Cole Camplese

My Pre-Blog Challenge

I have been doing a lot of thinking about the long-term value of this space since my six year post last month. The thing I have been thinking about is how to bring "pre-blog" work back to life within the context of today, but with the original content of yesterday. I know that sounds really odd, but as I have been thinking about how killer it is to have six years worth of writing and sharing available in this space I have come to the conclusion that I have neglected things from the years prior to that.

My friend and colleague, Scott McDonald, and I are constantly talking about how important it is for us to become curators of our own content -- sort of like personal librarians. Not really to expose the work more widely, but to have it in a way that it is organized and managed. With all this in mind I recently went through a couple of boxes of 3.5" floppies left over from middle school, high school, and college to see if anything is still living. What I found was disappointing in that very few of the disks were still readable ... to my point, I let all that go away. What I did harvest I tried to make sense of and organize in new digital archives.

Yesterday, Brad Kozlek and I were talking about some of these ideas and I mentioned that I might start putting some old content here to work it into this space. I want to find a way to bring it into the larger story this space tells about me ... and that story certainly started well before my first post here in 2004.

So, with that in mind, the month of August will be my Pre-Blog Challenge month where I will attempt to get as much old stuff in here as I can. At the moment, I am using the category PreBlog to organize all of it. I am also dating back to the original date that the files themselves have on them ... so my archives now stretch back into the 1990s ... I am hoping to find some even older items as time goes by (I might even have to retype some stuff). My only rule is that I cannot edit the content (as much as I might want to) and have to let it simply hang out as it was when written. I've already discovered some interesting things about myself by reading my own words 15 years later. I am also sure as I go along some of what I post won't be text, but might include old video, pictures, or audio. Who knows. Anyone else doing something like this and want to join in my new one something a day challenge?

Six Years

It seems sort of amazing that today is the six year anniversary of this blog space. Amazing because that is such a short time ... I always honestly feel like I've been here for a heck of a lot longer. I started publishing with "modern" blog software using Blogger back on 7/28/2004 and have been writing mostly in one place since. I've been through Blogger, WordPress, and am currently enjoying TypePad to manage my writing and posting. Funny thing is that 2004 wasn't my first trip around the blogging track, but it marks the time I started to take the idea of managing my own content seriously.

Prior to 2004 I was publishing online in lots of ways and places, scattering my content into spaces that I had no real control over. I set up blogging-like tools as early as 1998 when I first got to Penn State using UserLand Frontier. At the time it wasn't blogging per se, but I was using a toolset that I built on the Frontier framework that allowed me to do two things with relative ease for the time -- automate creating updates for my projects and to create eLearning course materials with the push of a few buttons. I remember showing it to people and most folks looked at me like I was crazy ... they were all using Claris HomePage (or something like that to create visual layouts) and pushing them via FTP to webspace. I had been through the rise of the early days of HTML first hand rolling everything (remember hand coding image maps?), then moving into WYSIWYG tools, and finally arriving at the notion that the content was so much more important than the layout. A lesson I still have trouble sharing with people.

This space has represented quite a bit to me over the last six years. It has given me an online time machine that I can get in to see what I was thinking about and working on in the recent past. It has given me an outboard brain to store thoughts, images, and conversation starters unlike any paper notebook ever has. Most importantly it has given me a place to practice my writing with an audience in mind. The notion that when I type here I have the power to publish, share, and engage the Internet is still an amazing feeling. I don't write as much as I used to and I know I have a very small readership compared to many others, but the notion that what I say here has the power to reach any corner of the unfiltered web is astonishing to me.

The last six years have moved quickly and the web has grown into the ideas I first learned about by reading the Cluetrain Manifesto. I am proud of this space even though it could be viewed as a relatively insignificant contribution to the larger conversation happening all over the Internet at any given time. It is my space and that is all that matters.

The emergence of Twitter and Facebook has challenged and changed the way I write, what I write about, and where I do my sharing. But even in today's one-button hyper connected web, I know there is a void that is filled with this space. I haven't been as active here for lots of reasons, but I find myself constantly thinking about writing here and for the most part that is almost as important as actually doing the writing. This blog has taught me how to engage myself in an internal dialogue before I write, it has taught me how to think about engaging people in online conversations, and it has made me a much better communicator. I believe this blog has helped me grow in my career in some very serious ways and I certainly believe it has helped me grow as a person. This space has helped me take more risks -- and those risks are calculated and reflected upon in deeper ways because of this space.

