Cole W. Camplese

Happy New Year!

Not much to say at the moment ... I am actually relaxing and enjoying being off the grid. I am getting ready to do some travel in the coming weeks -- I am heading back to Arizona to give a couple of talks back in the Maricopa system. I did one there last year and really enjoyed the people I got to talk with their. For now, I am staying off the grid and will probably be posting pictures of my travels over at Flickr. For now, I thought I'd share a quick picture of some really bad signage I saw yesterday at Downtown Disney.

Who wouldn't like a Hot Roast Beef Smoothie?

Merry Christmas, Chumby!

So after Allan introduced me to the Chumby on ETS Talk 36 a couple weeks ago, I decided to ask Santa for one. Well, under the tree this morning there was a shiny new web-enabled widget player. What I like about it is the openness of the platform. All I've done so far is embed a few of their sample widgets, but I'll do more with it after breakfast.

At any rate, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

ETS Year in Review

We had our last staff meeting of the year this morning here at ETS ... I was going to cancel given the amazingly bad weather we are having, but late last night I decided not to do that and instead to forgo the usual house cleaning, project updates and operational policy discussions and simply say thank you to the group for an amazing year of work and effort. I tried to share some of the highlights from the year with them ... a list of things way too long to cover as quickly as I wanted to came to mind. So instead of a huge laundry list of stuff I picked a handful of our largest impact initiatives and shared some highlights and some thoughts. I linked to the slides below without audio in Flash format. If you are interested, just click the image below to check them out (it is 5 MB). As always, comments are welcome!

It is also important to note that there are people all over ITS and the University in general who have had a big hand in these things.

MT Goes Open Source

Just a quick pointer to the fact that after a few months of talk and lots of whispers Moveable Type 4.1 has gone open source. This makes our decision to adopt MT at PSU that much stronger, IMHO. This gives us a chance to really do some very interesting things with a very scalable and stable platform. Obviously I love WordPress (as it powers this blog), but the MT 4 release is a gorgeous piece of software. Everyone I have shown it to at the University has been very happy to see its interface, learn about its features, and can't wait to get their fingers on it. The open source move is just icing on the cake for us.

Just a Little Funny

Just got back to my office after a lunch meeting and thought I'd do a little RSS before my 1:30 ... tried to hit Google Reader and I see the following:

The rest of the Internets is fine, just Google ... no calendar either. Never thought I'd see that one.

First Class Podcast

Scott McDonald and I are co-teaching a course in Penn State's College of Education this Spring. We're teaching Curriculum & Instruction 597, Disruptive Technologies for Teaching and Learning. One of the things we've decided to do is produce a course podcast as much as possible. Today we sat down and recorded the first podcast of the semester -- well before the semester begins. This is really just a course introduction and a little view into what is going to go on. The included podcast is the first cut -- complete with strange music breaks. I hope this version makes the cut ... feedback is welcome.

Ci_597_01

Off the Grid

I actually took the whole weekend off from email and work. It is something I haven't done in a very long time and it actually felt pretty good. I stayed on email all day Friday and did my last check around 6 PM, then just packed it in for the weekend. I moved my personal email account out of Apple Mail -- so it wouldn't get mashed up with work ... that let me send a couple of personal emails without getting in the middle of what is typically an avalanche of stuff coming my way over the weekend. I did this to spend more real time with the family and to stem the inevitable Friday evening email that makes my weekend taste sour. It was worth it.

The damage was reveled this morning around 6:30 AM when I opened it back up ... about 85 work emails and a handful of others from a couple of various accounts. Once I killed the spam and the unrelated stuff there were honestly only about 20 actionable notes ... my wife asked me if the state of educational technology had fallen since I logged off on Friday. Cute. Obviously it hadn't. What did I miss? A few things that I probably should have been connected to, but at the end of the day it was all stuff that could wait.

My question to anyone reading is how you deal with down time -- weekends, holidays, etc? Do you go off the grid when the work day is over? I'm not sure I can pull it off every weekend, but it is an excellent exercise every now and then.

More Apple Integration?

