I got my new MacBook Pro yesterday morning. I was thrilled ... it combined the keyboard I've loved from the Air with the speed and screen size of the 15" MacBook Pro. I couldn't have been happier. And then I felt the crushing blow that was the WWDC Keynote. I fully expected a speed bump -- I went and pushed the speed of my new laptop to a custom level because of it. I did not expect such an aggresive update so soon after the announcement of the uni-body machines not too long ago. The battery life is the thing, I travel and sit in meetings without a power outlet -- a lot. The extra few hours is a real difference. I also really like the SD slot ... one less cable to carry. All in all it is a shame.
The other thing this means is that my love affair with my Air is waning. I still love the form factor, but it has gotten to the point where my expectations of performance has outpaced the affordances of a very small machine. I thought long and hard about a 13" MacBook, but that was before it became part of the Pro lineup and at the time it didn't seem to add up. It doesn't mean however that my "year in the cloud" hasn't fundamentally changed my computing habits ... I am still working really hard to keep my machine lean and mean. I did break down and install Word although I doubt I'll use it much given how much I rely on Google Docs.
I spent at least half of this past year living mostly on a MacBook Air and I have been very happy with my transition to a mostly cloud based portable experience. I don’t have Office, Adobe PhotoShop, or many other large apps running on it — and I don’t miss them one bit. I have adopted Google Docs, learned how to use Apple’s built in Preview App and iPhoto to do image editing, taken lots of notes in Evernote, listened to my music online at La La, and have used this space and my PSU blog as an outboard brain with much success. I’ve found relying on local storage as being a limiting factor — and I am betting that more and more students will move in this direction this year.
So while I am moving back into the land of a bigger laptop, I am still committed to using less client based software and to keep things floating out there. I just wish that I would have waited another couple of hours to open the damn box for my old MacBook Pro.
Last night I spent some time with "the not ready for prime time" version of Google Chrome for Mac OSX. I didn't think I'd like it on any level, but have heard that it is really fast using the Google tools. I can say that it is fast, really fast when using the Google suite -- Reader, Docs, Calendar, and iGoogle. All were noticeably faster than what I am used to with Safari. After playing with this early build I am already convinced Google is on to something with a browser that is optimized for web applications. I know for a fact that I'll be spending quite a bit of time in Chrome once it when it gets a bit more stable.
I've never been much of a Firefox fan, so the idea of using a non-Safari browser hasn't really been high on my list. But if Chrome continues to progress and if the features continue to develop I'll use it quite a bit. I've stepped away from using Office except for very rare occasions so having a faster and more feature rich browser to live in Docs is very appealing to me. This could essentially be the space a good portion of my productivity and collaboration happens -- especially after Google Wave comes along.
If you'll indulge me for a minute there is one thing the notion of a browser built for specific purposes reminds me of ... an idea I had over ten years ago -- a browser built to support education. It seems insane now that we'd need such a thing, but back in 1998 bandwidth was scarce and the level of interactivity was very low (unless you embedded a bunch of shockwave pieces). What I was thinking about was a client application that had all sorts of standard functionality built in that a simple text file could unlock. If you needed to do complex in-browser activities, the browser itself had the functionality and the text file would simply provide the content and the context to let it happen. All the tracking would have happened on the client side and be pushed to the server when a network connection was available. Seems hilarious now, but it seemed to make so much sense at the time. I know it is funny, but lots of ideas look silly after progress ... I wonder if all the stuff we are hyped about now will look insane in 10 years?
For all of my heavy duty photography needs I use Apple's Aperture. I don't necessarily use it to adjust photos, I use it as a giant digital shoebox. I made the switch earlier this year when my photo count went up over 30,000 digital pictures ... iPhoto just seemed to slow to a crawl. I've been happy, but have missed the ease and simplicity of iPhoto.
Then about a month or so ago I started to tinker with my pictures, looking to get more out of them. Honestly inspired by some of the things I was seeing Brad Kozlek doing on the post-production side has gotten me really interested in trying (and I stress trying) to make my pictures a bit more visually interesting. With this in mind I have been tweaking things in Aperture and then working to achieve some Lomo like effects using Photoshop. Its been fun and I've learned a little bit about the tools.
