Recently in ITS Category

I will be working to round out these lists during the TLT retreat tomorrow ...

10 things we should be paying attention to in TLT:

1. ANGEL is by far the most widely used technology supporting teaching and learning. A focus on managing its growth will continue to be critical.
2. 7% download podcasts, while over 61% say they would if more were available.
3. Both undergraduate (40%) and graduate students (56%) both report sharing documents to complete coursework.
4. Wireless printing is a critical direction
5. 17% report creating video for a class while 15% report creating a video for personal reasons ... this provides evidence that we are well positioned with the Digital Commons, but pushes me to continue to think about how to make the service more obvious. Only 2% report using the DC resources.
6. Storage for DC will become a challenge as students' creation of digital media continues to grow.
7. The growth of gaming on campus indicates strong need to better understand how to manage both console and PC-based games on our network
8. Blogs as note-taking tools -- only 4% of students currently use their laptops to take notes and 36% of faculty say they allow students to take notes with their laptops.
9. True hybrid course design is an opportunity to reduce the number of f2f meetings (4% reporting that as course design)

10 things we should be paying attention to in ITS:

1. ANGEL is by far the most widely used technology supporting teaching and learning. A focus on managing its growth will continue to be critical.
2. If podcasting becomes more important, decisions will need to be made related to the diffusion of iTunes U vs. podcasting from the Blogs at PSU.
3. The need to create better online tools to enable sharing of documents -- more focus should be applied towards creating and managing ongoing team edits of documents than simply exchanging files. Google Docs comes to mind as an example.
4. Online testing/quizzing is a critical piece to the resident education puzzle. With the emergence of the Testing Center we have an opportunity to shift the approach to eTesting, but managing the growth in use in the physical environment may prove difficult.
5. Sudents report that they prefer email. This is a current state that may be due in large part to familiarity. Over time we'll need to find new ways to move this towards RSS and other push-like technologies.
6. Wireless printing is a critical direction
7. Storage for PASS will become a greater challenge as students' creation of digital media continues to grow
8. Greater flexibility for roaming access for guests of the University -- non-VPN based access
9. Communicating with our audiences about our services in a cohesive fashion. Building stronger awareness across all of our connected activities continues to be a challenge

10 things we should be paying attention to at PSU:

1. Digital Identity and Identity Management will pose greater challenges going forward ... this is not just related to managing multiple online identities, but extends into awareness for better understanding of how students should represent themselves online.
2. Security of networked computers as it relates to malware
3. Better physical environments to support the use of laptops across campus (power)
4. Resident Hall flexibility to manage multiple IP devices -- game consoles and other networked devices
5. Greater flexibility for roaming access for guests of the University -- non-VPN based access
6. Faculty development as a core value across all disciplines
7. Potential support for the use of external applications for mail and calendar
8. The utilization of FaceBook for new forms of communicating with the PSU community.

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.

Last week I spent some time with Robin Anderson, Senior Director in ITS for Markerting and Communications. I met with her and members of a small team we have assembled to help think about what our new ITS Intranet should look like ... it was a great conversation and Robin followed it up the post, Where to draw the line? Or should we? ... I linked the post into the TLT Intranet and asked folks to take a look and help us think out loud a bit.

I have to be honest about how much I like seeing this much conversation go on outside of the walled gardens. I am really happy to see a number of my staff really helping this along and adding some great thinking to this quesiton. I think there is a theme in the comment stream that really shows a willingness for openness that is new to the larger organzation. Very cool to see. Take a look for yourself and leave a comment if you'd like.