Recently in PSU Category

I had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours talking with the Faculty at Penn State Mont Alto about our students and ways to engage them.  It was a great time!  We spent our time looking at PSU and national trends about students' technology use and explored new ways to integrate technology into teaching and learning.  I wrote about it on my personal blog.

Yesterday I spent an hour sharing stories of how ETS is using social tools to create and engage our communities.  The talk was titled, "Engaging Communities" was relatively well attended and seemed to capture the attention of the audience.  The best stuff happened during the question and answer period at the end when we got into a real conversation about how we could be thinking more broadly about engaging our audiences.  People really seemed to want to discuss Twitter in particular -- the initial reaction is always centered around, "this is the dumbest thing I have heard of."  We talked through how Twitter is connected to our primary website and how it has become our number one source of traffic at the ETS site.  I think that kind of stunned people.  The other thing that stood out was when I showed the ETS is ranked number 2 in search results for "education technology services" ... right behind our friends at Berkeley ... and in front of about 64 million other results.  All in all it was an enjoyable hour and am more than happy to share more thoughts from it.

Last year I was a featured keynote at the Annual One to One conference here at Penn State.  This year I've been asked back to lead a conversation about web 2.0 and some of the fears surrounding it in our schools.  I hope I can make the case!  Description they gave me follows:

Critical Conversations: Web 2.0, Hype or Hidden Opportunity? What school leaders should know about social networking, Conversation Thought Leader: Cole Camplese, Information Technology Manager, The Pennsylvania State University, Moderated by Anytime, Anywhere Learning Foundation

In light of the constant stream of media reports around the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of web 2.0, and associated social networking technologies, it is critical that all school leaders fully understand the relevance or otherwise of them. So much is now impacting on the lives of students, and as leaders we must be well informed about their potential to support or intrude on learning. Too much is written by inexperienced or overtly biased journalists, and if we are to ensure relevance, we must keep an open mind to these new ideas until proven otherwise.

On Monday I presented to the members of the Penn State Online committee a short talk focused at Web 2.0 and how we are addressing needs at Penn State.  Slides are attached as a PDF.