Recently in Thoughts Category

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.

I was asked to share some interesting statistics about what is going on here at PSU and on a National level with technology. Here are some points I thought could resonate. I didn't editorialize too much, but here are my basic thoughts:

40% of online teens watch TV on devices other than a TV. This is a real trend hitting our campus. I gave two guests lectures in freshman classes last week and all but a handful of them said that is what they do. This has big implications for the kinds of networks we provide and the amount of bandwidth we allocate.

Nearly a third of all PSU students created a rich media piece last year. Half of them did it for a class which means faculty are beginning to accept digital media as evidence of learning. That means the other half did it just for fun. Looks like the move towards rethinking our lab spaces is a good move.

Nationally approximately 80% of college students are in Facebook. This is growing as Facebook continues to open to younger and more diverse audiences. At PSU, last November, the number was at 83%.

The most interesting statistics are that 60% log in daily, 80% update their profiles several times a month, and that 23% of our students spend more than 5 hours a week in social environments (FB and MySpace).

According to Pew Internet and American Life Project nearly 50% of online teens are sharing content online. This isn't file sharing, it is sharing pictures, text, and other forms of their media. 64% engage in at least one form of content creation. Girls dominate most elements of online content creation and sharing with 35% of teen girls blogging, and 54% sharing photos. Compared with 20% of boys blog and 40% share pictures. Boys are nearly twice as likely to share their videos online.

Why is this the case? 89% of them report that people comment on them some of the time. Most of them use their social networks to control access -- Facebook is the number one photo sharing site on the Internet.

We know they use all sorts of modes to communicate, but they use modes differently with different groups of people. Text messages are used to connect with peers, while email is "for old people."

Digital video is explosive at the moment. It is empowering new types of conversations across the web. Visit youtube and notice not only the number of views on videos, but the number of comments and video responses. It is stunning.

Internet users watched 10 billion videos online in December 2007.

73% of adults own cell phones, 63% of teens own them, and at PSU 93% of students own a cell phone.

Nearly 90% of PSU students own MP3 players. iPod is the majority.

A post my wife linked me to this afternoon seemed to resonate with me on a bunch of levels ... the first being is that we can all do better ... the second is that there are times when instead of standing on the sidelines it is important to jump in -- regardless of the splash or the associated ripples. I guess if you are left asking if you resemble the counter argument, well, then you probably do. You decide, but I would suggest stepping outside yourself and thinking about it. Worth a read and some thought -- or not. Up to you. Check out the post over at the "alex the girl" blog. At any rate, I'd like to know if people have initial reactions to the thoughts expressed.

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.

• Web 2.0 is the Rock and Roll for this generation.
• It may mean that a "newbie" may be 60 and an expert may be 13.
• Digital literacy means that participation must be at the core.  Sitting and watching isn't enough to be considered digitally literate.
• Use wikipedia to teach critical thinking ... come up with two completely unrelated topics and challenge the class to get from one wikipedia entry to the next in fewest number of clicks.  I love this!
• Wikipedia is like a person making a sand castle on a busy beach -- soon other kids come over and start helping.  Everyone wins.  Interesting as this just happened while we were on the beach in FL ... Madeline saw a kid building a sandcastle, went over, and contributed.

I was going to blog this weeks ago ... given so many peoples' frustration with email, this is an interesting concept. I wonder if I could ever pull something like this off?