Recently in Thoughts Category

A couple of years ago I outlined an idea for the staff at Education Technology Services that would allow for mini sabbaticals. The idea was met with lots of nodding and lots of questions -- it was fairly simple ... you share an idea and how much time you need to work on it and I figure out a way to turn you lose with it. The only caveats were that it couldn't be more than a week and you had to come back with a product to share. Lots of people threatened to actually take me up on the offer, but in the end exactly zero people did.

I always wondered why. I still don't know. Maybe it is time to dust off the idea?  I was reminded about it after reading, NPR tries something new: A day to let managers step away and developers play.  I really wonder what would happen if we twisted it so it wasn't about some sort of structured approach and instead something more like what NPR is doing?

NPR is experimenting with something called “Serendipity Day,” wherein everyone on the technology side abandons their day jobs to work on…whatever they want. Bugs that need squashing, scratches that need itching — the ideas that never get to the top of a to-do list. The managers step back, available only if the workers need anything. (I need a designer, I need a room, I need a bagel.) The only rule: In the end, you have to share your work.

“It turns out that that one day of pure, undiluted autonomy has led to a whole array of fixes for existing software, a whole array of ideas for new products, that otherwise had never emerged,” Pink says in the talk. He argues that motivation derives from autonomy, mastery, and purpose: the desire to control one’s own destiny, to get better at something, and to serve a greater good.

(Via NPR tries something new: A day to let managers step away and developers play » Nieman Journalism Lab.)

Clearly we'd have to do some planning, just as NPR has done, but I wonder what kind of participation I would see in my own organization. Seriously, it is a great idea and I wonder if I'd have any takers?

I have been in my role as senior director of Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State since November 15, 2010 and in those nine months I have been working to better understand the organization both in terms of its external requirements and the overall internal dynamics. I feel very lucky across several dimensions in that I have a great leadership team in place that has rolled up its sleeves with me to help explain the various functions inside their own units and who have also embraced this idea that we have a real opportunity to rethink how we work together.  Another critical factor at play here is that I still have access to the person who built this organization and was a huge driving factor in the creation of such a robust teaching and learning with technology ecosystem here at the University.  What that affords me is an opportunity to grow into my role and have people to lean on in all directions -- it has been critical as I work each day to better understand the overall depth and breadth of TLT and its overall role here at the University.

As part of this process I challenged my leadership team to come together and help me rethink the way we work together and present ourselves to both the on and above campus audiences we serve. I've pressed them into the idea that we can no longer do what we need to while being a handful of individual organizations -- we need to think, talk, and act as one TLT. This idea, that we are better together than as separate and vertical organizations is something I believe very strongly in. My push is that we need to see ourselves as a horizontally integrated organization -- an organization where our teams leverage the talents across the lines of the individual groups. I say this because I truly believe TLT has been constructed in a very intelligent and thoughtful way .. we are an organization that has each piece of the puzzle as it relates to envisioning, implementing, and supporting large and small scale technologies that influence teaching and learning.  What I mean is that we have a value chain of sorts in place that allows us to actively investigate new and emerging technologies and practices with an incredible amount of agility in Education Technology Services, we have the ability to install, manage, shape, and support all that activity in both physical and virtual ways through the Classroom and Lab Computing team, have the ability to drive adoption and appropriate use of technology through Training Services, and can work to communicate much of it on the web through standards-based accessible web presences powered by WebLion.  These organizations need to compliment one another as we work to deliver the kinds of services our audiences need and want.  They need to act as One TLT.

This perspective, when implemented, allows for our project teams to organize around successful implementations in ways we may not have considered in the past.  As a recent example, when we set out to replace our student response system, we didn't just turn to one of the organizations to make a technology decision, we assembled a team that included not only purely technical people who focused on the integration issues, but also an instructional designer to investigate and document teaching practice, a trainer to construct training opportunities from the start, and communication people to share progress openly as we drove towards selection and implementation. Sounds simple -- and it is conceptually, but the act of actually making that the new framework in how we do work is the complicated thing.  We can't live in a world where any one of the organizations within TLT does its own thing from end to end -- end to end requires the skills only available when you look across TLT from a horizontal perspective.

