August 2009 Archives

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.

Just a quick post to note the new iPhone specific format for the blogs at Penn State went live this morning. The blog team upgraded several things today including protected blogging and an amazingly fast search. Nice work to the whole team!