PSU-IT: May 2007 Archives

I was invited this week to participate in a site visit to the Penn State School of Nursing in the College of Health and Human Development. The SoN has submitted a powerful proposal to the Hartford Foundation for the development of a Hartford Center of Geriatric Nursing Excellence.

President Spanier kicked off the visit and was joined by Vice President and Dean of the Graduate School, Eva Pell, in articulating the strengths and commitment of Penn State to the proposal and the richness of the proposal itself.

Teaching and Learning with Technology is connected in substantive ways to the grant. ANGEL, Adobe Connect, instructional design, and expertise are all being brought to bear on the effort. It's great that we're involved in directly supporting this proposal and I was struck by how much we indirectly support all that was talked about in the morning. If there was ever any doubt in your mind about how IT enables what is going on at Penn State, I wish you could have been there with me.

I know this has been out for awhile but I thought it was cool enough to share anyway.

A few weeks ago, Google announced the release of the "my maps" feature at Google Maps. It took me all of 5 minutes to create a personalized map that became immediately useful in my personal life. I made a map that provided directions to and attributes of soccer fields in State College so that when we communicate with opposing coaches, they can plan accordingly. It's easy to see how valuable this could be in work constructs. If you've made any cool "my maps", please drop me a line or share them here.

Many of us have known about and sung the praises of RSS for what feels like a long time. But for every person I know who can't live without it, I estimate that I know 20-50 who don't know anything about it.

Leveraging the power of RSS has long since changed my personal habits in information gathering and digestion. I am able to scan and take in much more information that I believe to be relevant to work and personal like than I could, say, 5 years ago.

The ITS Financial Services group had a meeting where they shared a video that describes what RSS and how it works. The video is about 5 minutes long and does a great job of laying it all out. Since most people who read this blog are getting to it directly, it could be that most readers aren't using RSS to get here. Next time you have 5 minutes, I highly recommend watching this video.

BTW - I'm a Google Reader convert, so starting with it (the video uses it as an example) makes sense to me if you are looking to try RSS out.