Last weekend I was in Chautauqua, NY and found myself without Photoshop or Aperture and only had iPhoto. I took a little down time to experiment with a couple of my shots and really was impressed with what could be done without even touching a slider and instead just layering the built in effects. I had no idea I could apply multiple levels of the effects to make pictures more interesting ... I sort of figured all I could do was change a picture to black and white and move on. Not that the simple effects will do it for seasoned professionals, but I think they do a fair job for the newbies out there.
I thought I'd share this given how simple it is and that iPhoto is a very nice free alternative to much more expensive (and complex) tools available for the Mac. Below you can take a look at the iPhoto version with the simple settings in the screen cap above. Granted I don't like it as much as the fake lomo version I did in Photoshop, but with some practice I am guessing I could get close right out of iPhoto ... Also, I bet if I went back through my 10 year digital photo collection and actually paid attention to what I kept I could still be living in iPhoto. I doubt I'll go back, but I also know I won't need to install Aperture on my new laptop ... iPhoto should be a solid mobile solution.
I should know better than to post more about this concept given the lack of interest (perhaps my lack of clarity) in my previous piece on it, but I am really interested in generating conversations about it. My friend and colleague, Brad Kozlek, has been working with Intense Debateon his blog showing what it looks like from an end user perspective ... Brad does an excellent job of discussing the affordances of this specific tool offers. I think the idea that it is a service unto itself allows it to do so much more than simply handle standard text comments ... to me that is exciting in light of at least two of our faculty fellows this summer. If you are interested in what a third party commenting engine can provide jump over and take a look at it in action at my PSU blog.
One of our Fellows, Chris Long, is exploring the notion of "digital dialogues" to start to understand if the platforms of the web 2.0 world can support ongoing dialogue with deeper meaning. From Chris' post at the TLT Faculty Fellow site describing his investigations ...
In Plato's dialogue Gorgias, Socrates claims to be one of the only Athenians to practice the true art of politics. As is well known, Socrates haunted the public places in Athens looking for young people with whom he could converse. During these discussions, Socrates was intent on turning the attention of those he encountered toward the question of the good and the just. It is difficult to understate the lasting political power these dialogues have had over the course of time. Yet the emergence of social Web 2.0 technologies opens new possibilities for this ancient practice of politics, which Socrates fittingly called in the Gorgias, a "techne," or art.
When we started exploring the notion of using an external commenting engine to support some of the work Carla Zembaul-Saul wanted to think about this summer, we instantly saw these new affordances giving Chris new ways to explore his thinking -- commenting inline via video is a huge step forward in our minds to relate to his work.
While this interesting itself, the thing I was really interested in was not what you saw when you arrived at a given blog, it was what it looked like from a personal administrative side ... I was interested in being able to think about how what my (or students') contributions look like across the social web. We post and comment traditionally in a vertical fashion, while what we need is an easy way to track those contributions once we leave the vertical. So if lots of people, perhaps across the PSU blog service, could use a a service that keeps track of our horizontal conversations something really exciting could emerge. Something that would let us look at all of these horizontal contributions with ties to the original context. Since it is a service on its own, it has a set of dashboard tools that pulls it all together -- people you are following, certain keywords emerge, your own comments, links to the original posts, and more. This is the side of it that makes me really hopeful.
If we can make this happen the way we are thinking about it we can empower some new uses for our platform. Chris gets his ability to engage people where they are in multiple mediums and Carla gets a way to use comments as measurable artifacts. I gain the ability to introduce this to my friend, Keith Bailey, in the College of Arts and Architecture as a viable platform to teach art appreciation -- in that world, the idea of the critique is as important as the original contribution. So having an easy way for a faculty member to track contributions across many posts as a way to review and reflect on a given student's growth in the critique space is now very easy. If we can work to understand how to capture and pack up a single person's comments across lots of posts I think we are moving towards giving them more to reflect on and faculty a better set of evidence to base assessment on. At least I think so ... any thoughts?
