May 2007 Archives

As many people on and around campus knows, PSU has been involved in a pilot implementation of Apple's iTunes U service for about a year. Apple did something very cool today -- they opened a public iTunes U directory. No need to repeat myself, I already blogged this over at my other blog ... take a peek at my post, iTunes U and Discoverability

Not sure why I found this so funny, but I am guessing it has to do with the relative explosion of blogging going on around campus. There is something to enabling a direct conversation with your customers, but I think this boss has it a little wrong. Just my two cents, but this is too funny.

Sort of speaks to me in a strange way. With all my recent chatter related to identity it got me thinking more about just how easy it is to craft yourself in the online space. Not that I have a team of bloggers working behind the scenes on this or my other online spaces, but it strikes me as another reminder that it is easy for anyone to hide behind a transparency mask ... it makes you wonder if the company blog is really the company blog.

This post from GigaOM In Africa,"Money not necessary for mobile banking" is a perfect example of how people will use technology in novel ways to solve real problems. From what the article says, prepaid cell airtime is quickly becoming the currency of trade in Africa -- another sign that mobility is on course to change everything -- in this case banking, commerce, and trade. It is very interesting.

Necessity, they say is the mother of invention. It couldn’t be more true in case of Africa, where pre-paid airtime is fast becoming the ‘virtual’ currency for Pan-African trade, overcoming conventional currency exchange and lack of banking infrastructure. It started out as phone users in Nigeria, especially in the rural areas trading minutes, but then the transactions took a mercantile trend.

A little positive feedback every now and then makes a body feel good. In this case, Mike Briggs from Sun had some nice things to say about the ETS Talk Podcast over at his offical Sun blog ... This followed up a comment he sent to the ETS Talk email line yesterday ... if you don't mind the shameless self promotion take a peek at his post over at his blog, OneStop Secret Sauce. Anyone else listening to the podcast?

I was expecting this to be a small group meeting and more of an open discussion, but at the last minute it turned into a more formal presentation. I used a mash-up of slides from Maricopa and my standard Web 2.0 in the Higher Education Enterprise talk I've given several dozen times to produce a talk related to Platforms for Digital Expression at Penn State. I feel like the talk is finally turning into something that creates both interest and value. I know I had a great time talking to that group.

It was a well attended session that lasted about an hour. There was some time left over for question and answer at the end that I think helped make a difference. I enjoyed the time spent doing this. An archive of the talk is available via Media Site Live. Enjoy and please let me know what you think!

Slides are attached as a PDF. Download file.

When I was the Director of the IST Solutions Institute one of my staff members was Bart Pursel. Bart drove most of us crazy with his insistence that games were some of the best learning tools available. It isn't that we didn't beleive him -- there is the whole game theory thing -- it was that we had a hard time thinking of how we could implement this stuff. Bart was working on virtual worlds well before many of us could get our heads wrapped around it. He forged relationships with both There and Second Life and even ran a gaming course during the PA Governor's School for Information Technology.

Running through my feeds today, I stumbled across his post, Three Levels of Virtual Worlds in which he places a little context around all the virtual worlds spaces. For a little extra background, it may be worth a look. Understanding all of this becomes even more important as ETS gets set to really extend our research and work in the serious games space.

This was a good week with lots of interesting things going on. I've tried to capture the highlights here and am posting this a day early.

Monday, 5/21/2007

Campus IT Director's Meeting

I attended the PSU Campus IT Director's Meeting to discuss the Blogs at PSU and Digital Commons projects. I spent about 20 minutes sharing updates on both projects. The DC project spurred quite a bit of discussion and lots of interest. I was surprised that the blog project did not generate as much discussion as I expected. Several of the IT directors emailed me immediately following the meeting expressing interest. All in all, it was a very successful use of time. Download a PDF of the slides.

PSU Online Steering Committee

I was asked to attend this meeting to replace John Harwood. I am a member of the steering committee that reports up to this group. It was interesting to see the level at which this group operated. As a matter of fact it was an eye opening experience and one that I truly appreciated. I'm not sure what I can share from this meeting...

