Cole W. Camplese

Notes in the Cloud

To kick off the One Post a Day project I thought I'd share an idea stemming from a couple data points in the 2008 Faculty Advisory Committee on Academic Computing (FACAC) results. I have been giving the idea of student laptop use a lot of thought lately -- especially in light of the recent advancements in the Blogs at Penn State platform, MoveableType. The report tells us that about 88% of Penn State students at all locations own a laptop computer. What I find terribly interesting is that only about 18% of undergraduate students carry them to campus -- that is compared with a relatively high number of grad students at 42%. When you look at that coupled with a growing trend of faculty permitting/inviting students to use their laptops for note taking has risen to 36% you can see an opportunity emerge. The most disturbing piece to me is that of those that do own a laptop that only 4% actually use them for note taking. This is an opportunity.

As we've been aggressively pursing the Blogs at PSU as an ePortfolio platform for all students it is becoming obvious that the use of a publishing platform like the blogs could be an immensely powerful note taking tool as well. When I was in college I took notes in spiral bound notebooks that were organized like most people's -- chronological order with each course getting its own notebook. This left me with a huge stack of notebooks to carry around and it also meant that over time discoverability dropped to a very low number. My claim is that a laptop paired with the nearly ubiquitous wireless access on our campus connected to the blogging platform should provide an ideal note taking environment.

Imagine a single blog (public or private) that is organized by multiple categories -- perhaps representing each semester, year, subject, and free-tagging of the content being written about -- all together in an always-available, searchable, editable publishing environment. Finding anything would be a breeze, filtering subjects would be a no-brainer, and there is the potential for permanence that my paper-based notebooks did not enjoy. As a sidebar, I lost nearly all my college notebooks when the garage at an apartment I was living in was flooded. So much for going back and ever revisiting work. There also seems something right about storing this in the cloud -- access to thinking from anywhere there is access would be killer.

Can you sketch in a blog? Not really. But the ability to snap quick digital pictures with a cell phone or a built in iSight can get that job done. Why waste time reproducing a diagram on a slide when a simple photo would do. If you get into it, recording lectures on your own, or obtaining them via iTunes U and connecting them to each note entry would raise the stakes as well. I can't seem to understand why this hasn't caught on yet. We haven't even touched on the potential social components here ... adding the ability to share thoughts on your and other notes could move the static notebook into the frame of the 21st century study group -- actively engaging in reading other peoples' notes and sharing thoughts via the comments could add a new layer to the learning opportunities. Not sure if you've heard of outfits like Nittany Notes, where they pay students to take notes and then sell them to the ones not showing up ... sure would be nice to put people like that out of business. I think the social potential for creating deeper connections could be potentially game changing.

I am seeing a big opportunity emerging here and I am thinking about how we can use the extensible nature of our MoveableType implementation to create a more notebook friendly writing environment. Something that invites students in and helps bridge the metaphor gap ... I think there is something real with the mindset of the physical notebook that a contextualized theme and style could help with. So, any thoughts for me related to this little observation? What is going on at your University, college, or department? If you are teaching, would students taking notes, recording lectures, snapping pictures of slides, and openly sharing make you nervous? I think it is worth exploring the creation of a seminar on note taking in a blogging environment.

New Rules, One Post a Day

I've decided to try and write a meaningful post every week day during the month of August. From the comments on my post yesterday it sounds like it would be an interesting test. As people mentioned to me, the only way for it to work is to write things that go beyond the "mailing it in" posts ... instead focusing on a particular theme and trying hard to make each post have some depth.

So, to get this kicked off the right way, I'll add a few rules that I will attempt to stick to during the One Post a Day effort for the month of August ... I am writing this mostly so I have some parameters to follow, but I am also interested in seeing if anyone else feels like trying to create with me for a month. It could be interesting to see what would happen if a bunch of us tried to follow some basic rules and publish meaningful content for a month. I would think if we could grab a few other people in this, the aggregated content could be really interesting. At any rate, here are my "new rules" for the One Post a Day project:

