a Studiocode Forum on the Learning Design Community Hub, for discussion of Studiocode and its uses.

If you want to try this yourself, you can get a demo copy of Studiocode from Sportstec, the company the produces Studiocode. If you have a university-owned computer, you can also get a free license for Studiocode from the Penn State Computer Store. Just do a search for "Studiocode" and buy the license -- there is no cost. If you're a student or other person who does not have a university-owned Mac, you can go to one of our computer labs and try it there. As of September 12, 2007, it is installed and working in the ITS-operated Mac labs.

So there you have it...you're one-stop shopping for Studiocode resources. Additional updates will be posted to the Studiocode Forum in the Learning Design Community Hub.

Today, we were supposed to have our normal BS Breakfast meeting in the basement of Irvings. People showed up, but their wireless access was out again. So I thought I would see if I could access the Internet on my laptop using bluetooth and the Edge network on my iPhone. This really didn't work. I could connect my iPhone and laptop, but the connection doesn't actually do anything. The good news is that I was able to see my calendar on the iPhone and then write my weekly report in a text file for later import into Google Docs. [The iPhone can see Docs but not edit them yet.] I was also able to add two more sites to the ETS communities aggregator, although that would have been quicker if copy and paste was possible on the iPhone. Speaking of quicker, I'm getting much better with two-thumb typing...as this blog post indicates...all done from the iPhone.

So far, I've been to all of the ANGEL User Conferences. They're good opportunities to share what you're doing, unique issues, new tool requests, etc... with the people who make decisions about the future of ANGEL. In any case, this is the poster that Jeff Swain and I presented at the conference this year. It illustrates the idea of the ANGEL Community Hub that Jeff manages and how we integrate the hub into faculty and staff support.

I missed the original hoopla on Friday since I was at Hershey Park with relatives, and when I got back in town, the iPhones were sold out everywhere I could think to check. I was hoping someone in the office today would be one of the iPhone trial people, but no such luck. Even Brad (who got one on his own) was out. He did offer to come into the office to show me his though, which I thought was nice of him.

So I gave in and ordered an iPhone online. Hopefully, I should have it in a couple of days. Honestly, I've been waiting a very long time, looking for the right smartphone. I was almost sold on the Motorola Q when I heard about the iPhone rumors and decided to wait. So what the heck...I blew my gadget budget for the year, but I don't really care. I just hope that the few inconveniences that others have noted can be resolved with software patches.

[Someone sent this to me... it's actually a pretty good edit...and I can't deny that Psyduck will always have a place in my heart.]

Another interesting note: someone got this from my blog, edited it and sent it through IM, and in under 3 minutes, I made this post to my blog. I told the person who sent it to me that if I had to do this the old way, I wouldn't have bothered. Blog project = lower barriers to publishing. Most of my time spent making a new post has to do with the content instead of the technology or formatting. That's the way it should be.