Recently in Clickity-Clack Category

From Dave Test related to Lynda.com at PSU:

I just thought I'd add that the free lynda.com iOS apps also work with our site agreement with Lynda. On iPad, launch the app, tap "web portal login," type psu.edu in the URL field, and tap submit. When WebAccess appears, login with your access account. On iPhone, launch the app, tap "log in," tap "web portal access," type psu.edu, in the url field and hit the Go button on the iPhone keyboard. When WebAccess appears, login with your access account. Lynda.com looks particularly good on the iPad screen, and with video mirroring on the iPad 2, you can output the content to a monitor or projector.

I watched Dave do this the other day and couldn't help but think about the future of training.

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Update: I unpublished the Wave.

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.

I posted some thoughts about the second annual Learning Design Summer Camp over in my other blog space. I wanted to get the content into the emerging tag search results here at the Blogs at PSU by adding a pointer.

Jump over and read my thoughts.

Some random things I've come across online recently that I thought I'd both share and collect.

World Builder

This is a wonderful short that I really thought some folks around here could enjoy.

The Twitter Global Mind

Smart and quick, "WTH is Twitter?" piece from Rocketboom ... they make some interesting claims in the video. Worth the watch.

Microsoft Vision of 2019

Again, an interesting short -- this time by Microsoft (gasp). Lots of interesting tools that probably could/will come true. I wonder if given the economic turndown in this country will innovation like this be slowed?

Yacht Rock #2

I wish they had an embed code -- damn QT only! No matter ... if you grew up in the 80's you'll recognize some of the players. I got this via a pointer from Brian Lamb of Abject Learning. This really made me laugh.

Today I sat down and put together a quick XML file that has my ETS, PSU, and a few other subscriptions in it ... the idea is that you can download this XML file and upload it into Google Reader. I imagine it'll work in other feed readers, but since I use Google Reader it is all I tested it in.

You'll have to right click on the link to the feed and download it before you can upload it ... in other words, don't just click the link, save the document locally first. So grab the XML file and watch the video below to learn how to do it.

This is at once simple and brilliant. A post from a fellow Penn Stater, Shelby Thayer, related to her use of Twitter. If you are confounded by Twitter, have no idea why one might use it, or how to get started following people then this is a post you should read. I've done my own musings on Twitter, but never took the time to explain it like this. Worth the read for the newbie and for advanced users.

Originally I had composed this entry as an email that I was only going to send to a handful of people in and around ETS ... after I read it I thought it was better for the community to see and engage with.

I came across a post today by Michael Wesch that D'Arcy Norman linked to. Dr. Wesch is responsible for several of the best videos on youtube that challenge notions of connectedness and our students. As I read this I was thinking of the work we all do and how important it is that we do that work better. I was lucky enough to spend a little time talking with him at ELI in San Antonio last year and we just missed an opportunity to bring him to campus to be the keynote of our TLT Symposium.

There are lots of points in this post that strike a chord with me, in particular the notion that students are playing the "just getting by" game with great success. What is interesting to me are the assertions that they are winning it and we are letting them. He goes on to mention how he sees the need to embrace new thinking in our classrooms, the need to stop pretending there are walls separating real life from learning, and that the notions of learning and school elicit very different responses. Clearly he is a proponent of technology in teaching and learning contexts, but so should we -- our jobs are to design teaching and learning opportunities that appropriately take advantage of the landscape we (and our students) live in.

I just thought I'd share the link to the post and invite comments and thoughts.

I was doing some updates to my PSU Blog this morning -- mostly exporting old sites out of the MT 3 environment that we are looking to discontinue on October 15, 2008 (that was a hint). At any rate, I setup SFTP to PASS to move some images around and clean up my directories when I came across some of my old work.

When I say old work, I mean it. I came across a presentation I remember doing for an ETS Show and Tell back in 1999. At the time I was a World Campus Instructional Designer working on Electrical Engineering courses with my friend and colleague, Dr. Stu Kurtz. Stu and I both had a real interest in doing something very innovative ... and while I think Stu and I drove each other crazy, we really drove our collective bosses even crazier. At the time, Stu and I wanted to deliver a full on course experience, complete with a bunch of rich media files (sorta like enhanced podcasts without the RSS), real world scenarios, links to videos, and a whole bunch of executable Mathmatica activities. We had a huge problem getting all of this to work from a web browser, so I built an Authorware "launcher" application that linked it all together. I hate to say it was fun finding ways to work the web back in the day.

At any rate, the presentation is still sitting in my PASS space -- I always did hate PowerPoint, so I did my preso as a simple website. If you have any interest in what we were doing back in the day at the World Campus take a look ... a couple things to note ... the first is how much stuff we built for each and every course (help files, getting started guides, and other items) and the other is the use of First Class as the communication environment. Crazy stuff.

I just wrote about what I think will be the tipping point for mobile devices on our campus over at Learning and Innovation ... already a couple of interesting comments. We shall see how it all shakes down.

This morning I came across a little something from SixApart, the people behind Movable Type -- they make the blogging software we are using for the Blogs at Penn State. They've released a plugin that provides an iPhone/Touch specific template for authoring your blog. I still think once people on campus (a) get blogs, (b) realize all they can be used for, and (c) embrace these new devices we'll see a whole lot more mobile blogging.

We should have MT 4 running soon. Just a matter of time until students' thumbs will be tapping out posts.