April 2007 Archives

Jeff Swain, ANGEL New Product Specialist, alerted me to the ANGEL v7.1 Town Hall meeting to be held on May 2nd here at Penn State University Park. Join Jeff for what will be a great opportunity to learn about the new ANGEL.

The Town Hall will provide support staff and others who work with ANGEL a chance to preview the new ANGEL interface either in person at University Park (101 Ag. Administration Building) or via Adobe Connect. This is an open discussion forum where in depth exploration of all the new tools and features will take place. Time will be available at the end of the seminar for questions and answers.

I woke up this morning to the typical deluge of new mail in my inbox ... mostly junk, but about a dozen legit from the last check late last night. In the mix was something I hadn't seen before -- an email for a comment on my shiny new PSU Blog that contained SPAM. If you haven't blogged before then you don't know or understand the joy associated with comment SPAM. This is one of the biggest reasons many bloggers just give up and move on.

I was hoping this wouldn't become a huge problem with the Blogs at Penn State toolset ... only time will tell if it does. I think we'll need to take a hard look at how we are protecting our University's blogs and better understand MovableType's SPAM protection. It turns out, that was only the first email the system sent me ... when I checked my comments area of the MT Dashboard, it showed it had auto-flagged about a dozen spam comments automagically! So far, that's pretty good.

Again, only time will tell how well it works when people actually discover this blog is here.

This past week I did two sessions at the ITS Event and Expo. From the reports I received there were well over 1,100 people who walked through the show floor. Both of my sessions focused on podcasting and blogging at Penn State ... they were only 25 minutes a piece, so I had to leave out the wiki portion of what I had planned to do. I have had several requests for the slides, so I have linked them here as a PDF ... enjoy and please feel free to leave comments.

Download the presentation ... BTW, sorry the file is so big (11 MB). I used a few high-resolution photos in it.

Just a quick pointer to something my friend D'Arcy Norman is doing for the Mac Learning Enterprise group ... this looks to be a great learning opportunity for anyone interested in web 2.0 in higher education space. He's teaming up with some of his old friends to present, Mac Learning Environments - (Many, Too Many?) Small Technologies Loosely Joined: Open, Connected, and Social. D'Arcy always makes this stuff sound so good. Will be worth tuning in for.

ETS Talk 21 is now available ... I'll let you decide where you get it from ... the page on the other end of this link will let you decide either the Podcasts at Penn State or Penn State on iTunes U. It was a fun session ... we had Dr. Scott McDonald from the College of Education join us here in the Studio.

I thought it would be a good idea to provide a link from this space over to a presentation I did for the all ITS Staff meeting that happened back in January of 2007. This was a Spring 2007 Podcasts at Penn State update ... instead of delivering it in Keynote, I decided to use the PSU Blog tool to do it. I was obviously interested in sharing the information about the podcasting project, but was also excited about showing a few novel uses of a blog. I think it worked fairly well.

Is it too hard? Take a look ...

I think at some level it is a little confusing, but that is what training is for.

It has now been several months since we first started using Twitter on a regular basis around our organization. Campus-wide adoption is strong and I am guessing it will grow even more after the level of conversation that went on around it at the TLT Symposium. I have said many times that Twitter has made me even more aware of how vibrant the educational technology community is here at PSU. It has been nice discovering the work so many people are doing.

Within ETS, the use is still high, but I've noticed it changing and evolving more and more recently. I am seeing people use it to communicate with each other more directly ... sort of reminds of the Web 2.0 way to shout over the cube walls. Sort of funny that the shouting either happens with people next door, across campus, or across the Continent. Very cool. Take for example the image below ... I am yelling at Brad who is across the hall, Hannah is yelling at Allan who is across campus, and D'Arcy is yelling to Brad who is across the Continent. Kinda cool.

With all the Twitter love that is going on, Obvious Corp just announced Twitter is spinning out to be its own company. The speed of the web ...

I have been working hard with both the teams in ETS and ASET to make this Blogs at Penn State thing a reality. We are getting very close now ... just today our friends in ASET moved the updated MovableType code and templates over to the production environment. With a little luck this time next we'll add our first round of pre-pilot users to the environment for extended testing. By June we hope to have 70 or so testers in here making it all go.

Now that it is getting fairly stable I am spending some time learning the MT platform and undersatnding how to customize my individual blogs. The Feed Widget Manager is very powerful and once you get it figured out it is realtively easy to use. The StyleCatcher tool makes changing themes very easy. This theme, for example, comes from a theme repository located at:

http://www.thestylearchive.com/browse/

All you have to do copy and paste that URL into the MT StyleCatcher and it auto loads all the available themes from that repsoitory. Very cool. I will try to link to useful sites that can help users extend and customize their own blogs. I am also using hte del.icio.us tag psublogging to store anything that seems related. Feel free to add sites to it as well.