This is also true in the way we need to begin to represent ourselves as well. One of the things we have done every year I have been a part of this organization is write an annual report. Typically the responsibility to construct the report would fall directly on the shoulders of the director in each of the primary groups. What this meant was that the report read more like four or five different reports under one cover page. This lead to some strange reporting -- CLC and ETS would both report on projects they were involved in (like the Media Commons) and often times the data shared might be slightly contradictory and tell two different stories. What we set out to do this year was much different -- we wanted the report to represent our thinking as it related to TLT. It honestly took quite a bit longer than I expected to work through the thinking, but in the end I am left very proud of what we developed and I believe it will be the blueprint that much of our work will follow over the next couple of years. Last year's report was nearly 140 pages, this year's report is 23 in total. (What follows is mostly for me, so I can capture the process of creating it while it is still relatively fresh in my head.)

Several months ago I started the conversation about the annual report with the TLT leadership team and we all agreed we wanted something that could more effectively speak to who we were as a collective.  Our first step was to take the 140 page report and break each headline into a blog post. Each post included the title of the section and a short description of the initiative.  The blog gave us a multipage digital representation of a static document.  We fully intended to use that as a platform to allow all of TLT to vote on the most important initiatives to form the basis of the report.

Bu once the blog was in place and we looked at it, something different ended up happening. I walked into my colleague, Derek Gittler's office and he had taken every headline and placed them on sticky notes. He even color coded them based on what I'll call the organizational owner.  We looked at it and were at once shocked at the overlap and the emergence of themes. I was able to easily construct a handful of themes that highlighted what our largest and most impactful initiatives are. Within the hour we had taken the blog built around what should be a hidden org structure from our report and turned it into a thematic representation of TLT.

Once the themes emerged, I was able to assemble a Keynote presentation for the leadership team so we could drive towards consensus as a team. The presentation outlined the themes and how our projects and initiatives come together to tell an amazing story of the organization. A story that allowed us to share short details about how TLT focuses intense energy around:

• Teaching, Learning, and Collaborative Spaces
• Collaborative Platforms for Teaching and Learning
• ANGEL and the Future of the Course Management System
• Enriching the Community
• Engaging the Community
• TLT Events
• TLT Research and Assessment
• The Future of the Web
• Conservation in TLT

The themes turned into a series of wiki pages that the leadership team constructed from the outline from the whiteboard. From there the leadership team took a couple of days to gather the appropriate data from each item and write it up in the wiki. I was able to leverage the wiki and write the final report, with narrative in less than 24 hours. Once the communication team did the editing the report came together remarkably fast -- after the months of preparation and discourse.

I know it seems almost silly, but for the first time I can look at TLT and see how we work together to provide services and opportunities that truly supports our mission to guide the University in the appropriate use of technology to enrich teaching and learning. When you read through the TLT Annual Report for 2010 I hope you can see that what we are attempting to do is provide not only a new way to communicate our accomplishments, but a new willingness to address our own organizational framework to better serve those who depend on us the most. Maybe taking a few months to craft an annual report seems extreme, but in this case I honestly feel the work that we did here will provide the foundation for how we work together going forward. It is something I am very proud of.

Now that I am back from a week acting as faculty in Educause's Learning Technology Leadership Program I have been thinking quite a bit about the things that went on around me. You'd almost think as faculty I wouldn't expect to get much out of the experience. I can say that is so far from the truth. In reality I ended up learning more during the week in a leadership role than I have in quite some time.

One of the things I learned (or was reminded of) was what it was like to be the new person in the group. Out of the seven faculty I was one of only two that hadn't been in that role before. I had forgotten how difficult it was to step into that situation ... I am not used to working so hard to find common ground around things I am experienced with. I'm not saying I was on the outside looking in, but I did need to work harder to establish my voice with the group. Upon reflection it has me thinking quite a bit about how hard I need to work to understand this with regard to other people when they are in that situation. Just something I need to spend extra energy on and intend to.

When it was time to work with the team I was assigned to mentor I made a real effort to engage them where they were. I wanted to find a way to ignite some real opportunities to get into the depth of the conversation with them ... I sort of let go of the perceived power position that an Institute like this creates between faculty and participants. I spent a lot of time working to be available to them -- where, when, and how they wanted me to be. I enjoyed their questions and I really appreciated their approach to a very stressful and demanding experience. The participants are put into teams to create a compelling solution to a large institutional challenge over two and a half days. Needless to say it can create a lot of stress for the teams. I took it on to help alleviate that stress by being available to coach them when they needed it. It lead to an amazing few days of work and discovery with some very smart and engaged people. A real treat!

