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.

Update: I unpublished the Wave.

Kudos to the people at Applied Information Technology!

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.

Jump over and read my thoughts.

PSU Basics

• More than 90,000 students
• More than 22,000 World Campus enrollments
• About 20,000 full and part time faculty and staff
• 24 locations across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

Our MT powered blog platform is managed and run by our core ITS organization and was designed to potentially serve our entire user population. We built it upon existing infrastructure, including integration with our Web-Access authentication system so students could move in and out of their blog dashboards with a single sign on and that content be published as static html pages into Penn State Personal Webspace (PASS). What this means is that we utilize the 5 GB of space that everyone gets without worrying about ownership of content, the opportunity for users to have access to their assets, or the need to create new policies to govern blogs. Faculty, staff, and students operate in a self service mode, going to the Blogs at Penn State site to log in and create their blogs.

Blogs at Penn State Back Story

We launched our "blogging" service about 18 months ago after discussions about affordances of a system like this. Our argument to administration revolved around creating an environment that was an open publishing platform -- not just a blog service. When we stopped talking about blogs they began to understand the power.

The growth has been strong overall, with us now serving over 10,000 users -- about 4,500 of them are very active users.

The big stories being the use of blogs for:

• Courses
• ePortfolios
• Faculty pages
• eLearning design, development, and delivery
• Biology 12: And the Design Document
• IST 110
• Unit websites
• Podcasting
• Penn State Voices
• Project sites -- Faculty Fellows

We are promoting the idea that faculty shouldn't require a separate course blog for each course they teach, opting instead to talking to students about how one overall space is more powerful. One overall space can be used across a career by effectively employing categories and, more importantly, tags to keep things organized across their academic and personal lives. This is ultimately the direction we are taking this -- a Learning Life Stream. In this way students are collecting evidence of learning and their overall experiences in one searchable archive.

What is emerging is that people are getting the fact that blogs are powerful personal content management environments. Because of the way one can instantly post, tag, search, and edit, students can organize materials in an online space like never before.

ePortfolios

In two different Colleges (the Schreyer Honors College and the College of Education's Teacher Education Program) Stacks of papers will become a thing of the past as students move their content into integrated online spaces that are fully searchable and belong to them. In these Colleges they have worked to identify and clearly articulate the program outcomes so as students create work (evidence) they use tags to mark posts as related to specific program outcome statement so it is easily aggregated together. When the time is right our Pack it Up tool allows program assessors to create a fully functional archive and move it into a program assessment environment.

Some Portfolio Examples

• Amy's Portfolio
• http://www.personal.psu.edu/awb5000/blogs/andreas_portfolio/
• http://www.personal.psu.edu/hst5004/blogs/helenes_portfolio/
• http://www.personal.psu.edu/pjh5020/blogs/paiges_portfolio/

Technical Issues

In our implementation, we deal with a number of technical issues:

• We need the following hooks added to system:
• Local file system access sanitation:local file read, write, including template linked to static files, asset control, publish to file (page and entry), or "include file=" template tag.
• Path sanitation for blog/entry/page creation and publishing
• Authentication model for openID does not work well with WebAccess
• Dashboard
• Comments
• Private Content Support
• Integrate MT permission table with .htaccess to control published blog read access.
• Prevent private contents from appearing in unauthorized searches.
• MT doesn't really protect private contents. MultiBlog simply changes the default inclusion. Users can still explicitly assign blog ID to access any blog. We had to filter search parameters and template parameters.
• Search cache can be retrieved by anyone.
• Needed to hack DBI driver to do an efficient SQL hack. (MT's ObjectDriver does not allow specifying Inner Join On field). Perhaps MT can provide a hook before SQL is sent out?
• Content TAGs in private blog should not appear in global cloud

Session 2: Discussion of MT-TP Migration Concept

Easily move student blogs to typepad after they leave. transfer content form psu blog to typepad blog. This should be an automated process with simple user interface for the student.

Ideally this would include:

• TP on par with MT 4
• entries
• pages
• comments
• tags w/ tag cloud
• files (images inline, linked images, linked pdfs, word, etc)
• change intrablog links (links to other entries, pages, files. Keep internal reference consistence)
• typepad blog will have option to have static front page
• blog will have header image (? - is this important)
• typepad blog will have primary page navigation (like the horizontal navbar) - some pages will be in primary nav, others will not (we currently use @topnav tag on pages to distinguish)
• PSU Blog will set up redirect from a student's psu space to the typepad space for six months after graduation.

