Cole Camplese

Moving Towards Web Standards

I love it when things start working ... the senior webmaster in the School of Information Sciences and Technology at PSU (within the Solutions Institute) took the time to post her thoughts related to the topic of web standards at the blogs@si site. Rose lays out some great concepts in her first post at the site and I thought it was well worth the read. Rose is an amazing webmaster and she has been pushing PSU to think about standards for five years or so ... that's well before the buzz (that's a dumb choice of words) related to accessibility. If you have any interest in the subject, take the time and jump over to her post. By the way, while you're there, leave a post and let us all know what you think.

Memo to the RIAA: Better Check on Bush

It just sort of cracks me up that President Bush has an iPod is such big news. For the second time in recent memory, all the big news outlets ran coverage of the "First iPod" ... what really gets me is that the one is in my favorite (old school) news outlet, the New York TImes by reporter Elisabeth Bumiller actually had this quote in it:

The president also has an eclectic mix of songs downloaded into his iPod from Mark McKinnon, a biking buddy and his chief media strategist in the 2004 campaign. Among them are "Circle Back" by John Hiatt, "(You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care" by Joni Mitchell and "My Sharona," the 1970s song by The Knack that Joe Levy, a deputy managing editor in charge of music coverage at Rolling Stone, cheerfully branded "suggestive if not outright filthy" in an interview last week.

The key there is that the line that says, "The president also has an eclectic mix of songs downloaded into his iPod from Mark McKinnon, a biking buddy ..." Correct me if I'm wrong here, but isn't that stealing music? As a matter of fact, it is. You just can't do that! I've been following the discussion over at the excellent Corante blogs, When Are You Going to Sue the President? Some great pointers to the coverage, but the best is perhaps the fact that Siva Vaidhyanathan promised he'd ask RIAA President Cary Sherman and actually did! The answer from Mr. Sherman's answer: "We're only suing uploaders, not downloaders." Well that clears that up, I'm sure my students here at PSU will be happy to know it. Check out the whole 3.5 hours from the Cornell sponsored debate here.

Adobe is Buying Macromedia!

Yikes, that's big news ... Adobe is dropping 3.4 billion on buying our favorite authoring apps company! I guess if you can't beat them, buy them. It will be very interesting to see how all this shakes down, but this could be great, or not so great. I am sitting here wondering how this is going to impact our emerging relationship with Macromedia. While at the ADC Institute, I got to talk with Macromedia's VP for Education and she was very interested in us getting together. You see, most of our tools in the Online IST space are built on ColdFusion ... as is the School's CMS we built this year. Jeez, big news.

I've written more about this over at blogs@si ... take a look.

I ' ve Been Saying This For A While ...

For some reason I decided to take a look at some of my student's blogs from last semester in my IST 110 class. If you recall from some of my posts, I had all my students create their own blogs ... not that all of them continued to use them, but it exposed them to the technology. I also replaced the use of our University-wide LMS, ANGEL with a standard blog for class communication. I did do some fairly decent post-assessment and evaluation related to the students' overall satisfaction and as I've posted here before, they were mostly happy with how it it worked as a course communication environment. Then today, while just surfing some of their spaces, I came across this post from one of my students who will go nameless:

"So I don’t know about these personal blogs. What’s the point in sharing your thoughts to all sorts of strangers on the internet? Well guess that must be why this is only my second post. However, I found the course blog to be really effective compared to angel…man what a pain in the ass. But anyways the class blog was great for helping others with posts and encouraging us to talk about class related material outside of class. Hmm haven’t ever done that before."

Its that last little bit that makes me think these types of spaces are SO much better than the stuff we as educators are pushing on our students. I think its time we start to look at these tools much more critically ... I know we are and it would be great if more people would join us. If you'd like to see more of the results from the survey we did, check out my talk from the ADC Leadership Institute.