Tuesday, 5/22/2007

ETS Leadership Retreat

The ETS Leadership group took a half day retreat to discuss various organizational topics. The Digital Commons project was a primary focus as was the plans around Studio 204 and the Faculty Multimedia Center -- the big question there is how do we begin to re-brand these two separate spaces under the Digital Commons name. We spent time talking specifically about the processes and approaches we would use to move from concept to implementation related to the DC at the campuses.

We discussed ongoing communication challenges -- essentially how do we better keep our staff and audiences informed about what we are up to. Several ideas were discussed ... providing more opportunities for Q&A at staff meetings, inviting new faces to meetings, and to take time to openly discuss the importance of keeping blogs up to date. We also revisited staff portfolios via their blogs ... we decided to bring it to the group and open it up for further conversation -- there are still questions that cannot be effectively answer.

Space, summer projects, and emerging opportunities were also discussed. We talked about much more that would be premature to share here. If there are additional questions, please either email me or come visit F2F and we can discuss.

Chalk and Wire Overview

I was able to attend a meeting between the College of Education and folks from Chalk and Wire (CW). CW is a web-based assessment tool set designed as an ePortfolio system that the CoE is investigating for College-wide assessment. I wasn't a part of the entire day, but what from what I understand this is designed to help the College manage progress as it relates to accreditation. This is not an ePortfolio system like the ones we are looking at per say, it is designed to manage College level performance. From what I was able to observe it is a very powerful system.

Students are a part of the process in that they place objects in the system for assessment. Additionally students receive feedback throughout the process and can download a "clean" portfolio at the end of four years. A clean portfolio is one without assessment. Students create objects that align to known rubrics that they upload into the system. Faculty then assess these objects based on the determined rubrics.

Just some observations:

• The tool is built on a .Net framework written as web services. There are exposed APIs that we could write to do interesting and useful things with the data.
  
• They find that Institutions want to include all sorts of data into their assessment, but then scale back to tie more closely with the outcomes they are interested in.
  
• Looks like it is a hosted solution that is also available as a stand alone self-managed install ... I'm not sure what CoE has in mind.
  
• Authentication can happen in multiple ways -- they say they can integrate with PSU authentication or they can provide their own authentication system. They aren't sure about shib ... but they do kerberos and would work with us on integration.
  
• CW stores all the data that students upload "forever" ... students can only access their materials while they own an active subscription. All assessment data is hosted in this same way.
  

Much more that would be inappropriate to share here. If there are additional questions, please either email me or come visit F2F and we can discuss.

Wednesday, 5/23/2007

Social Computing Presentation to the PSU Libraries

I was expecting this to be a small group meeting and more of an open discussion, but at the last minute it turned into a more formal presentation. I used a mash-up of slides from Maricopa and my standard Web 2.0 in the Higher Education Enterprise talk I've given several dozen times to produce a talk related to Platforms for Digital Expression at Penn State.

It was a well attended session that lasted about an hour. There was some time left over for question and answer at the end that I think helped make a difference. I enjoyed the time spent doing this. An archive of the talk is available via Media Site Live.

All ETS Staff Meeting

Standard monthly all ETS Staff meeting. Basic agenda included brief updates on positions, the Digital Commons project, Studio 204, summer conferences, the Blogs at PSU, and a few other items. Brett Bixler did a good 10-15 minute demo of Second Life and we talked a bit about how we are going to grow the serious gaming program. We used the last 15 minutes to do an open Q&A as well. I have to say that I enjoyed the open Q&A time very much.

Thursday, 5/24/2007

IST Solutions Institute

I spent well over an hour and a half with Brian Smith, new Director of the IST Solutions Institute to discuss new opportunities for engagement. I used to be the Director there, so seeing someone like Brian move into that role has me very excited. I am particularly interested in his perspective that the Institute needs to think about innovation and doing good work first. I think our relationship will grow into something that will provide ETS and the College of IST with real value.

Friday, 5/25/2007

ETS Talk 26

Like all Friday's we have an ETS Talk planned. I think this week we are going to discuss some ideas we have related to how we join a number of the new tools we've been working on so faculty can more easily integrate them into their classes. We've been tossing around the idea of a dashboard for deciding when it might be smart to use a blog or podcasts and a simple one button setup option for them. We'll have to wait and see how the podcast turns out. When it is ready I will link it from here.