Writing can be so effortless at times ... and then there are other times where it is next to impossible. The last two months have proven to be very lean writing months for me personally and I am very disappointed by it for lots of reasons. As I've said before, the idea of writing often is to help me keep track of thoughts and put little time stamps on ideas. I've done two One Post a Day challenges in the last year and they have both kicked my ass -- they've left me angry, inspired, exhausted, and so much in between that I really don't know if it is good for me or not. I like the idea of challenging myself, but I am also very aware of what it does to my psyche ... it pushes me to compose and post things that require a lot of thought and effort and while that is a good thing the larger impact is daunting. But like I said, writing often is personally important. I'm thinking I need some inspiration.
So when my friend and colleague, Allan Gyorke, left a comment on my last post about the idea of a "One X Per Day Challenge" for the month of July I thought it might be an interesting experiment. What the "X" consists of is really up to you. On one hand I like the idea of building, sharing, creating something every single day for a month, but on the other I fear I might have a tendency to mail it in. Folks like D'Arcy and Alan do the amazing one flickr post a day and I know they rarely mail it in, but I wonder if I would simply bail on it somewhere in the middle and start posting crap. I just don't know. I know the one thing that really pushes me is writing, so I wonder how creating other forms of stories would treat me.
Maybe it would be as rewarding and exhausting -- just in different ways. Either way, if I do engage in it I'll want to set some ground rules. I would also want to use my blog as the place where I keep track of the contributions -- and if I do that well, each entry might look more like a reflection of the artifacts instead of just a simple pointer to it. As I sit here and write about the idea I am coming around to it. It would force me to think about different ways to share, it would push me to participate every day, and it would let me engage in some real reflective activity while I work to make sure it lives on in my personal space. This is sounding better ... anyone up for a challenge?
Last week was strange on several levels. It was an odd set of experiences that have left me more confused than usual ... so much so that I have been unable to figure out how to write about it all. I attended and presented twice at the Chronicle of Higher Education's Tech Forum event in Washington DC and while I was really excited to attend I left feeling a bit down. I don't think it was the event that did it to me, I just think the overall vibe was way outside of my sweet spot. It was a crowd that seemed to be much more interested in yesterday than tomorrow -- and as a critical reflection, that may seem a bit short sighted or jaded but that is how I left feeling. If you look at the Twitter search results from the hashtag I introduced I think you can see a bit of the tension, although there may have only been a dozen of us using our Internet voice while things were happening. It felt like an event that was working really hard to connect with fresh ideas, but was not quite ready to let go of old constructs and have some really difficult discussions. With that said, I did learn quite a bit and I met some really interesting people while there ... to top it all off, I got to present and spend time with a great friend and make some new ones. I am honestly hoping the CHE does this again and maybe invites some of us to be a part of the planning for the event. I would definitely go back -- if they'll have me.
As a personal aside, I firmly believe my talks did little to stir up the crowd in any sort of proactive ways -- there were lots of folks who dismissed what I had to say as being fluffy and not based on the perceived rigors of traditional scholarship. Of course I was running a risk by showing youtube videos of Charlie getting his finger chomped on, but I wasn't using the videos as the message -- I was using them as a metaphor for the explosion of new forms of conversations happening all over the social web. I know for a fact I missed the mark with at least one audience member who had his hand up even before I finished ... his comment created a strange segue into the open discussion portion ... and he was serious.
If that is scholarship, we are all doomed.
Never mind the session was titled, "Building the Classroom of the Future" ... these folks wanted to hear something else. It was very comforting when a woman in the audience raised her hand and told an amazing story about her 8th grade son who decided to (on his own) create a new religion. At first I was nervous where it was going, but the way she described his passion and his intensity as he researched existing doctrine to come to his own conclusions was the exact right kind of example we needed to get back from the edge of being "doomed." Interestingly enough I spent time talking to one of the other people in the audience who really challenged my notions and he was far more interested in having a dialogue in a more private setting, even telling me he found the talk "engaging and interesting." He didn't seem that way during the session as he told me that all this was fine and good for the soft sciences, but there is no room for distractions in the real sciences (he was a mechanical engineer). Not sure I agree and when we did talk he told me how he does use youtube to show difficult concepts.
