Cole Camplese

Being There

Interesting contrast between giving a talk face to face, like the one above from the Maryland Distance Education Conference, to my participation this week in the all Adobe Connect virtual event, CIC Clouds on the Horizon.  Talking to people face to face is honestly so much easier.  The Adobe Connect version just provides no real feedback ... its hard to know if you are hitting the mark or if people are just browsing the web on the other end.

Connecting Alumni Communities

This morning I talked to a large group of Alumni Association staff about ideas related to connecting communities. The talk was titled, Emerging Trends for Connecting Communities, and focused on the emergent opportunities within social environments, content creation spaces, and the rise of mobility. It is always quite a bit of fun getting to talk to people outside my specific area of focus and I always discover that we have far more in common than I expect going in.

Another nice thing was that I got to give the talk in my old stomping ground at the IST Building ... in the IST Cybertorium no less. That space has a lot of memories for me -- I spent several years working on planning the building with colleagues and then several more spending nearly all of my work time walking the halls. Each summer I got to teach my PA Governor School scholars in the Cybertorium and loved every minute of it.

Nothing too earth shattering with today's talk other than it served as an amazing reminder of how interesting all of what we do is to people in general. The ideas related to connecting communities move effortlessly from teaching and learning to alumni relations. I think one of the things it means to me is that the work we are doing in promoting digital expression and engaging via mediated platforms is in the sweet spot. I really don't think it has anything to do with the technology per se, but instead in what the technology provides. I received a good question about how to get alumni service groups to break out and embrace the new environments (he was asking specifically about Facebook, Twitter, etc). I responded in a way that I think surprised him a bit -- I asked him to ignore the technology and instead start to press on what it enables. Alumni Associations are all about staying connected with their communities ... so if his administration is balking at Twitter, why not ask if being able to stay ultra connected to a very active network of people is important? Coming at it from that perspective it gives you a wedge to then introduce a solution that fits that scenario.

It was a fun and very thoughtful group of people. It is honestly a real honor to get to talk to people outside my domain and have it be received in such a positive way. I especially liked getting to tell someone what ROFLMAO meant when it came up in a Twitter search. This is powerful stuff and it is relevant in so many ways ... if one stops and investigates the affordances and not just the tools.

Home from ELI 2009

This past week I was in Orlando, FL enjoying the warmth that was the ELI Annual Meeting for 2009. I did my overall recap over in my PSU blog as a travel report ... I also did that to provide some much needed reflection on the whole event and to be included in the PSU travel aggregation. If I had to sum up the event in a few words it would be really easy -- the whole thing left me feeling really energized about the state of educational technology. It seems to me that ELI continues to push the edge of the conference on many fronts. They try new things every single year and work very hard to make the event both comforting and challenging. The level of participation is always high and this year was no different.

One thing that was different about this trip were the number of colleagues that I traveled with from PSU. I was lucky to be joined by Allan, Brad, Chris, John, Carla, and Hannah -- all of us spent time in multiple sessions and lots of time thinking and reflecting together. I think having so many PSU folks travel together worked out very well. We actually took time to talk about what we were seeing, hearing, and feeling around the event. Having that opportunity was a real difference maker. The other thing I am noticing about these events is how many people I am beginning to really know from other Institutions and organizations -- I got to see Bryan Alexander, Alan Levine, Jim Groom, Carl Berger, and so many others. The whole community is coming together in a way for me personally that is hard to explain. All in all it was a blast.

I loved the challenge and opportunity to present with Alan and Jim ... figuring our how to structure a session when all three of us are in very different places wasn't easy. Going in it felt like we hadn't prepared, but in hindsight, the things we discussed have been part of our collective focus for so many years now the prep time wouldn't have mattered.

I got to work with both Brad and Carla on an ePortfolio presentation that generated lots of discussion and some follow-up emails from people. I love to find time to present and share the work of our organization at events like this, so getting the chance to do two was great.

If you are looking for details read my reflections on the event, listen to ETS Talk 52, visit the website or the listen the audio from the Not Your Grandpa's Blog session. For now I think I've said enough about the ELI 2009 event.

Web 2.0 and Community Engagement

I blogged about the talk< Allan Gyorke and I did at last week's TechForum and had posted the slides, but wanted to include a little more insight with them. The basic theme of the presentation is related to how we've been using Web 2.0 philosophies to support our work within the teaching and learning community. I sat down day before yesterday with my slides and a simple USB headset and tried out the narration recording capabilities of Keynote '08 ... long story short is that it worked. The resulting presentation is about 50 MB, but it is in iPod format and actually looks really good on my iPhone as well. I am a little surprised it was kicked out to iTunes from Keynote as an M4V ... I was actually expecting an MOV, but I didn't spend any time messing with it. If you are interested, download the file and watch. It is about 22 minutes, which is almost to the minute how long it took Allan and I to work our way through the slides ... I will also say that Allan's perspectives and thoughts are clearly missing from my solo performance here. Please provide feedback if you make it through the presentation. I am also planning to post a Flash Video version later today if the conversion works as expected. Download the Enhanced Podcast

Talking Design with Designers

Day before yesterday my colleague, Allan Gyorke, and I gave a talk to the Instructional Design and Development group at the Penn State World Campus related to Digital Expression. It is a talk I've done before and it really focuses on the platforms PSU has been working to deliver for the last 18 months or so. The talk frames the need by looking relatively deeply at the changing characteristics of our undergraduate resident population -- they are very mobile, very smart, and very plugged into social spaces (read, Facebook). I use a bunch of PSU statistics gathered by our assessment team as well as numbers from the Pew Internet and American Life Project team.