Trying to get my head wrapped around this one ... Facebook Getting Spacey? Discusses the posibility that the FB is heading down new paths. FB as a platform could be interesting. When you have that many eyes on pages all sorts of stuff can happen.

We have been looking for ways to really take advantage of the Blogs at Penn State tool set the last few weeks. Now that many of the folks in ETS are blogging I wanted a way to pull all the content together in a very simple way. Google Reader gives you all the power you need to accomplish this META Blog scenario. I posted at length over at my other blog this morning, but also wanted to point to it from here. Thoughts?

I did a quick screen cast showing how it all works.

I forgot to put this together this week -- just too busy to get to it or something I am guessing. At any rate, I am trying to keep a running list of the things I am spending time on via these weekly updates. This week was a short one for me as I was in Arizona giving a talk as the featured speaker at the Maricopa College Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference. I wrote some thoughts down about it over at my other blog.

Meetings for the Week

I only attended four formal meetings this week. Not as many as usual, but Monday through Wednesday I was out of the office on travel. Speaking of travel, it never ceases to amaze me just how hard it has become to get from here to anywhere and back. At any rate, that ended up putting a big dent in the week. Thursday I focused the morning on catching up. Friday was my standing day to think and work on projects of interest. Some highlights ...

Tuesday May 15, 2007
Maricopa College Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference

I did two talks at the conference. The first was a breakout session and the second was the featured talk -- that took place over the lunch hour. Both went well, with the featured talk seeming more high energy and focused. It is the first time in a while that I have given a talk like that. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Thursday May 17, 2007
Penn State Online Coordinating Council Meeting

I attended the Penn State Online Coordinating Council Meeting Thursday afternoon ... the meeting focused on updates from the subcommittees creating the strategic plan for the implementation of Penn State Online. I was added to two subcommittees as well -- one looking at how to best share the message of the initiative and the other looking at repositories and open courseware/resources models. Both will provide me with a chance to work with and learn from some new people. A very productive meeting.

Friday May 18,2007
ETS Talk Podcast Number 25

Scott McDonald joined us for the 25th episode of ETS Talk. We spent quite a bit of time on gaming theory and a handful of other topics. I haven't listened to it yet so I'm not sure how it turned out. I think the group enjoyed doing it ... always nice to hang out and talk to the podcast crew. We need to find ways to get some other guests to come on the podcast. If you'd like to be a guest, email us or call the ETS Talk Hotline at 814-806-1855.

Being up at 3 AM to catch an early flight does lead to some interesting discoveries ... hitting the RSS this monring pointed me to a page on Sun's webiste showing off a virtual world for Intranets ... At first I thought it was crazy until it hit me that much of a workforce is mobile these days and have very little connection to the office. Could a VW pull employees into it to share documents, get work done, and collaborate? Seems completely plausible.

Not matter what the initial reaction is, their site is worth a look ... take a peek at MPK20: Sun's Virtual Workplace.

As we are getting closer to really diving head first into the Serious Games space here at ETS, I am attempting to keep up with the numner of schools and organization shifting high energy into Second Life. Brett Bixler maintains an excellent blog and community for us where he typically keeps all this stuff together. Today I came across The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: San Jose State Library Celebrates Opening in Virtual World and thought it was worth a link.

What is more powerful than a massive location aware social network? Why its the FaceBook Marketplace. Looks like everyone's favorite campus hang out spot is getting into the clasified ads business -- for free. Don't be fooled, there is a business model in there. If you jump over to the NY Times you can read all the details in the piece, Facebook to Offer Free Classifieds. From the article ...

Facebook, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is calling the new service Marketplace and plans to introduce it on Friday. It will allow users to create classified listings in four categories: housing; jobs; for sale, where users can list things like concert tickets and used bikes; and “other,” a catch-all that could include things like solicitations for rides home for the holidays.

This creates an interesting campus market place that could drive even more traffic through the FB. I have to say I think I know where I am going to be placing my ads to sell some of that old stuff I have. If you think about it, where else could I go to really reach this demographic? The University newspaper, maybe. A flyer to hang on a classroom wall, eh. But with this, the FB folks have pegged the three things you need to do business -- location, location, loaction ... oh, and a built in network of connected, trusted, co-located friends doesn't hurt either. This is worth watching. More over at Learning and Innovation ...

