Jeff Swain and I went to the Dairy and Animal Science faculty meeting a few weeks before the transition from ANGEL 6.3 to 7.1. We gave this presentation so the faculty would understand what changes were in store and where their commonly used tools were located in the new version. They were kind enough to share their recording of the session with us.
May 2007 Archives
Cole and I had the chance to discuss the venue. The Business Building may be an option for the future, but we decided to keep it at the Penn Stater again since there was such a positive response from the attendees. Plus the Penn Stater has the staff necessary to support our event -- we're already stretched thin with things like introductions, recordings, demonstrations, technical support, and registration. Everyone in ETS and several other people from TLT (parent org) and ITS (grandparent org) were tapped to lend a hand.
That decision settles another question about "when". It looks like the 2008 Symposium will be the weekend of March 28-30. My next step will be roughing out a timeline, budget, theme, etc... with the help of my core operations crew. The idea of creating some images to promote the 2008 Symposium came up at the management team retreat today and I got excited...that's a clear indication that I'm ready to jump into next year's planning cycle with both feet.
In October of 2006, 11 people from ETS went to the CIC Learning Technologies Conference in Minneapolis, MN. At the conference, four of us (Chris Millet, Gary Chinn, Tom Davis, and myself) gave a presentation on the Hot Team process that ETS has been working on. Essentially, this is a small group of people who spend a few hours over the course of a 3-4 weeks looking at a new technology and how it can be applied to the teaching/learning/research process. We got a very positive response from the other CIC institutions present and many representatives said that they would like to try something along similar lines at their university.
We recorded the audio and Chris synced it with our Keynote presentation as an enhanced audio file if you want to see it. We also have it as part of the ETS Talk feed in iTunes.
After starting at ETS, one of my first projects was to create a guide for faculty who are new to using videoconferencing to run their courses. Plenty of technical guides exist, but I was asked to create something to address pedagogy. So I did some reading and asked a lot of questions of people who have videoconferencing experience. The end result was the "Faculty Guide to Teaching through Videoconferencing".
The cool thing is that since this has gone on the Web, I've gotten requests from other colleges and universities to use it. We license this under the Penn State Commons agreement, so (in general), as long as it's used for non-commercial purposes and it's attributed to the people who wrote it, other people and institutions can use it.
In the summer of 1997, having decided that I wanted to move back to the University Park campus, I started looking through the Penn State job postings and saw a posting for a position with the World Campus. I think the title at the time was "Web Specialist" -- someone who knew their way around a web server, HTML, PERL, and course management systems. That was a lot like what I was doing toward the end of my time at Hazleton, so I applied for and got the job.
It was a bit confusing at first because I was officially working for our Information Technology Services group (known as the Center for Academic Computing at the time), but I was permanently assigned to the World Campus.
Shortly after I started at World Campus, we adopted WebCT as our course management system and we also had a program (Noise Control Engineering) that ran on a First Class server. I was the main administrator on those systems and I worked with the Instructional Designers to figure out the best tool for each aspect of teaching an online course (content delivery, discussion, handling assignments, etc...). Since WebCT was written in PERL then and had a simple file system, I wrote some tools that enhanced the course environment, like an assignment drop box, peer evaluation system, and student home page generator. We fed these ideas back to WebCT in the hopes that they would incorporate them into their next software release.
When we started offering courses online in January 1998, I worked directly with instructional designers and faculty to support the students. A couple of years later, we had a functioning help desk in place, but I continued to act as their backup, to work on unusual troubleshooting issues.
In 1999, I became the Instructional Technology Manager for the Instructional Design and Development group in the World Campus. I branched out into more project management and consulting roles, like hiring students to do low-end web development, Y2K planning, transitioning from one file system to another, batch updates, reusable content, communication and process protocols, compliance with university computing policies, accessibility issues, handling bandwidth limitations, planning for backups and disaster recovery, server upgrades, maintenance outages, issue tracking and resolution, converting from WebCT to ANGEL, working with the ANGEL Operations and ANGEL Administration groups, etc...
By 2005-2006, my interests were in social computing/Web 2.0 applications (e.g. blogs, wikis, podcasting, Writely, Gliffy). Brad Kozlek and I set up the ID&D Change Blog so staff could share new discoveries and best practices in the open. Brad, Stevie Rocco, and I set up the Beta Brownbags (aka "Techie Lunches") so we could set aside time to talk about new technologies and their applications to teaching and learning.