But perhaps the biggest stir came after the event when the Chronicle ran two separate stories on my message ... the first was titled, "Web 2.0 Classrooms Versus Learning." I was a bit upset with the use of the word "versus," but I am guessing conflict sells -- I felt as though a more appropriate title might have used the word, "supports" or even "and" as a replacement. Oh well ... it created some dialogue. The thing that seemed to blow the doors off it all came about as Jeff Young from the Chronicle called me as I was driving home to talk to me about some things I mentioned about how my colleague, Scott McDonald, and I used Twitter during our classes. In the piece titled, "Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class -- via Twitter" my ideas come off as a product of a crazy mad scientist using my students as guinea pigs and my class as an out of control research lab. The comment stream speaks for itself -- this is a heavy debate and one that I am really hoping to engage in here locally. I think we have a lot of new opportunities to capture students imagination and engage them in new ways -- if we are looking to be a bit crazy ... well, here's to the crazy ones!
And so it was an odd week that has me wondering if what I have to say really does resonate with people or if I am getting the polite nod because people actually think it is all bullshit. Not sure, but I am working to check my own confidence level and working hard this week to get my mojo rising for our own TLT Symposium. I really need to hang out with a group of really engaged and excited educators to get my head back on -- and trust me, we have them here at PSU! Maybe I'm not ready to deal with the truth that nothing we do will matter outside these walls -- or maybe that is the bullshit in it all. Perhaps those who call it all fluff are holding onto something that no longer exists, maybe notions of control, or maybe that never did exist? I don't know. Do you?
The debate over when to build, buy, or use is one that rages in higher education information technology units all the time. I am constantly asked why we'd run that service versus just relying on someone else to host it for us. I sit in meetings where the debate over taking something off the shelf for our use is weighed against our desire to build it. It never ends and I don't expect to ever really have a solid answer.
Not too long ago, I was sitting and talking to Brad Kozlek about our choice to run our own blogging platform. I go through these massive swings about the topic -- usually settling somewhere around, "why not just lean on wordpress.com and focus on training and adoption." That argument works on lots of levels. On this particular day we came to another conclusion about why it is so important that we are running our own service -- the potential for community.
Several weeks ago I was lucky enough to spend time talking and presenting with Dr. Abdur Chowdhury, Chief Scientist at Twitter ... I wrote about it then, but have been thinking about it nearly nonstop. What became incredibly clear to me was that Twitter is sitting on an Ocean of data. Data that they are working really hard to turn into meaningful content. If you go to the Twitter Search page you'll see that they are making sense out of this data and showing us how clearly the social web is plugged into what is happening. They have their "Trending topics" displayed right below their search field and it shows you what we are all talking about 140 characters at a time. I'm sure many of you have heard the story about how reports in Mumbai were first broadcast via Twitter and the first picture of the plane landing in the Hudson River came through the same channel -- its obvious that what is wrong with big media is the same thing that is so very right with the social web -- connections building community that is, in the case of Abdur and Twitter, predicting the future as it happens.
So back to the Blogs at Penn State ... as Brad and I sat there we realized we are sitting on a river of data that is built entirely on people right here at PSU. Now that we are reaching the 10,000 user milestone with the service we are seeing an explosion in the understanding and use of tags for filtering content. Courses are using them to aggregate student posts together, students are using them to mark portfolio entries, departments are using them to pull information/knowledge about initiatives into focus, and so on. Once we realized that we started to realize that we could begin to act a little bit like Twitter and use our data to see trends and ultimately predict the future as it unfolds. With this in mind we're working on a few new and interesting ways to not only tap into the community but also ways to let them move the state of the University around a bit.
A simple example is something I'm loosely calling, "PSU Voices." Essentially we would hand out a tag each month (or perhaps week) related to topic we'd like to see the community explore. Imagine during April (when Earth Day is) asking the student body to write, or post pictures, videos about "ideas to make PSU a more green campus?" We'd ask that question, provide a tag, and watch as the aggregate posts of that month's conversation came into focus. If we took a simple advertisement out in the student newspaper, The Daily Collegian, to get people to participate I wonder if they would? If they did I think the results would be amazing.