My Team

What I have figured out over the last couple of days was that I needed to do that to overcome my initial feelings of discomfort with my faculty role. I needed to find a way to deeply engage when I wasn't immediately able to do that in my other role. I need to remind myself that my role in situations like the Educause context (and ones across my job at PSU) is one that exists in many dimensions. Finding ways to engage where I could allowed me to energize myself to participate in a more holistic way. Doing one well, lead to new energy and confidence to go after the other areas.

I believe now more than ever that it is critical to listen to your own complaints and work to overcome them. That was something I said to the participants in a faculty panel where we were asked to talk about the things we've learned as we've grown into our leadership positions. I said that early in my career at the University that I was malcontent quite a bit and it wasn't until I started to find ways to address my own complaints on my own terms was I able to participate more completely. As an example, I used to complain that I never got to work with faculty who were motivated to do great things -- that was true until I started to use down time to discover who they were and work to make meaningful conversations happen. Understanding how to address your own complaints is a skill that I believe to be critical as you move through an environment like higher education.

I'll close by saying that I'd like to find ways to engage with people around here a bit more like we did at the event last week. I loved the opportunity to informally talk to the participants about their work and about my own experiences. I learned quite a bit about myself and those around me ... sort of a shame I had to go to Portland to do it. That doesn't mean I can't do the same back home. With that in mind I'll leave an open invitation to get together and talk -- doesn't have to be formal on any level, just looking to find a way to get closer to this around me. Any takers?

The infographic below has been making the rounds and I thought it was worth sharing it and a couple of quick thoughts. Now that the weather is starting to shift into sunnier days I wanted to think about a simple way to create an even slightly healthier workplace by doing two simple things -- walking and standing meetings.

I visited the WebLion team a couple of months ago to be a part of their staff meeting and was struck by a couple of things -- the efficiency of the meeting and that no one was sitting down. I know they are related, but I hadn't been part of something like that before and I really liked it. Figuring our how to pull this off more often would be an interesting move forward.

The other notion is that of the walking meeting. Why on earth do we all live in our offices through every single one of our meetings? I did quite a few walking meetings last summer and will be starting them back up. These are especially effective in small numbers -- typically one on one meetings. When you add simple tools like an Android or iPhone with apps that record you can be active, get things done, and have a record of the conversation.

At any rate, the graphic below has me thinking that we need to think more about how we can take advantage of opportunities to move our bodies as we do the work of the University. Are people doing this now and have success stories?

Via: Medical Billing And Coding

PBS, though, hopes that Mr. Rogers will live on for children -- online. Last month, PBS began streaming full-length episodes of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" on both its Rogers site and its PBSKids site. "We think about Fred every single day," said Lesli Rotenberg, senior vice president for children's media at PBS. "The PBSKids site is based on a philosophy that I think he pioneered of looking at the whole child."

via www.nytimes.com

When I was little I would sit on the couch every evening to watch Mipper Rogers -- that's what I called him. Almost everything I know about interpersonal behavior can be traced to his lessons. The fact that his reruns aren't shown on any of the channels I get is a crime. Am I being too nostalgic or is there nothing like him around today? Read the NYTimes piece and make sure you watch the video below (even though I've linked it before) ... if you care about people and education it makes you smile. Even if it makes me a hippy.

In one of the talks I do on a semi-regular basis I share thoughts on my audiences -- one is way down the path and the other is the one that stands before me on my campus. While the students I work to inspire and support right now are really important, it is the ones down the path a bit that I love to think about. I have a built in barometer living in my house with my own two digital kids. My daughter is eight and my son is 3 and they are both heavily engaged in the use of digital devices.

More and more I am watching both of them attacking digital devices in ways that just a year or so ago they didn't. They've mastered the Nintendo Wii, their DSi, the iPod Touch, and in a lot of ways the Mac. My little boy can browse (and we've learned, also place things in a sopping cart) the web with relative ease. But what has become amazing is how my daughter is using the Mac to create digital artifacts -- the creation of blog posts, videos using PhotoBooth, and podcasts using GarageBand seem close to second nature to her. It gives me a great view into what our students will demand of us as they arrive on campus.

With that said I continue to be torn about my need to provide the platforms, but I still think it is important and I do not think the platforms we provide are simple commodities given the importance of privacy, identity, and other emerging concerns.