• I'll post every week day during the month of August. I am giving myself the weekends to think about other things.
• Posts have to be meaningful to count. I'm not going to simply point at an external site and say "this is cool." I'll try to find things that could be of value to the community.
• Sticking to a theme seems like a good idea. From a few the comments it seems important to have a focus and I think I know what I want to focus on ... I'll work to expose interesting results from both our and national statistics that have emerged in the last year. I'll draw upon data we've been collecting and attempt to add a layer of context to it that explains where we are going and why.
• Trying to create conversation will be a big part of the effort. I'd like to share stuff that gets people anxious, angry, excited, and interested in talking back.
• Having fun and writing are really what it is all about. If I'm not having fun, I'm done. That doesn't mean I am dropping out if it gets hard, but it means that if I am having a good time exploring ideas then it is a waste of time.
• There are no invitations required to join in. If you want to write along with me, let's come with a shared tag and I'll aggregate stuff together on a public page shared via Google Reader. I you want to come along, establish your own theme, and torment yourself with me then leave a comment and share an idea for a shared tag.

That's it. I hope I can follow my own guidelines and make this go.

A Thought? One Post a Day.

I am considering trying to write a post a day for the entire month of August. I would limit the rules to only having to post during week days, so weekends would be free time. I wonder if I can pull that off and if it would be meaningful? Given the lackluster posting schedule around here, I'm not sure I could make it happen. But, I may try. Here is what I have in mind ... I'd take results from our own surveys related to the things we've been looking at with our faculty, staff, and students and share the discovery and try and add some thoughts to each post to clarify how it is effecting my/our thinking. What do you think? Worth it?

Finally, Arriving at the Blog is Not Just a Blog

I can't believe it has been two years since we made the claim that the Blogs at Penn State could be so much more than a blog and should be viewed as a personal content management system. In that time, we've made huge progress related to the notion that our blogging environment can and should be used for all sorts of things -- most recently we've been doing some important work as it relates to blogs as portfolios. Our Faculty Fellow, Carla Zembal-Saul, has been working with Brad Kozlek and others here in ETS to rethink how we frame the portfolio opportunity ... what we are coming to is that the win in the portfolio space is associated with the social opportunities the blog platform affords. We've been doing our thinking in the open over at the ETS Wiki, so please take a look. We have several pilots taking advantage of this approach this fall, the coolest one being with the Schreyer Honors College ... check out Dean Chris Brady's post seeking volunteers. Some of the scholars' comments are very encouraging.

At any rate, that is not what I am focusing on here ... with the latest release candidate of Moveable Type 4.2, we've started testing out the new template set concept they've introduced. When we pitched the Blogs at Penn State project I made sweeping promises that we could use this one platform to easily support blogs, portfolios, note taking spaces, personal websites, course pages, and more. Well, with template sets that is coming true. I did a little screencast showing how easy it will be to create personal websites using the MT environment. This has far reaching potential. Take a look at the screencast below and let us know what kinds of templates would be compelling. BTW, sorry about the watermark on the screencast ... I tried ScreenFlow and have yet to purchase it. A little tough to see, but you can get the idea. Another BTW, the wonderful music in the background was written, composed, and performed by Penn State's Stephen Hopkins. The track is Ian Grove Blues and is available from Stephen's Penn State Blog. Steve was an early guest on ETS Talk as well.

Some Interesting Stuff

Recently I was asked to share some "interesting statistics" about what is going on here at PSU and on a national level with the use of technology by young people. Here are some points I thought could resonate. I didn't editorialize too much, but my basic thoughts are below. What strikes me is how this leads us to such obvious conclusions about where time, energy, and dollars should be applied within our environments. I don't cite all this stuff, but nearly all of it is from various PSU reports or the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Please fell free to comment on these.

