Cole W. Camplese

Double Dog Dare You

You think we got our collective stuff together? In the spirit of Ralphie, I gotta go ahead and "double dog dare you" to ever ... and I mean ever ... pull something like this off. Sherwood High School just blew my mind. I need you to watch the next two videos for me. The first is actually what I watched second, and that is the "making of." The second is the actual lip dub. I want you to try and wrap your head around not just pulling off a one shot lip dub with a high school, but do it in reverse. Wow.

The finished product ...

The Power of Video

More and more of what I engage with online comes in the form of video. As a simple example, most of the new music I am discovering comes from YouTube, not iTunes. That is a shift for me. Last year a third of our faculty here at PSU reported using YouTube as a teaching tool in our classrooms. I talk about that when I give presentations and usually say that these faculty are using YouTube much like they did films a few years ago. The difference? They have access to nearly everything at any moment. And what they have access to has the power to teach, the power to connect, and the power to enlighten. Is it too much to say that vast communities of practice are now easily able to spin up because of a YouTube video?

I watched the TED Talk from Chris Anderson I embedded below and felt as though much of what I am thinking about as it relates to video was really well stated. As you might expect from the TED Curator, he feels the open nature of online video is providing a critical spark in the ability to connect and change the World. At first I thought it was a bit overstated, but watching all 18 minutes of the video made me feel otherwise. The closing example is worth watching in and of itself.

"What Gutenberg did for writing, online video can do for face to face communication" -- Chris Anderson

It is exciting for me to see the rise of personal and professional video online that can build new forms of educational experiences. I remember being an undergraduate at WVU back in the early 1990's when I discovered QuickTime ... at that time QT video was amazing, but also amazingly small and of terrible quality. My first video project was something I cooked up on the side after a killer lecture by my favorite teacher, Phil Comer, gave. I used QT and Apple's Open Doc technology to capture pieces of lectures and embed them in text-based class notes that I could share on the Psych lab Macs. Dr. Comer had this one great lecture he did on this notion of what he called "the eclectic solid." It was all about the need to be able to see issues through the lens of multiple perspectives. This solid had different psychological perspectives printed on all the sides. He would toss it in the air, catch it, and whatever was facing up was the lens we had to look at the issue through. If it lands on "cognitive" and we all had to dissect the issue from that perspective ... same for "behavioral" and so on. It was so visually powerful that you could never get it by reading notes. By integrating the video of him tossing it in the air with the text of the notes I felt like I nailed something new and exciting. That was the first mash-up I created to support learning.

"Video is high bandwidth for a reason." -- Chris Anderson

Fast forward to today and I don't need any overwhelming set of skills or technology to make far more compelling learning materials quickly and easily. With something as simple as my phone I can record, edit, and share a story that can connect me to communities on a global basis. When I contribute it in the open, the World can see and engage with it. This is one of the reasons why we've decided to add Kaltura video editing to the Blogs at Penn State. We've always thought of Blogs at PSU toolset as a simple platform to create, share, and engage in multiple forms ... and now it is a platform for text, images, audio, and video.

Watching the video by Chris Anderson reminded me of my own first engagement with video and text mash-ups for learning. With our new toolset rolling out I wonder how some other crazy undergraduate will use it to change and challenge the status quo. I wonder how much more interesting I could have made my own eclectic solid presentation had I had these tools? The bigger thing is that I could have instantly shared it with the world and introduced them to Phil Comer's brilliant mind and teaching. I bet he would have gotten a boat load of views.

Keynote Alignment

One of the best things we get to do here at Penn State is host the annual TLT Symposium. It is an amazing event that we have grown over the last few years and has become quite the centerpiece to launch new thinking into the teaching and learning space. We try really hard to not only highlight the killer work of our most innovative faculty, but to invite keynotes that align with our thinking for the year. I believe it is critically important to think about where we want to nudge the communities' thinking and bring speakers to our events that can lay the foundation for our own work. More and more it is clear that bringing the right people to campus is a key ingredient to changing the culture and pressing forward.

A few years ago we really wanted to raise the awareness around the importance of remix culture and Creative Commons so we had Lessig join us -- less than a year later we adopted CC 3.0 as an accepted licensing model. When we wanted to draw light on the importance of open and social learning we brought David Wiley and danah boyd to campus ... no coincidence that we've launched our first centrally designed fully open CC licensed online courses built on our social blogging platform. When we wanted to inspire faculty to think about how to engage students in large classrooms we brought Michael Wesch to share his stories ... I guess that has something to do with our push to work with faculty in pumping up engagement opportunities in sections of Communications 110 (300 students) and Sociology 119 (725) students. At times it almost looks like we are thinking about this stuff.

So when we had a chance to invite Clay Shirky to be our keynote for the 2011 Symposium we jumped at it. His new book, Cognitive Surplus, is an excellent example of how we are thinking about tapping into our own communities to push our agenda forward. Having Shirky here will inspire new thinking and will challenge all of us to rethink how we can leverage the relationships we've created to do even more in the coming year. As always, I am excited by the prospect of another Symposium and of its potential for impacting our campus.

Open Insight

We don't have a top down open education initiative here at Penn State. At some point in the near future I hope to see that change, but at the end of the day so much is already happening in the open across the PSU web ... quite frankly it is really amazing to see. I try to highlight that incidental openness when I can, but I have been thinking more and more about what our OER might look like here. And when I say that, I'd like to do it in a way that could impact more than just people looking to grab some solid open content to consume ... I'd like to take it a step further, but up until recently I haven't been able to figure out what that means.

After Learning Design Summer Camp, one of our undergraduate writing interns put together a short piece on her reactions from the day in a post called, Learning Design Summer Camp from the student perspective. There was one part that really struck me as interesting and thought provoking ...

The one presentation that I found particularly interesting as a student was Sam Richard’s presentation on teaching Sociology 119. I actually took Sam’s Sociology 119 class during the spring 2010 semester, so hearing him speak about the actual teaching of a class that I had taken just recently was very interesting for me. His presentation at Camp focused heavily on engaging students in a large lecture setting, especially through the use of technology. Sam’s Sociology 119 class was one of the most engaging classes I have taken at Penn State, especially amazing, since it is in such a large lecture setting. Before hearing Sam speak at Camp, I never really thought about all the things he actually did to keep me engaged and interested in a class so large that it would be easy to feel forgotten. Hearing him discuss choosing these technologies and why they work in the classroom helped me to better understand from his perspective how he can make a class of 700 students work so well.

What grabbed about it is that I've never really thought about what classroom practice looks like to students. What I mean is that I never recall thinking about the kinds of things my faculty did to engage me in the classroom ... and I certainly never really thought about the fact that they were doing something deliberate. It makes me wonder if any of the students on our campuses think at all about what goes into making a particular class interesting or engaging?

With this new perspective I have been talking about an idea that would go along with some sort of more structured video based OER project. What I would like to do is to not only produce a video based OER series, much like Yale's, but add shorter vignettes of the featured faculty talking about their designs, motivations, inspirations, and reflections on how and why they teach. I think it would be terrific to hear in short bursts from the faculty about what is going on in their heads as they prepare to stand in front of their students. I could see it being very much like a powerful digital story that can inspire other faculty to think critically about their practice and it may be really interesting and engaging to students to hear their faculty talk more informally about what is going on behind the scenes. It may also help inform design practice in ways we haven't yet thought about.