Session 3: Next Steps

Licensing confusion continues to be an issue. Let's find time to discuss how we better plan our costs as we go forward.

We need to evaluate how these would work with our unique set up:

• MT Enterprise
• MT Community
• TypePad Connect for our Horizontal Conversation concept

What are the best way for PSU developers to contribute to open source community. We have our own issues based around large multi-user setup:

• Self provisioning of blogs (verification of paths, auto user creation, more flexible auto blog creation) (The App and interface is not designed as a self-service multi user environment)
• Security issues related to ACLs on filesystem
• MT accounts for commenting does not work smoothly with webaccess.
• Protected blogging
• Use ldap groups for reading and writing blogs.

1. Blog platform
2. Intense Debate comment engine

If you want to open it up to people all over the world easily and get questions from the outside, add in the optional component of a live UStream of the session. Not real hard, but if you imagine this post is being for a session happening live you'd see the commenting options below as a way to add questions live. The ratings would allow top questions to rise to the top and be openly addressed live. If you add the uStream, questions can flow in from anywhere ... and with the video commenting option people can sort of be there.

So if you click the title of this post (if reading in the stream of the environment) you'll see how easy all this works.

Twitter tag search results.

Keynote James Boyle

Excellent speaker --> No slides and exceptionally engaging

Previous Chair of Creative Commons

Hypothetical Situation #1

If you were asked to design two different systems:

Imagine 1992 --> Terminal --> Designed to restrict access to the network --> You are a consumer, consuming from a predefined list of functions (print, send)

Imagine 1992 --> WWW --> The network will carry anything --> The Internet treats blocking as a malfunction and routes the user around it --> Recipients can also be producers (they can put stuff up that we've not attached a value to it)

Thoughts --> Network #2 will be a disaster --> Porn, SPAM, Idiots, Ranting, Stupid Rumors will be spread, and Piracy --> No one will do commerce on a public network --> It will be a disaster --> Let's go with a nice safe network where control lives

Who would have imagined that 17 years ago?

Hypothetical Situation #2

If you were asked to design two different encyclopedias:

Imagine 1992 --> "I want you to design the world's greatest encyclopedia" --> Build a large corporation who can execute top down control --> It is going to cost a lot (writers, review, editors, etc) --> Trademark and Copyright would be critical

Imagine 1992 --> "I want you to design the world's greatest encyclopedia" --> We would just put up a website and let people do it themselves --> We'd have that is crazy

Hypothetical Situation #3

If you were asked to design two different methods for creating software:

Imagine 1992 --> Closed source license --> Built around tight control with a model for generating revisions and updates --> Money

Imagine 1992 --> Open Source Software --> Open, free access --> Changes move back into the commons

Which would flourish? Both.

IBM makes twice as much on OSS as they do from patent enforcement. IBM is the world's largest patent holder.

"if you want a secure system it has to be open"

Each of these choices is between open and closed. At the time most (if not all) would have chosen closed.

Open is not always better, but we have a cultural bias against openness.

Teaching should be about open --> How do we learn to teach? --> We take others peoples work and remix it --> Raises a set of really interesting observations --> Surely textbooks have been crowd sourced, open educational resources, and other ideas have not come into focus.

It is not just the freedom to copy, it is the freedom to remix.

We have a flourishing global encyclopedia and OSS movements, but not an active approach to openness in education.

Search engines are failing us not b/c of their algorithms, but b/c of the closed nature of our information -- the Science web is trapped in 1993 search results --> terms, not context and value --> Content is too closed

Right now we are being more cautious with our content than Viacomm --> That is pathetic

Everyone is an edge case in someone else's discipline

Conclusion:

The norm should be open --> Common sense must win --> SSN --> No --> Course materials, Scholarly Presses, Technical Systems --> Yes

Mock Debate: Is the CMS Dead?

Jim Groom and John St. Clair

This was perhaps the most fun I've had at a conference. Jim went first and claimed that it wasn't that the CMS was simply dead, that it is undead -- like a zombie. It cannot be killed. He clearly has a negative impression of the notion of the CMS as a Institutionally driven, top down system. I think one of the best assertions is that too many people think the CMS/LMS itself is that it isn't about teaching and learning, it is about managing course rosters, uploads, etc.

The real wonderful thing that happened occurred when John St. Clair (Distance and Blended Education) started by saying Jim misunderstood the challenge -- that he wanted to debate if the "Conventional Midsize Car" was dead. All I can say is that it was brilliant on so many levels.