I am not sure if this was helpful last week, but I got some milage out of it -- if only to have a better grasp on the time spent on things.

Meetings for the Week

I only attended seven formal meetings this week. Not as many as usual, but Monday was dominated by the TLT Strategic Planning Retreat and I was out with a stomach bug on Tuesday and Wednesday. That ended up putting a big dent in the week. Thursday I focused a ton of time on catching up and getting some new projects planned. Friday was my standing day to think and work on projects of interest. Some highlights ...

Monday May 7, 2007
TLT Strategic Planning Retreat

This was a half day retreat. Not much I can/should say about this other than it is the first of several that will happen once a month over the course of this year. It is crucial for us all to get out of the office and take stock in where we are headed. From the meeting I wrote a few small project proposals and we spent a great deal of time talking about the coming year.

Thursday May 10, 2007

eEducation Council

One of the better eEd meetings I have been to in recent memory ... Brett Bixler led a discussion related to Second Life and the conversation was rich. I enjoyed hearing the other members' perspectives on the whole virtual world concept. I provided an overview of the Digital Commons project and we discussed some strategies for aligning the proposed media design studios with curricular goals. All in all a good meeting.

SemReg/LMS Meeting

I also met with John Harwood and Lisa Lacombe, Director of Training Services to discuss the path forward with their Seminar Registration system. We talked about several scenarios, but it appears as though we will continue development on the current version to kill a last round of bugs and then begin working on the new version. We will be moving the whole toolset to the Zope/Plone environment as soon as TS has completed a scope and requirements document. I suspect that within a month or so we should be moving forward with the new version.

Like I said, a short week. Very manageable ... but it did leave me behind the eight ball on several things due to being out.

Earlier this week we started opening up the Blogs at Penn State project to the first round of external pilot testers ... there were about a dozen or so of us using it for the last six months or so, but this was the first group of "real" people. This past week I also installed the Google Analytics code into my primary blog here as well, just to get a feel for how many people were looking at it. The thing about where the project is right now is that we don't have a Blogs at Penn State directory to make discovering blogs easy. You essentially have to know the userid of the person you are trying to check out ... we're thinking about how we can (or should) make blogs more discoverable.

Here is the dashboard from my Google Analytics home page ... not much traffic and nothing like my Learning and Innovation blog, but this surprised me. I spent a little time digging through the statistics as well and was surprised to see how people were finding me. I am going to be watching what this means to me over time ... I am wondering if more people will stumble upon this site. Time will tell.

Just a quick pointer to a very interesting WordPress blog extension, the Next Of Kin Plugin. This won't work here on the Blogs at Penn State, but for my other blog this might be a worthwhile install. If something happens to me, after a pre-determined amount of time it will kick a message to a person I designate letting them know my last wishes. I have to say it is novel, but it also raises some very interesting questions about life and web permanence. This will require some thought.

Today we sat down and recorded ETS Talk 23 ... in this episode we talk all about the just announced and released Blogs at Penn State toolset. We are all really excited about this one! I think the podcast is a good one as well ... jump over to the Podcasts at Penn State space and check it out!

I am thinking about trying something new here ... finding time to (when I can) write up weekly reviews of the stuff going on. This will be mostly sanitized, but there may be some comments or thoughts that could spur a conversation. I have no idea if I should be doing this or if it makes sense ... or if I'll keep it up for that matter. Every week is different and that means the number of meetings, emails, phone calls, etc will vary greatly vary week to week. I should also add that at this time, this is for me -- so if it is boring or annoying just skip it.

Meetings for the Week

I had 19 formal meetings this week all over campus ... I did find time to meet informally with a handful of colleagues to discuss all sorts of things. Typically meetings last an hour, but this week I had a few that were longer than that. I will not go into detail at each as that would be more annoying than helpful ... I won't, for example, discuss my standing Monday morning collection of meetings or my 1 on 1 meetings with my direct reports (if I do it is only to highlight very specific things). There were a few highlights this week that I'd like to share.

One thing of great interest that I can't classify as a meeting, but is worth noting ... the Blogs at Penn State project is opening the pilot doors this week. We invited about 60 people into the first round of the public pilot. We are thinking we will let about 25 people in a week for the next several weeks as we move towards production. So far, so good!

