August 2007 Archives

Day before yesterday my colleague, Allan Gyorke, and I gave a talk to the Instructional Design and Development group at the Penn State World Campus related to Digital Expression. It is a talk I’ve done before and it really focuses on the platforms PSU has been working to deliver for the last 18 months or so. The talk frames the need by looking relatively deeply at the changing characteristics of our undergraduate resident population — they are very mobile, very smart, and very plugged into social spaces (read, Facebook). I use a bunch of PSU statistics gathered by our assessment team as well as numbers from the Pew Internet and American Life Project team. It is a talk that provides an overview of our goal to create a platform that can support digital expression.

Slides and more thoughts can be found at my Learning & Innovation blog.

On August 14th, I've been asked to present to an online audience about PSU's use of iTunes U. I plan to discuss how iTunes U (and podcasting in general) has sparked the imagination of faculty and staff across Penn State. The webcast is sponsored by SABA ... it should be an interesting event for me as I have never participated as a presenter at one of these types of events. Here's the program:

“Pressures on Higher Education IT: How we Move Forward to Embrace Web 2.0 and Beyond” Matthew Jett Hall; Assistant Vice Chancellor, Information Technology Services and Associate Chief Information Architect; Vanderbilt University

With society's mass adoption of the digital life style in North America, Europe, and Asia, higher education must address both the ways in which it provides commodity IT services and embraces new tools for mobile learning and social networking of the digital generation. Matt will discuss some of the pressures facing central IT organizations in this context.

"Penn State on iTunes U: Driving Adoption through Innovation” Cole W. Camplese,
Director, Education Technology Services, Penn State University

In this session, Cole Camplese will discuss Penn State University's use of iTunes U as the centerpiece to providing scalable podcasting infrastructure at a large university. We'll look at how faculty, staff, and students have quickly adopted podcasting as a way to share academic content anytime, anyplace.

“Web 2.0: Re-inventing Learning” Ben Willis, Senior Manager, Learning and Collaboration Product Strategy, Saba Software

Ben will introduce the seminar with an overview of Web 2.0 and how collaboration technologies are changing the way students – and adults – learn. Ben will walk us through the shift that is taking place in how we collaborate, connect and capture information in today’s digital and connected world.