At the end of the day this space was started as a place for me to better understand the emergence of the read/write web and it just clicked with me. Many of the initiatives I have pressed forward the last several years are a projection of my own growth through the use of personal publishing platform for expression, reflection, and engagement. I hope the Internet keeps changing and I keep taking advantage of it as a platform to help track my own growth.

Mipper Rogers

PBS, though, hopes that Mr. Rogers will live on for children — online. Last month, PBS began streaming full-length episodes of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” on both its Rogers site and its PBSKids site. “We think about Fred every single day,” said Lesli Rotenberg, senior vice president for children’s media at PBS. “The PBSKids site is based on a philosophy that I think he pioneered of looking at the whole child.”

via www.nytimes.com

When I was little I would sit on the couch every evening to watch Mipper Rogers -- that's what I called him. Almost everything I know about interpersonal behavior can be traced to his lessons. The fact that his reruns aren't shown on any of the channels I get is a crime. Am I being too nostalgic or is there nothing like him around today? Read the NYTimes piece and make sure you watch the video below (even though I've linked it before) ... if you care about people and education it makes you smile. Even if it makes me a hippy.

Visualizing my Life

I was meeting with Scott McDonald this morning talking about a few things and the topic of data visualization came up. I've been interested in visualizing data since working on the Horizon Report, especially to get a handle on what is happening in my professional life ... as an example tracking projects in meaningful ways has always been difficult for me. I'm not really all that interested in time spent on the projects, but more along the lines of where on campus we have touch points, who are we working with, and what kinds of things are we doing are all much more interesting to me. I've just not found a way to really map all that.

Scott showed me DAYTUM as an example of simple personal data tracking and visualization ... I was instantly floored by what I saw. It gives you a really simple way to keep track of all sorts of things. I doubt it will solve the issue I mentioned above, but I am kicking the tires a bit with some personal things -- at the moment I am tracking my daily exercise time either running or on Wii Fit, how I spend each day of the month (working not working, vacation, or sick), and the number of meetings I have across certain categories. I think it'll help me get a better snapshot of where my time goes in a week. I doubt I'll produce anything like the Feltron Report, but who knows where it could lead.

Scott and I instantly jumped to ideas on how we might use it in class. Next week we think we will be asking them to design some ways to take advantage of it and visualize their collected data over a few weeks and see what they come up with.

Depression Sets In

The forcast for the next two weeks is nothing short of depressing. I'm taking bets on if we can make it through to Spring.

Getting Disruptive

My colleague Scott McDonald and I are getting set to embark on the second running of our Disruptive Technologies for Teaching and Learning course this Spring. We attack this thing as a grand experiment, not really knowing what to expect fully but with hopes of high level activity. We know some things will work and some things will not, but at the core of our design philosophy we feel OK with that. We spent a couple of hours yesterday putting some more touches on what we hope will be an open and engaging learning opportunity. What is emerging is what we hope to be a very powerful mix of academic rigor and applied technology investigations.

So far we have solid numbers in this graduate only course and know we'll find ways to push our students into unfamiliar and uncomfortable waters. Scott and I have big questions heading into this new semester -- primarily what technologies will move the students into the same kind of round the clock learning community we saw emerge last time? We feel like we are better prepared to collect data from the get go and see how we can be more systematic about sharing the things we learn. The course is timely as Scott and I recently completed an article that focuses on the key trends and drivers we see as disrupting current classroom practice. The article should be available in the next month or so, but we will be using it as a kicking off point for the course this Spring.

For those of you who are interested I will be posting thoughts about the course here during the semester and you can also watch as the course will evolve in the open at the course site. We are taking a cue from another one of our PSU colleagues (and TLT Faculty Fellow) ,Dr. Christopher Long, who has been talking about the course site not as a blog per se, but as an ongoing text that is contributed to by all the members of the course. Our goal is to keep our course site going semester over semester so that current students can build on the work of the past. Another grand experiment I suppose!