Ok, so less than 10 minutes after posting about how nicely QuickTime plays with a Podcast Producer Server I decided to take a look at some of Apple's other content creation tools and see if there is really a concerted effort across the board to encourage instant publishing. What I was curious about is if the suite of iLife applications enable a user to create and instantly, with a single click, share that content to the emerging campus infrastructure Apple is promoting -- I am talking specifically about iTunes U, Podcast Producer, and Blogs. In all cases, it easy to share to .Mac and iWeb -- two tools that do not play in most of higher education's plans. What I found was interesting, if only to me.

Keynote

Keynote is the best presentation tool on the Mac (or any platform) and it would only seem appropriate that I could instantly publish to Podcast PRoducer just like in QT. So I explored the "Send to" menu item and I get the option to share it with the other iLife apps and strangely enough, YouTube. Nothing for Podcast Producer.

I then figured it had to be under the Export option, but again nothing for Podcast Producer directly. I am guessing I could use the QuickTime export and then open in the QT Player and use its share to Podcast Producer feature ... one step too many.

GarageBand

I figured since GB is the best Podcasting tool on the Mac it must play nicely with Podcast Producer. Again, nothing that sends it directly to Podcast Producer. I am also quite surprised given Apple's push with iTunes U that it doesn't allow you to go directly there as well. When you attempt to use the Share menu in GB you do get a few options that are of real value -- again, letting you go right to a couple of the other iLife apps.

iMovie

iMovie is a powerful content creation toolset that actually gets quite a bit of use on campus. Mostly used by students, it only seems obvious that you should be able to publish quickly and easily into spaces like iTunes U via Podcast Producer. Checking the Share menu there doesn't offer anything too surprising, except for the YouTube option again. There is a really nice matrix for sharing that Apple provides, but nothing to go straight to PodCast Producer. Again, it looks like you have to send it to QT to get it to Podcast Producer quickly and easily.

iTunes

Since the previous apps let me go directly to iTunes, I figured I should check to see how easy it is to publish out of that environment. I was really actually fairly amazed that I can't do anything out of iTunes ... but, upon further reflection, iTunes is built for managing and acquiring new content -- not sharing it in the other direction. In this scenario, it is more like a platform much like iTunes U, a blog, or any other place content is stored, managed, played, etc.

Final Thoughts

So there it is ... Apple has done an amazing job of giving us an end-to-end set of tools to create and share digital media -- especially in education. I am not bashing on any of it, but what I am saying is that the consumer focus of Apple's iLife suite keeps it from fully realizing its potential when it is used in a connected education setting where digital media creation and sharing is being promted. Asking students and faculty to understand how to use more than one application for creating and sharing content isn't too hard, but it lacks to overall elegance that the solution could rely lean on.

Podcast Producer Integration

We are looking very closely at Apple's Podcast Producer for use in and around campus. I wrote a little about it the other day while sitting in a meeting ... this morning I opened the QuickTime player on my MBP to record a very quick piece of audio. When I went to the export it I saw a "Share ..." option in the File menu. Not remembering that from the QT Player in 10.4 I decided to check it out. What I saw really surprised me ... an option to share the file to a Podcast Producer server.

What that means to me is that I can open QT Player anywhere, record audio/video, and instantly publish it to our Podcast Producer Server. I haven't looked at it beyond that, but it certainly makes me realize there is big power coming together here. With a chain like iTunes U, Podcast Producer, simple creation tools, and facilities on campus to help people make digital content, sharing just got a whole heck of a lot easier. I will be interested to see how/if workflow can be invoked from a simple "Share ..." command in QuickTime. If it can, the possibilities for quick and easy content creation and distribution is only limited to what one could dream up. I wonder in the Windows version of QT Player can do this?

I'll share more as we get further down the path. I am also curious to see what happens when I click the login button ... will it give me a new set of options to invoke custom workflows? If that is the case we can build workflows to put things in all sorts of places ... want to publish to an iTunes U course space? Done. Want to publish via your Blog? Done. Want to push it to our streaming server? Done. I am hoping the integration I see lets me take the final step and really create once and publish to many environments.

Local Feed2JS

So after a couple of days of talking with people around the office, Brad Kozlek executed a sweet little piece of thinking. He was interested in creating a local version of Feed2JS that would be auto-published by the Blogs at Penn State. The content below is coming right out of his site ... still needs a little work as it is only a listing of his latest posts, not the full text like I am really after ... but that can't be that far off. Very cool.