• 40% of online teens watch TV on devices other than a TV. This is a real trend hitting our campus. I gave two guests lectures in freshman classes last week and all but a handful of them said that is what they do. This has big implications for the kinds of networks we provide and the amount of bandwidth we allocate.
• Nearly a third of all PSU students created a rich media piece last year. Half of them did it for a class which means faculty are beginning to accept digital media as evidence of learning. That means the other half did it just for fun. Looks like the move towards rethinking our lab spaces is a good move. The idea that we should put a Digital Commons at every campus may help grow and support this trend.
• Nationally approximately 80% of college students are in Facebook. This is growing as Facebook continues to open to younger and more diverse audiences. At PSU, last November, the number was at 83%.
• The most interesting statistics related to FB are that 60% log in daily, 80% update their profiles several times a month, and that 23% of our students spend more than 5 hours a week in social environments (FB and MySpace). This proves to me that they'll spend lots of time online if given the right kids of spaces to participate in.
• According to Pew Internet and American Life Project nearly 50% of online teens are sharing content online. This isn't file sharing, it is sharing pictures, text, and other forms of their media. 64% engage in at least one form of content creation. Girls dominate most elements of online content creation and sharing with 35% of teen girls blogging, and 54% sharing photos. Compared with 20% of boys blog and 40% share pictures. Boys are nearly twice as likely to share their videos online.
• Why is this the case? 89% of them report that people comment on them some of the time. Most of them use their social networks to control access -- Facebook is the number one photo sharing site on the Internet.
• We know they use all sorts of modes to communicate, but they use modes differently with different groups of people. Text messages are used to connect with peers, while email is "for old people."
• Digital video is explosive at the moment. It is empowering new types of conversations across the web. Visit youtube and notice not only the number of views on videos, but the number of comments and video responses. It is stunning.
• Internet users watched 10 billion videos online in December 2007.
• 73% of adults own cell phones, 63% of teens own them, and at PSU 93% of students own a cell phone.
• Nearly 90% of PSU students own MP3 players. iPod is the majority.

Open Event Planning

I've noted the Learning Design Summer Camp that is happening on our campus August 12 and 13 a number of times before, but I wanted to share a few additional details that have been making me very proud of the work going on around PSU. You see this event is different than anything else we've planned before -- different because we really aren't so much planning it as we are guiding it. I pitched the LDSC idea as a way to replace our more traditional all campus instructional design meeting that has historically happened on an annual basis. My challenges were to expand the reach to a more inclusive community of learning designers, raise the level of the conversations we could have, create a fun and robust program, and let the community shape the event. It was that last challenge that excited and scared the hell out of us.

We've watched others do the unconference thing and have loved the results. None of had done it so we were reluctant to try until I got back from the Berkman at 10 event and felt new energy about how communities can rise up and participate. We had been getting good participation in the ETS Wiki and felt like we could count on at least a handful of people to help out. What has happened has surprised us all. My colleague, Allan Gyorke, added a page to the wiki on May 28th with a very light skeleton structure ... a few Tweets later and the pages came to life. Within days a volunteer committee had formed and met. Within a few weeks enough ideas for sessions had been proposed and discussed that we didn't need to be concerned. A couple week later, someone from the University Libraries offered their gorgeous space for us to hold the event. Within two months an amazingly robust event had been planned. All of it without having an assigned committee or agenda. All we had was a vision, an outline, and a wiki.

If you have the time, or the interest, jump over to the LDSC wiki page and see for yourself. This event is shaping up to be outstanding. The stories and conversations that can potentially go on are both exciting and encouraging on all sorts of levels. Explore how the community has created a series of stickers that represent areas of interests or icons of themselves, take a look at how the logo for the event evolved, check out the sessions proposed by the community, and look at how many people from all over PSU decided to spend two days with us. So maybe the community can be the committee!

Blogging from my iPhone

When the iPhone 2 software was revealed during one of Steve's keynote addresses the thing I wanted the most was SixApart's mobile blogging tool, but for WordPress. Well today I got it! The iPhone WordPress app is now available ... this post is being banged out on my iphone and I have to say it works very well. Lots of potential here. I was able to easily set up the connection to my personal blog, create a new post with the picture to the left, and then edit that (or any other) post. Very cool.

Perhaps next up is a client to publish to the blogs at Penn State environment?

My Simple iPhone App Wish

I've been very happy with my iPhone since I got it last year ... I like it so much I haven't yet felt compelled to pony up for the new one. With the 2.0 software update I am thrilled with how easily I can extend the functionality of the device -- and the "fake" GPS works fine for me at the moment. I am betting there will be a killer app for the real GPS integration that will get me thinking, but for now the location based hooks in software are good enough for me.

There is one thing I want though ... I would really like an app that made it easy to acquire content from the iTunes Store that is in the iTunes U area. I know how it all works behind the scenes (for the most part) so I know it isn't a simple task, but having the ability to integrate SMS notifications to students that new content is available in their iTunes U course spaces would really kick ass. I fully get the challenges with authentication, storing credentials, and the like but having an app that would at least let me point students directly to (even a public) course in iTunes U would be outstanding. I could easily write a half dozen case studies where this could be put to amazing use -- and I am betting it would drive adoption of both the new 3G powered network device and the wifi enabled iPod Touch on campuses.