When I left the World Campus in 2006, we had a group of five full-time Instructional Technologists and two part-time ITs. They were creating an Assistant Director position to replace my position, but I opted to leave at that point since things at my official home unit (ETS) had changed to focus on university-wide projects, many of which were related to social computing. They had an opening for an Education Technology Manager that I couldn't resist, so I moved over and I'm glad that I did.
In late 1993, I found out that they were moving my position at the Computer Learning Center from full-time to part-time and I wanted to stay full-time, so I started looking around. I found a job posting for someone to run the computer labs and help support faculty and staff computers at the Hazleton Campus.
I had a lot of fun working there: hiring students workers; ripping apart broken computers; trying to fix the token ring network (again); setting up the first FTP and Web servers; going through the change to Windows95; moving the main lab to the library; learning about hubs and routers and modem banks; working 14 hour days; and running workshops on hand-coding HTML. Ah, the life of a young nerd-in-training.
Eventually, I became part of a project that put Instructional Design Specialists at many of the smaller campuses around Penn State. That meant that I could finally hire another person to be my back-up person instead of having to run the campus myself (and never really being able to take vacation time). So I worked with faculty on some projects like experimenting with CU-SeeMe, VRML, Hypercard, and Authorware. I taught myself PERL and used that to build some simple simulations (like an Ideal-Gas model). It's probably still floating around the web somewhere.
But, my social life in Hazleton left a LOT to be desired and I wanted to get my master's degree, so after a car accident and a long solo-hike that helped to clear my head, I decided to move back to the University Park Campus. Coincidentally, that's when the World Campus was hiring a programmer to manage their course management systems (WebCT and FirstClass) and write some custom scripts.
I can't believe that I've been working for Penn State full-time for nearly 15 years now (July 1992). In my first job, I worked for the Learning Center (now "University Learning Resource Centers") running the Computer Learning Center -- which is a computer lab on the second floor of Boucke Building where people could drop in for one-on-one help using a computer. I actually started there in 1989 I think -- first as an economics and engineering mechanics, but I drifted over the the computer-tutoring side of things before being asked to run the center in 1992 (right after getting my bachelor's degree and realizing that I really didn't want to be an industrial engineer).
Most people using the center needed occasional help with writing a paper, creating a spreadsheet, graphing data, or making simple drawings. In 1992, the people using PCs (aka "IBM compatibles") were using DOS programs, PSUVM, and WordPerfect. The Mac side was more interesting to me. We had a bunch of SE/30's (little black and white toasters) and eventually some color models. People needed help with Word, Excel, CricketGraph, MacDraw, and a few other applications. In addition to the drop-in help, I ran scheduled workshops, hired and managed a group of 6-7 students, and helped the other Learning Center staff with their computer needs. It was a nice mix of computer literacy, teaching, and customer service.
The 2007 Symposium isn't really over...we have the media and we're releasing it over time to keep the interest going. But we have switched our focus to the 2008 Symposium already. The biggest questions now are when and where.
Where would seem obvious: the change of venue to the Penn Stater Conference Center Hotel was very well received. It changed the feeling of the Symposium to a more professional event. The parking is better than anywhere on campus. The food and beverage service throughout the day kept people fed and happy. However, there are two problems. First, the network connectivity there leaves much to be desired. We would have to work with them to make sure that they are ready for us next year. The other problem is the availability of dates. We're penciled in for the last weekend in March -- it was the only time we could get.
So when and where? Maybe the Penn Stater. Maybe the Business Building. I shy away from other classroom buildings, but the Business Building looks more like corporate headquarters. That could work and provide nice facilities, a good network, and maintain the professional feel. Parking would be a problem and we would have to do more with catering than boxed lunches. We could use the lobby for the main meetings (keynote, lunch, closing, etc...) plus it would get the business faculty involved, which has been a missing piece. Planning an event there is an unknown for me...what's involved, do they have event coordinators, etc... Would it be significantly cheaper, or would we need to invest a lot of our own staff to make up for a non-conference facility? The lighting is good in there (the Penn Stater can be dim) and we know that the classrooms have computers and projectors already.
So I think we should explore that option, especially if it means that we have more control over dates.