After the warm-up I tend to dive into the tools we are highlighting -- Blogs at Penn State, Podcasts at Penn State, Wikis at Penn State, as well as the Digital Commons initiative and a few others. What made this conversation different was the fact the audience was a group of instructional designer and technologists -- certainly a fun group to talk to. I was struck by how interested most of them seemed to be in the tools and how willing they were to discuss how we might think about using them. I was also struck by how excited many of them got as we continued to talk. It was a very fun hour and a half ... it left me thinking two things -- I would very much like to spend more time with groups of interested designers who are in the midst of creating lots of learning spaces and that I have now done this presentation for about a dozen audiences at Penn State but have failed to deliver it to my own staff. That last point hit me last night as I sat on the back patio with a glass of wine -- talk about having one of those reality check, "duh" moments. That is obviously something I have to do.

The thing about the talk is that it really tries to define one of my core strategies -- enabling opportunities for faculty, staff, and students to engage in the art of digital expression within the context of higher education. One of my goals is to create a platform that provides for supported use of digital tools to not only enhance teaching and learning, but that can creep into everyday life. The other thing it does is illustrates how quickly we are all moving ... two years ago these platforms didn't exist in a coherent way on our campus. The talents of many people have made it a reality.

Wow, Teachers are Smart!

I have to admit, talking to a couple hundred K-12 educators scared the hell out of me. I am used to higher education and corporate audience so my talk as the lunch keynote for the Third Annual One to One conference was well outside of my comfort zone. Turns out we are all in the same boat - huge challenges in driving acceptance, adoption, and diffusion of innovation within our environments. I had an hour and fifteen minutes to cram a couple of years worth of content related to web 2.0 and how it plays in the education environment into ... the talk I did was a reshaped version of my "Enabling the New Classroom Conversation" talk I assembled a while back. I had to do some new stuff with it to make it appropriate for the audience, but at the end of the day I think we engaged in some really meaningful conversation.

As always I'll make my slides available as a PDF, but I have to admit that I am disappointed that the talk wasn't captured ... this audience could use some long term take aways to help further their cause. Is it just me or is the notion of recording talks still a big deal for conferences?

I got great feedback and the nods of encouragement left me feeling very good about the state of teachers in our world. These are people who are genuinely interested in transforming what they do with the technology that they do have at their fingertips. Here's a huge issue I didn't expect coming into it -- the notion of schools blocking/filtering access to the tools we look at on a daily basis is disturbing. My big takeawsy is that we all need to be part of the equation and that teachers are working so hard to do great things with their students (BTW, those are our kids). All I have to say is that I wish I would've liked my teachers in middle and high school as much as I loved talking with this group today. BTW, thanks much for the kind words!

Web 2007 at Penn State

Today I had the pleasure of presenting at the 10th annual Penn State Web Conference. This is the second year in a row that I have presented at this conference and it was just as much fun this year. Jim Leous and I revived our Web 2.0 in the Higher Education Enterprise act for this year ... offering a bit of a status update on the state of Web 2.0 stuff going on here at PSU. Sort of cool to look back and see that at this time last year we were presenting dreams about University wide blogging, podcasting, and general Web 2.0 adoption and this year we were able to show what our emerging services look like. What great feeling it is to be talking about reality and not just "imagine if you will ..." kind of stuff. I feel like we have made real progress in the last 18 months or so.

I really enjoying getting to present with Jim ... he has been an innovator on our campus for so many years and he has insight into why things are the way they are that so many others don't. He and I try to make it a fun and light session when we do this and I hope we pulled it off this year. It was also nice to see the conference bring a blog online this year as well as encourage people to tag items in del.icio.us and Flickr with "psuweb2007" ... walking the talk is an important piece to the puzzle. By all accounts it seemed like a successful day and one that hope continues to push our overall awareness towards emerging web trends forward. I will also say it is so good to see close to 300 people (all from PSU) kicking the web tires. The next step has to invovle getting members of this community together with the learning design community in some sort of un-conference way to really get the conversation rolling. No matter how you cut it, I had a good time today.

My schedule continues to be hectic as tomorrow it is off to Pittsburgh to spend time learning more about Google and what they do ... that should be a blast. Back in town Wed and getting ready for another talk at the Technology in Business Education conference. Again, new audiences and new challenges ... should be fun and interesting. I will attempt to post thoughts about it all as it happens.

Penn State on iTunes U and Podcasting Talk

I gave a talk at the ITS Forum yesterday with a colleague here at Penn State related to Podcasting and Penn State on iTunes U yesterday. Jimmy V focused on the hard core technology behind making the iTunes U system work in our environment, while I did a more general talk focusing on why we would do podcasting at the Institutional level, an update on the state of podcasting in general, and a full on demo of our iTunes U space. Reaction was fairly positive ... there is a podcast and a videocast of the session being produced -- I'll link that when it is available.