Cole Camplese

Social Media Lesson

A couple of weeks ago we held our annual Symposium on Teaching and Learning with Technology here at Penn State. It was an amazing event once again -- this time with just shy of 400 faculty and staff choosing to spend a beautiful Saturday with us. Our keynotes rocked, with David Wiley supplying a rallying call towards openness that has helped move our OER conversations forward. At lunch, danah boyd delivered a whirlwind of a talk that people are still buzzing about. One thing in particular was how both David and danah hung out with us not only the night before, but all day on Saturday. Up until this year none of our previous keynotes have stayed and chilled with us -- they even joined us for the post Symposium party afterwards.

Sessions were excellent and the conversations in the hallways was lively. I could go on and on, but nearly all the sessions are now captured over at the Symposium site -- including David's keynote with a slick side by side widescreen presentation that our Digital Commons team came up with (danah is coming soon).

But this post is about something related ... two things are lingering in my mind after the event. The first is how much Twitter was used during the event itself. The tltsym09 hashtag turned into a trending topic early in the morning -- sometime during David's opening keynote. That in and of itself is really cool and very interesting. The Twitter stream of the day is long and it does tell a bit of a story all by itself. But, sometime during the morning I realized that people weren't really blogging the event like they had in the past -- does a Twitter stream provide enough for those not there to grab onto? With the lack of sessions being blogged I am afraid we could be doing the event a disservice. I'd love to hear thoughts on how to take the Twitter stream and do some real sense making on it all.

The other big social media lesson I am taking away from the event has to do with Flickr and community tagging. Early on we decided to use the tltsym09 tag for the event across the social web. We were thrilled to see hundreds of photos flow into the tag aggregation on Flickr. What I wasn't thrilled about was the hijacking of the tag by a cross dresser on his bed in lingerie. It didn't offend me per se, but I know for a fact (from a couple of emails) some folks were mortified and I was asked to "fix" it. Flickr doesn't really allow me to delete tags from other peoples' photos and while the pictures clearly didn't fit into our group, there was nothing about the pictures that would cause Flickr to pull them. Turns out it was simple to just contact the guy and ask nicely -- he removed the tag.

This is one of the reasons people are terrified of openness and the social web -- lack of control. It has caused us to rethink our own use of the social web, so we've created a Flickr account that will be the repository for our pictures, but it doesn't solve the community stuff. I think we need to have a conversation about how we take advantage of the social web in light of the fact that it is as simple as watching the trending tags on Twitter Search and hijacking them to insert your product, pictures, etc into the flow of the emergent conversation. Funny how even after all these years of participating in an increasingly open way, we can continue to learn and adapt our usage to really take advantage of what we are learning.

Any thoughts?

Asking New Questions

This morning as I was plowing through the post TLT Symposium haze I came across a track back to a couple of my posts last week over at my friend and colleague, Dr. Chris Brady's site titled "Technology revolution or evolution." I started to leave a comment at Chris' blog, but thought I might work to extend the conversation a bit by offering a little bit more thought to my response. In so many ways I agree completely with what Chris is saying, but wanted to extend it just a bit.

While I don't see any massive revolution on the horizon in the teaching space, I do see a continual refinement of our understanding of the affordances emerging (or emerged) technologies have on classroom practice. I don't think web 2.0 is any more related to scholarship than the chalkboard when taken by itself. When I argue that new forms of scholarship are emerging, I am asking people to consider there are new opportunities to ask new types of questions that couldn't be asked before. Take for example the "Texas Slavery Project" from the University of Richmond. When I got a chance to sit down and listen to the researchers behind it, they insisted that being able to visualize data in this environment caused them to ask questions they hadn't considered before -- that is, the technology was used to create new scholarship opportunities.

We've started working with quite a few humanities faculty here at ETS to let them do things with these tools that couldn't be done before. If we dismiss the notion that these tools are somehow outside the boundaries of scholarship (and I do not believe Chris was saying that) we are not maximizing our new ability to attack new and interesting questions.

So back to the conversation around the Twitter use in the classroom that Scott McDonald and I stumbled upon ... we are eager to investigate these same kinds of emergent questions in classrooms -- the outcome of the Twitter use in class last year was shocking to me and without that experience I would not be able to question the value of backchannel conversations as enablers of learning. This is just a question that would not exist without the initial disruption. Is a revolution coming? Perhaps, but it will feel more like a glacier moving across the frozen tundra -- a few centimeters at a time. But to me, that works because each step makes a big difference for a few students.

Symposium 2009

Today kicks off the TLT Symposium weekend and I couldn't be more excited. Throughout the year I travel to events across the country and it is always so cool when I can sit back and watch our own kick off and inspire people right here at home. This year is our largest Symposium to date -- over 400 people are registered! The theme this year is "Reimagine" ... we are placing that in front of all sorts of concepts -- scholarship, literacy, portfolios, etc. It is a powerful message at the right time. We've followed an arc of sorts in the planning of these events over the last few years -- first we introduced emerging web 2.0 stuff, then we brought a view into how to implement them in the classroom, last year we highlighted faculty doing great things, and this year the focus is on students and outcomes. A really nice four year cycle.

The Symposium team, led by Jeff Swain, have done an amazing job. Everything is first rate -- down to the posters, the program, and every other single little detail. We'll have two keynotes from David Wiley and danah boyd that I think will inspire the collective audiences. Last year we had Lessig who blew open the idea that we should all be rethinking copyright and I know David's message of open education will help us take the next step. danah will spend time sharing critical insights into the social web and how our audiences participate ... it is going to be great! We'll have man on the street interviewers, a video production team, a demonstration room showing off our Educational gaming initiative, and so much more. The keynotes will be recorded and shared as they happen and all the sessions will be blogged and twittered (watch the hashtag #tltsym09). All in all I expect it to be a great event. Take a look at just one of the videos we produced leading up to the event.