September 2007 Archives

I had the good fortune to attend the last few minutes of the first open house for Penn State's new e-testing facility in Pollock. You may have missed the news story about it, but don't miss one of the remaining open houses,

* October 25th, 11:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.
* November 13th, 11:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.

The facility is really impressive. There's lots of technology at play but it isn't in the way. When the facility is not being used for testing, it will act as a general purpose computer lab at the flip of a switch. The layout is inviting and functional.

About 40-50 people came to the first open house yesterday and from what I was told, enthusiasm was almost as high as interest. I highly recommend checking out this facility as it will be one that many faculty and students associate with their IT experience at Penn State.

Hats off to all involved in this project. And please, to anyone I spoke with yesterday (Chris, Jonathan, Brian, et al), jump in here and highlight anything I missed in this very brief overview of the facility.

This post would have better pictures if it were The Hulk vs. Mr. T, but then I'd probably end up violating someone's copyright.

A little over a year ago, I subscribed to MAKE magazine. I learned of it from a now defunct podcast published by O'Reilly. The driver behind the magazine is that with information technology as pervasive as it is now, there is much more surface area between IT and the analog world. MAKE set out to capture this phenomena and I think it does a great job of it. A week doesn't go by when my son and I aren't talking about some cool project we've see on on MAKE. We even set some time aside this past summer to make one of the projects we saw and it was really fun.

MAKE has also been a force behind the establishment of events called Maker Faire's. You can think of Maker Faire as the Grange Fair but with technology. Instead of showing off the pig, you show off the kite with the digital camera attached to it for taking pictures several hundred feet off the ground, for example. Or the Altoid can mod that becomes the case for your latest iPod. You get the idea.

Aside from the fact that this kind of innovation is fun and fascinating to track, it gets me wondering about what role IT thinks it has in this space. There are times I think we're (IT as much as ITS, but probably more of an issue for ITS IMO) hyper-concerned from the browser to the backbone, and for good reasons. But what about the plethora of cameras and digital signage on campus, or instrumentation in research labs, or the cornucopia of technology that now resides in residence halls rooms. Keeping in touch with how faculty, students, and peer staff are changing their IT environments to accommodate all of these new devices/agents/etc. is only going to become more important as the number of devices equals or greatly exceeds the number of computers running clunky browsers. We don't have too many first hand examples of this in ITS but we do have some. I'm wondering about how we get closer to what's going on at this IT vs. T interface.

Maybe we should co-sponsor a residence hall Maker Faire for residence hall students along with IST and Student Affairs? Maybe we could sponsor a faculty oriented Maker Faire so they could show off cool IT/T solutions they've come up with in their offices, homes, labs.
Even better, it would be great to have a place (and excitement) large enough to have both going on at the same time. 4H for technology at it's most basic level - getting things done.

Doing anything cool that you'd be willing to share here? Have any ideas about how we can raise awareness about our own Penn State MAKE attitude, so we can better prepare for the future (because it's here now)?

I am excited to announce that the Blogs at Penn State
(http://blogs.psu.edu) pilot is now officially open to all ITS
Employees. The Blogs at Penn State toolset is designed to eventually
provide all staff, students, and faculty of the University with an
easy to use web publishing toolkit. During the Fall semester, the
Blogs at Penn State project is in a limited pilot that will reach
about 1500 faculty, staff and students.

I would now like to invite you to join us as we investigate how blogs
can be used effectively across an organization like ITS. Remember,
the single biggest change here is shifting from a culture of
consumption and fighting the information glut to a culture of
contribution and finding discoverable, relevant information. Create
a blog - and start sharing what you know about the art of your work,
working at Penn State, serving faculty and students, collaborating
with colleagues across the the university, the country and the world.

Here are some details:

* If you have not already been provided an account, you can activate
your Blog Account by going to http://blogs.psu.edu/pilotenroll.html
and clicking the "Activate" link at the bottom. You will be asked to
make sure your Personal Web space is active before being allowed into
the Blogs system.

* If you have been provided a Blogs at Penn State Account at
blogs.psu.edu, you do not need to do anything further.

Since this is a pilot, support is currently limited. Additional
Instructions on how to get started using the blogs, podcasting,
controlling comments and how to customize the appearence are
available at the Blogs Community Hub at: http://blogger.psu.edu. I
have personally found this to be a great place to go for help and
insight.

For advanced web users of the years - a note an Access Control Lists
and your personal web space. Blogs at Penn State publishes content
to your www/blogs/ directory. If you have have modified ACL's
permissions within your Personal Web Space, you may need to reset
ACLs to the defaults. See http://blogger.psu.edu/help/advanced/acl
for more details

If you have any questions about the pilot program you can post
questions at the Blogger Forum at http://blogger.psu.edu.

BASIC FEATURES

* Multiple blogs per user
* Customize sidebar and style themes
* Supports tags, categories and monthly archives
* Published in your personal web space (you can blog about whatever
topic you want)
* Comments from anyone
* Generates (RSS) news feeds and podcast feeds
* Ideal for announcements, journaling, portfolios, note taking, and
discussion.
* You can register your blog at http://blogger.psu.edu/directory to help
others find your blog

NOT ENABLED YET

* Multiple authors in one plog - only one editor per blog (but
anyone can comment)
* Private blogs - all blogs are visible to the public

Start sharing and tagging!

Thanks to the folks who have been working so diligently on getting
this new service off the ground.