Real content on the go would be great. Total integration across the iTunes/iPod/iPhone eco-system would be an ideal situation for us all. Thoughts?

Organized in the Cloud

As I reflect on my time at the Project Bamboo workshop held at Princeton University last week I am left with a few thoughts. While not as stunning to me as was my Berkman at 10 reflections, the Project Bamboo workshop did leave me with my head swimming with activity. The Project Bamboo workshops focus specifically on the needs of the Humanities community and bringing to light challenges and potential solutions to these newly (or not so newly) discovered issues. Challenges such as research method support, research management systems, tagging, discovery, describing objects that otherwise seem indescribable, and so much more were teased out by the 100 or so participants. During the first day I was struck with something as I spent time in the first table activity -- in a modern sense, we tend to organize materials in the cloud better than we do locally. There was context to this discussion that I won't get into, but it started me down a path that I am interested in exploring more.

Here is a tangible example of what I mean ... on my iMac at home I have probably in the neighborhood of 7,000 local photos of travel, my children, friends, landscapes, and all the other things we take pictures of. Several hundred of them do have some form of meta data assocaited with them -- most are simply tagged with four or five stars, while a few I have renamed or even organized into albums. But at the end of the day there are thousands that are simply disorganized (other than date and other EXIF meta data that comes pre-packaged upon import).

Now, compare that with my Flickr space ... as of today, there are 1,813 photos on Flickr that are tagged, have been given titles, and even several hundred with descriptions. This may seem normal, but I see something sort of strange in it. My personal repository at home is largely disorganized (perhaps miscellaneous) and yet I trust my true organizational structure to a third party in the cloud. It really has me wondering about how one goes about synchronizing the offline universe of local storage with the more structured cloud concept. Where is the application that does that for me?

This is a simple example, but it also makes me think about the literally hundreds of documents I have on Google Docs that are neatly organized with tags compared to the thousands I have on hard drives throughout my home. Why do we do this? I asked my friend and colleague, Bryan Alexander, and he told me as we got on the elevator, "everyone likes to dress up in public." I've thought about that comment and I think there is something to it -- and I know when Bryan reads that he'll say it was an in the moment comment, but it seems to hold true. So what do we think in a collective sense? Does anyone have thoughts they want to explore with me?

On Changing Roles

As the First Annual Learning Design Summer Camp approaches I am struck by how different the list of participants looks than a more "traditional" ID meeting has in the past. I am amazed by how many people there are attending that a more conservative view of ID would deem too far outside the path ... that there are people attending that are librarians, marketing people, programers, developers, faculty, students and others who impact learning design in a team environment, but who have traditionally been left on the outside looking in when it comes to these kinds of events. Let me say one thing about it all -- I love it.

I have always looked at the design process as one that is so much more powerful when we are inclusive of people with many perspectives. I think we are all being asked to rethink our roles as we find new ground to populate in the academy. We are no longer being asked questions about what tool to use, how to write an objective, test items, or add resources to a CMS powered course space. I see something else happening -- we are being asked to help extend the reach of classrooms to connect communities. Even if the ask isn't overt, the notion of openness and connectedness is living just under the surface of nearly all the questions I am asked. I like this on a lot of levels, but I especially like that it is forcing us all to rethink where we add value to the bigger picture.

I really like the idea that everyone coming to the LD Summer Camp can have an impact on the design of learning -- they can impact small pieces or entire learning opportunities. This is not meant to be a call to arms for more traditional instructional designers (I may actually be one), but it is a call for the entire Learning Design community to see this change coming and to embrace it -- to level the playing field and to participate openly with colleagues as we explore this new territory. It is a truly exciting time to be in the Learning Design field -- unprecedented access to content, knowledge, peers, teachers, learners, and all the others in our space has made our jobs that much more interesting and critical. We need to understand that our value will be finding new ways to connect learners to teachers, classrooms to larger communities, and education to 21st century skills that can take students into the next three decades in a holistic fashion. I am working on changing my thinking and I am inviting those around me to do the same.

Did I mention I am excited? Thoughts?