The Read/Write Web: Next Gen Textbooks

I am still trying to figure out what it really means to have three blogs going at the same time ... so much of what I want to post, I want to have in each spot. Until I figure it out, you'll have to understand. Sorry ... this is cross posted at blogs@si as well.

I just read a good post over at Weblogg-ed ... The Case Against Textbooks and thought I'd share it into this space. The Read/Write Web is a powerful thing and even more powerful when put to work for good instead of evil (that sounded a little over the top don't you think?). I am thinking of the project we are getting set to do with Dr. Mike McNeese -- he calls an eBook ... I think its a perfect opportunity to try either the book feature of this system or with a straight up wiki. He wants a way to create a student centered book/textbook related to HCI written by his students -- both undergraduate and graduate. I think he originally just wanted an interactive text -- interactive in that it was online and had animations. It seems to me that it would be mush more powerful if students could use and grow the thing over time; without a bunch of developers and instructional designers getting in the way.

The way I see it, most of the eLearning stuff we've done should be built on the Read/Write Web concept that is starting to emerge. I know we used to call the content for Online IST a living textbook ... it was really static though. Even though it is all stored and published out of a databse, there is nothing dynamic about it except for the Flash-based interactions. It just sits there on screen so you can read it. If it were all in a Read/Write mode, students could annotate it, discuss it, contextualize it, and really whatever they wanted. Has some downsides, but I think its worth a little research and experimentation. At any rate, it got me thinking. Any thoughts?

Blogging for Marketing Rising

I think we all knew this and really don't need a post to explain it, but what the hell! We've just started blogs@si -- for a different reason, but in the end its all about putting the power of publishing in the hands of the community. A while back I was talking to some friends at Apple, actually egging them on to start some sort of coorporate blogging program ... didn't get too far, but they have started doing it for a few things.

This little read popped into my bloglines this morning and thought I'd shre the link ... Micro Persuasion: Corporate Blogging Rising ... sort of reminds me of hte research proposal we are organizing around community blogging and shared community ownership. See Higher Education isn't that far behind!

Imposing CMS Limitations? Why ...

I had a lunch meeting with two guys from PSU who run pieces of the ANGEL project here on our campus to talk to them about adding RSS features to the toolset. I won't bore you with the details, but I made the case that ANGEL should have multiple feeds available so students can use news readers (or the PSU Portal) to get updates, notifications of mail, calendar updates, etc without spending the 10 mins to just log into the system and look around. They liked the idea and were happy that it didn't step on the toes of the portal, but supported it. At any rate the biggest issue they are dealing with revolves around email. Someone at the University -- who will remain nameless -- has been pushing the ANGEL development team to not allow students to forward ANGEL, course-related mail out to their standard email accounts. I have talked with students about this and most, if not all, are upset about the idea. I understand adminstrators think it should stay in the system because it enables tracking, but it limits availability for students. Now, if you combine an RSS notification feature with the newly proposed "limitation" on email forwarding, you've got something. I have more to say about this and will add additional thoughts later. Off to another meeting!

Thought That Looked High

So, I included quite a few stats from the Pew Internet and American Life Project report about podcasting in my talk at the University of Missouri. Turns out, Jen Reeves was right when she thought their numbers were overblown. She felt (and even stated it in her talk) that Pew was factoring in music downloads and the like and not focusing on podcasts solely. What Pew forgot to tell us was that the 6 million or so listeners of podcasts they cited weren't really podcast-only listeners. Makes it really hard to trust sources when your sources aren't being completely honest with their data. That's just flat out too bad. Live and learn!

Talk From ADC Institute

Here are my slides from the ADC Institute as a PDF. It was a fun session, with some really great discussion. Good time. Enjoy and let me know if you want to discuss any of it. Read the description Bart Pursel wrote over at blogs@si.

Here is the podcast frothe session as well. Get it via the RSS Enclosure, or go old school and click the link. It is around 11 MB ...

ADC Talk: Tools That Change The Classroom

SI Blogging from ADC Institute

Take a look over at blogs@si-->