I showed Brad Kozlek my daughter's travel journal she keeps for school yesterday and we got to talking about how cool it is that we are building the future infrastructure to support children like her. She keeps her travel journal as a WordPress blog and sends the URL to her teachers, classmates, and family. I love everything about it -- especially that she can do it herself. This time we even looked at how to embed pictures from Flickr in her posts! What is interesting is that this space grows over time and allows us to look back at things in ways one can't when living in a more analog Universe. We looked back at our trip to Washington DC as we were finishing the post from the Outer Banks with real amazement of all we did -- we sort of relived the trip and that was really cool.

So when people ask me why I care so much about providing platforms for digital expression one of the first stories I tell them is the one about my own children and how I want education to be able to support them in all sorts of ways. I want them to be able to do what they can do at home inside the walls of the school ... I need them to feel like the things they make are an important part of who they are today and who they will become. I need them to feel the power related to thinking about their thinking and I really want them to actively reflect on what that means to them. As I sat looking at her travel blog I actually got goose bumps thinking about how important our work really is -- and how important it is to build opportunities for how it should be in the future.

Something I have been struggling with lately is the continuum of open to closed in lots of contexts. So much of the conversation in the tech blogosphere is all about Apple and the App Store/iPad/iPod/iPhone lock in. It is a conversation that if taken on its own I am completely disinterested in. I bought in years ago and that is that. The App eco-system and the perceived heavy hand of Apple in the approval process does not interest me in the least. It is, however, in this conversation that I am trying to pay more attention to where I am in my own career and thinking.

I read a great post that John Gruber pointed to yesterday by Neven Mrgan titled, "The Walled Garden." Again this post dealt with the App Store, but I think it has some serious implications for thought about the field of education technology and the way we are working within our institutions to radically open up education. It sort of caught me off guard how aligned some of my thinking is around this topic ... and in many ways I find myself standing on the other side of a divide I thought I'd crossed.

Aren't the benefits of a closed, carefully managed garden clearly visible? The experience is controlled, so it tells a story - one which may not emerge from a democratic, anything-goes process (or do you think this sort of slow and deliberate story would emerge in a busy American city in the year 2010?) Charging for admission means that the place can be maintained, improved, and marketed. There are downsides to this, of course -- maybe the management makes boneheaded decisions now and then. Maybe you think that vine maple would look better a little to the left -- maybe you're even right.

via mrgan.tumblr.com

Even in my teaching I struggle with open versus closed and I am growing tired of the "versus" in that conversation. Some things are better closed and managed by the few -- not all parts of my open class are democratic and I wouldn't apologize for that, but for some reason I feel like I need to say I am sorry in other contexts for not being totally open. I know there are times my students feel they know better than I ... and many times I know they are right.

In my work, I am being pushed at my institution to take a broader view of the landscape and that is forcing me to see perspectives that I am afraid are not widely held ideals of many of my peers (many of whom I count as mentors and friends) from across higher education. I spent the better part of the last 10 years pressing on the idea that "open wins, period" and lately I am finding that there are times when closed is as much a winner.

via Shirley Buxton

I try to manage my own organization as openly as possible, but things are shifting under my feet. I recently did something I never thought I would do -- I created a private blog space that only my staff can get to. Just the thought of that makes me cringe, but that is exactly what I did. I was finding that I was unable to share things that were in process openly as it was constantly being picked up and shared as gospel. As much as I enjoy seeing our work get recognized by the likes of our own Daily Collegian, Onward State, and the Chronicle of Higher Education the overhead of managing the fallout from it has worn on me. It isn't a coincidence that I have stopped writing as much about my work openly ... my work has changed and so has emerged a greater need to keep it guarded. So a private blog was born so I could once again be open with my own staff -- it sounds crazy ... I needed a closed space so I could be open. There is that gradient thing again.

I am chairing a committee charged with investigating the pedagogical affordances of various course management systems and that as well has me questioning some of my beliefs about it all. I have been a very loud opponent of the CMS in the past and I still don't use our University-wide CMS in my own teaching, but through the work I am doing with a very smart group from across our Institution I am seeing it all in a new light. Why am I so damn embarrassed to admit that I do believe the CMS is an important part of what we do? I think these tools should be in place and more and more I see them as the access point to all of the innovative stuff we do outside the CMS -- why not turn the place that nearly everyone uses into a portal into the Blogs at Penn State, our iTunes U dashboards, and perhaps even google services in the future? If my goal is to drive adoption of these types of (open) platforms I have needed to get beyond the "CMS is evil" stance and embrace it. Again, I need to pass through a closed space to arrive at opportunities for openness.