We've already started to pull out some trending data based on the popular tags and we are seeing some really interesting things. It was clear last week that lots of students were working on their portfolios. One of the next steps is to build an interface between the tag and content search to see what people are talking about in mass ... I can't even imagine how interesting that could look when we have 20,000 or 30,000 people writing regularly around PSU. I'm not ready to share the pages yet, but I am hoping that in the next couple of weeks we'll start to see the unintended results of running our own service -- the ability to not create community, but to coalesce it. Anyone have thoughts related to these ideas and others?
I made it through a One Post a Day challenge now for the second time and it feels good to be on the other side. One thing that happened this time around is that lots of people decided to join the conversation -- I ended up writing 30 posts and getting 229 comments (right up there with the best ever months). I have to say that reading the comments really helped me think more deeply about the things I was writing about and it certainly pushed me to stay more engaged with my thinking. It was the first time in a long time that I was able to focus energy in a general direction over a series of posts which is typically a problem for me. Like in August when I did this before, I found it both extremely difficult but very rewarding. This time around I found myself really pouring intense energy and thought into what I was writing. So with all of that, I say thank you to all who spent time reading, commenting, retweeting my posts, sending me emails, and talking to me about the things I was writing about. And I will say a sincere thanks to Allan Gyorke for pushing me down this path when I didn't want to.
Closing out the month of One Post a Day ... its been a crazy experience that was even more complicated this time than when I did it back in August. It was well worth it however and I want to acknowledge those who went along for the challenge with me -- Allan, Brad, Erin in ETS and several of the students in the Schreyer Honors College as well. All of the PSU One Post a Days can be seen in a tag aggregation at the Blogs at PSU.
With that said, I'd still like to explore an idea ...
My colleague Allan Gyorke is leading a group looking at informal learning spaces on campus and they are doing some interesting work exploring spaces that are outside of our classrooms. With that in mind I wanted to ask what our classrooms should look like in higher education to embrace the future. I have a few ideas, but would love to hear more.
One thing I really think we should do is design a classroom that can project two sources to two different screens. This would allow faculty to teach with supporting content as they do now (typically PowerPoint, Keynote, or a web page), but would also engage in bringing the back channel to the front. I've done presentations and taught with a Twitter stream of a specific hashtag running behind me and it completely changes the dynamic of the room. For the most part our students have technology at their fingertips, why not work to engage them.
I'd have no problem working to socialize a tool like Twitter or the Harvard Live Question tool over the course of the first couple weeks of class. I think by doing that we'd see some really interesting things emerge. Twitter is becoming a powerful platform to do just about anything on, not sure why we aren't seeing more teaching with it ... it seems ideal as a place to engage in lots of good backchannel conversation. I think the students are ready ... if you walk past any modern classroom there is technology everywhere.
An additional thing I've been thinking about is using a blog as a real time reflective environment. Invite students to comment on a post during class and see how things emerge. When we teach too many times we ask questions and get really very little verbal engagement ... would that change if the conversation was seeded by blog comments? I am guessing yes.
To do any of this stuff you need a room to support it. I think a room that can project meaningful teaching materials as well as the backchannel is key to exploring this new way of teaching. What do you think?
The picture below can be snapped in public schools across the Commonwealth of PA. I'm guessing the teachers, administration, and students earned it given the requirements of the State standards ... on some level I wonder how they feel about it when they walk by? What I am discouraged about as a parent and educator is that this and the other ones like it bearing several other years hangs proudly in the school's entryway ... D'Arcy noted on my Flickr posting that it might as well be one of the signs you see in factories that proudly tell us that there have been no injuries in the last X days.
The first things I thought when I saw it were (a) it looks like the PA Department of Transportation made it, (b) how disappointing it was that they would hang it, and (c) this is the representation of our children's contribution to the school.
Is it possible, given all the creative and intellectual contributions our children make, the Commonwealth of PA couldn't have chosen something other than "Adequate" to describe the progress. Why have I seemed angry? This is a big part of the reason.
ad•e•quate, satisfactory or acceptable in quality or quantity.
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