Monday, April 30, 2007 12:30-2:00
College of Education Presentation

I was lucky enough on Monday to talk to a group of faculty (and a few grad students) from the PSU College of Education. Amazing hour and a half ... one that left me feeling very good about the relationships we are developing there. In general I would classify the faculty there as both innovative and very interested in the use of technology to appropriately enhance the learning environment. I should have written about this as soon as it was over, but I didn't.

The talk was really focusing on the infrastructure we have been trying to put into place to support digital expression. I spent time on everything from trends and key statistics we are collecting our campus, to FaceBook, Net Generation expectations, to what we are doing to support it all. I spent quite a bit of time actually showing faculty the insides of both Penn State on iTunes U and the Blogs at Penn State toolset. There were great conversations related to how one might integrate these things into their classroom experiences.

Slides are available as a PDF.

Tuesday May 1, 2007
Meeting with Librarians to Discuss Web 2.0 in the Library

This was an eye-opener for me on a whole bunch of levels. I got to sit and talk with three women from the Penn State Library who are really into the web 2.0 space and are trying to find ways to incorporate these approaches into the operations of the Library. I won't spend a bunch of time writing about this here as I wrote my thoughts about it directly after the meeting. I will say that I expect more interaction with this group in the coming weeks.

See my original post to read more.

Wednesday May 2, 2007
Meeting with Management Development

This was sort of a follow-up meeting from a few I've had over the last few yesrs with a few people in the MD organization. It started out as a discussion of how podcasting could be used to support their training programs but quickly moved into how to organize their content to gain the greatest exposure. We also discussed how web 2.0 technologies could promote a more open a fluid conversation with potential clients.

Looks like we will be helping them get started in the world of podcasting. We'll start with some low hanging fruit -- looking at how could take some of their micro-lessons and support them with some podcasted micro-content examples. Should be interesting.

Thursday May 3, 2007
Meeting to Discuss Managing Workstations from a Distance

This was a meeting between myself and two colleagues within the Classroom and Lab Computing group to talk about how we can support workstations remotely. We are looking at doing some very interesting things with digital media studios at various PSU Campuses -- these are all geographically dispersed so we want to be able to manage the environment as if it were next door. We discussed solutions for safely storing large amounts of data for digital media development as well as ways to make sure every user log-in is personalized to the individual. From what it sounds like, we are on our way to making that a reality. Very cool.

Friday May 4, 2007
Presentation to the PSU Outreach Advisory Board

Again, I don't need to say much about this as I have already blogged about it ... I will say that it was an outstanding opportunity to share not only a little vision for the future of education, but also to share time with some very influential people about how PSU is rapidly addressing the needs of the net-generation student. I made the case that by studying today's students, Outreach could better predict the types of customers (learners) they will need to support in the coming years. I think it went well. I really enjoyed the opportunity.

Read my blog post about it.

I have been asked to take part in a day long series of briefings to the Penn State Outreach Advisory Board focusing on the PSU World Campus. Their Board looks to be a smart group of people who have been selected based on their ability to help our Outreach organization make big decisions. I haven't been involved in Advisory Board style meetings since I left the College of IST about 18 months ago -- that used to be a regular activity for me.

At any rate, I have been asked to start the series of presentations this morning to lay out some of hte challenges and opportunities we face as it relates to teaching and learning with technology. I'll be doing my usual Web 2.0 thing, but with a slightly different slant this time -- I want them to be excited and interested in how emerging technologies are becoming more a part of everyday life and learning. We shall see ... I have attached the PDF of my slides.

I had a good time talking with this group. I always enjoy spending time with smart people with good questions.

I had a very interesting meeting today with three PSU Librarians who wanted to talk web 2.0 ... two of them had attended the 2007 TLT Symposium and wanted to think about how to integrate web 2.0 tools into practical application within the Library itself. It sounded to me like they were already playing in the space, so it wasn't much of a stretch to get them to think about how all this tuff plays well together.

Much of our conversation tended towards adopting technologies that would demystify the notion of the Library -- especially to students. Just talking through the various ways they could use a tool as simple as del.icio.us to create a research library feed that would pull multiple tags to create interesting selections for students.

All I can say is that Librarians are very cool and interesting people who think about things in amazing ways. I see a relationship developing here that will pay some serious downstream benefits.