All of this is is interesting to me and I wonder what it means to where my work fits into the larger landscape of higher education. I have built much of the success of my organizations on being open, honest, and transparent. I want to continue to live in that space, but more and more I see value in some layers of control. I know we will continue to innovate and I know we'll continue to share, but as the ideas of openness continue to spread I am seeing how closed is truly a part of the conversation. At the end of the day I do recognize the need for doors into wide open spaces -- even in that realization I see the ridiculous contradictions. If the doors are locked, how does everyone get in? Maybe the open space on the other side isn't locked? Not all fences enclose a whole area ... what if the door is just the easy way for many of us to walk in and share out? I don't know.

Here's a thought, maybe we don't need the Harvard Live Question Tool. Maybe we have the killer mashup right here at PSU (or anywhere there is a blog). Here are the ingredients:

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.

After attending Chris Brady's talk yesterday and watching/listening to some of the reactions I was reminded of the ETS mission and how it fits into some of the things he was talking about. First and foremost, I have a great deal of respect for Chris -- he is by far the most student-centered Dean I have ever been around. I'm not saying others are less interested in student activities, but Chris' position as Dean of the Honors College provides him with affordances other Deans do not have. I am thinking about the fact that his College is structured in a radically different way than the other Colleges ... this fact allows him to spend more time thinking about and working with his students.

What struck me was how passionate he was about the total educational experience. I love to see people who share a passion for impacting teaching and learning -- it is what drives most of us to come to work at a place like PSU (at least I hope). I was also struck by how much he downplays the amount of innovation he and his colleagues explore and implement. He said he is measured in his use of technology and focuses on things that have the greatest long-term success. It is one of the reasons I was instantly drawn to work with him even before he got to campus. We've done several things with SHC since he arrived ... we built their first blog space, got him started with podcasting, helped with technology integration issues, and most recently started the SHC Scholar portfolio project. These are things that have played a role in the evolving nature of his perspective on how to engage with his students. The latest effort is one that many on campus feel could be transformative for the long haul.

It is always fun to work with him as he spins through ideas. He isn't afraid to try stuff and he is looks very critically at projects to make sure they are paying dividends.

Again, his talk made me reflect a bit on what our mission and paths are ... essentially trying to think about how we fit into the University. Are we, on a day to day basis, impacting the University? Are we following our own paths to reach the goals of our unit, the University, and serving our key audiences? I have a tendency to say we are, but one thing that might be good to do when one has doubts is to reflect on their work while using the mission and paths below as a measuring stick. How does it add up for you?

Mission and Paths

Education Technology Services is a unit of Teaching and Learning with Technology within Information Technology Services at the Pennsylvania State University. Our primary mission is to provide leadership and support in the appropriate use of technology for teaching, learning, and research. We work to achieve our mission by:

• Creating opportunities to engage faculty to further their use of technology for teaching and learning
• Supporting technology innovation and adoption to support to teaching and learning
• Participating in research opportunities to better educate faculty, staff, and students in the use of emerging technologies as they relate to teaching and learning
• Enhancing curricula through the use of instructional design
• Managing University-wide technology implementations that are designed to support teaching, learning, and research
• Hosting both physical and virtual events that are designed to bring members of the teaching and learning community together to engage in meaningful activities

So if you decided to buy music from Wal Mart in the last six months you may just be out of luck. I just read on TechCrunch that Wal Mart is going DRM free -- yay! The problem is that they are closing down the DRM server, so no more listening to any music purchased during the DRM days. From TechCrunch:

Six months after Wal*Mart jumped onto the music peddling party bus back in August of 2007, they decided to make the switch to 100% DRM-free tracks. Awesome, right?

Unfortunately, any music purchased during that 6-month window before the switch is still at the mercy of Wal*Mart; if they were to pull the plug on the DRM server, the files would become useless on anything but the computer originally used for authorization. In just under two weeks, that's exactly what will happen.

Yet another reason why I continue to shake my head at the DRM models out there. Trust me, I understand why the industry feels DRM is the right thing, I just can't understand why we tie it to an ass backwards model. Why not make the owner (or the licensee) be the key instead of the device? I don't know, but I can't imagine how I would feel right now if all my iTunes purchases were going to get bricked ... I've been buying all my music from Amazon for the past several months for this reason ... I am not interested in getting the shaft with my content. Seems like I should be able to assert my identity as a key for things I have purchased. I guess others feel differently.