http://blogs.psu.edu/2010/01/quickpost-add-multiple-users-a.html
This morning, the software that powers Blogs At Penn State was upgraded. This upgrade will provide better stability and performance going forward and should result in less downtime. Other changes to Blogs at Penn State are outlined below.
I know this happened a couple of weeks ago, but I thought it was worth sharing these upgrades ... the new bookmarklet is very cool and the ability to batch add rosters is a huge step forward.
I've been looking over the 2009 FACAC Student Survey results and have some thoughts I'd like to capture.
The first thing I notice is how our new services are catching on -- and quickly. If you look at the services students report using, the top ones are ANGEL, eLion, Portal, and Wireless. All of these are things I expected to be at the top of the list. What I was surprised about is how services like ePortfolio (16%), Blogs (10%), Podcasting (7%), and Digital Commons (6%) are being used. Sort of amazing to me as these had very low utilization in the last survey two years ago. Even the Educational Gaming Commons checked in at nearly 2%.
One area we are really lagging in is mobile access. We've not addressed the intense rise in ownership of web enabled mobile devices -- Blackberries and iPhones represent about 20% of that space. We need to be thinking more strategically about how we address these devices.
Facebook continues to be a highly used social network and I think we'll be finally taking another stab at using it for access to services. What is encouraging is that students are embracing Twitter (16%) and Youtube in a big way. These things offer new opportunities for engagement in and out of the classroom and it gives us a leg to stand on when talking to faculty.
Speaking of social networking, 82% report being active on FB. 68% use it to share photos. 16% upload and share videos on Youtube. 14% have an online photo account, although we don't with whom.
Laptop ownership continues to be strong, with 83% of students saying they own one. How do we work to make it more attractive for faculty to take advantage of these devices in their classes? I am guessing some serious thinking about how blogs, youtube, and twitter can be used inside the classroom would help. I am hoping we can split some numbers out with regard to how they use these laptops -- we have facebook and twitter use lumped together and no matter how much I begged we may not have asked these as separate items. It is really important to not lump the social networks together because they each offer such radically different opportunities. At any rate, 80% of laptop owners say they use them to access FB/Twitter. 53% of laptop owners report playing games on them. Three other items here that is good to see, but are also huge opportunities are that 24% say they edit video on them, 23% take notes, and 14% blog. Huge opportunities here!
I was stunned that 63% of our students own a digital camera that isn't in a cell phone. That is a huge number as far as I am concerned. I was also surprised that 58% claim owning a palm sized digital video camera ... perhaps many of them are counting their digital cameras with video capabilities, but I was surprised to see that.
So those are some rapid fire thoughts ... not much analysis here, but some things that jumped out at me.
I see the embedded Wave below ... do other people? Sounds like only people who are logged into Wave can see it. I can actually edit it right here. I can't figure out how to make the wave public and I think that might make it appear for all. You should see a wave inline below that looks like what is in this screenshot.
Update: I unpublished the Wave.
A little video some of the people in TLT made recently.
Just seeing if the geo tagging system is working yet. Please ignore.
With a lot of the H1N1 talk rumbling around campus one of the work from a distance resources that we should know about is PSU's own implementation of the secure Jabber IM service. It is really easy to set up and use with popular IM clients on both Macs and Windows. It offers a secure and PSU authenticated way to IM. The ITS knowledge base has been updated with instructions on how to get it all setup. It is a smart and secure way to have PSU conversations.
Something I've known for a few weeks that just went live today -- our personal webspaces have been increased to a maximum of 10 GB per user. That means that in combination with your Penn State Blog and your personal space, you can store and manage all sorts of things. One thing that is interesting to me is that more people are not using their PSU Blogs to act as a simple personal repository. Files can be easily uploaded that become instantly searchable with a few clicks. I think the 10 GB limit is an amazing move for us and one that speaks volumes about how committed we are to providing services that match the pedagogical conversations we are having. If you are a PSU person, just jump over to work.psu.edu and dial up your quota.
Kudos to the people at Applied Information Technology!
I'm listening to Justin Elliott talk about the changes to the University's streaming server environment and am really excited about a few changes. Clearly what we all measure the video upload/sharing experience with YouTube ... we don't and really can't replicate that functionality, but we can get closer. One big thing his team has added are public videos with embed codes. That is important as it makes it YouTube easy to add video to your blog. Below is an example of an old QTS version of a talk Kyle Peck gave several years ago, but embedded here.
There are so many other things that are being done, including integrating Kaltura into the Blogs, but I thought I would at least share the embed code. Why do we even worry about this? We traditionally ran the QTSS to allow faculty to restrict access to content that may be covered under copyright. The moves going forward will change the way we allow everyone at PSU to work video into their digital lives online.
I posted my thoughts on the OpenEd 09 conference over at my personal blog. It is long, but I tried to capture the energy and passion I witnessed ... If you are interested, please jump over and read it. The event was mind bending on so many levels, it is hard to put into words.
