Cole W. Camplese

The Hot Team ... LionShare Style

When I came down from the IST Solutions Institute late last year I was interested in creating opportunities to explore technology as it relates to teaching and learning that could be connected with tangible outcomes. One thing I have been working towards is a systematic process that charges a small group with looking at a specific technology to help inform our internal teams as they work with members of our audiences to apply new solutions in and out of our classrooms. The notion of the Hot Team was one that came out of some thinking spurred by the Art of Innovation book put together by the folks at Ideo. The Hot Team concept is actually quite simple -- ask people to explore/play/investigate something specific and write up the findings as a white paper.

A while back we did a Hot Team that looked at Pachyderm as an authoring environment, but have had a little trouble getting another one going. Two weeks ago we decided to put a team together to investigate LionShare. LionShare is an open source peer-to-peer tool developed here within Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State under the leadership of Mike Halm. It is a very interesting piece of technology that does so much more than help you securely exchange files. This is P2P in a whole new light. Mike and his team are close to releasing LionShare widely here on campus and we wanted to understand it better to help drive adoption for teaching, learning, and research purposes. The Hot Team will be finished up by June 15th and we'll be sure to share the findings. How do you encourage/support/promote the notion of investigating and reporting on new uses of technology for teaching and learning purposes?

In Washington D.C.

I got down to DC last evening to prepare for today's "Expert Panel on Technology-Based Learning" that I was invited to be a part of. Let me first say that this is the first time I have taken part in anything remotely connected to the Government. This all day panel is hosted by the U.S. Department of Labor and its intent is to inform them on policy decisions related to technology in education. I am one of maybe a half dozen people here to join the conversation.

I talk at 1:00 PM (right after lunch) on the panel titled, "Emerging Technologies Now and in the Future." My piece of the hour and a half panel is on what we are calling disruptive technologies -- blogs, wikis, podcasting, RSS, and social bookmarking. I get 20 minutes to talk and then we are on the spot for 30 minutes of questions. Should be a lot of fun. I am really looking forward to hearing what goes on today. There are some good people here that will be making remarks in the morning so it should keep my attention. I will post a follow-up after I get home tonight.

.Mac up to a TB

I am not a Mac rumor guy ... but this jumped out at me.  This is sort of old news, but as I was logging into my .Mac admin panel I noticed that I had a TB of data transfer ... that was the other day, now when I log in I don't see any mention of it ... hmm?  It sorts of makes me think this is tied to the whole MacWorld thing coming up this month. I remember back in the day -- you know maybe 13 months ago or so, Adam Curry was using a .Mac account to deliver his podcasts because they didn't have a hard limit on bandwidth transfer. That changed. But, here we are creeping back up to a very respectable (even generous) level. This has me thinking that thre are potentially two things going on ...

The first is a real podcasting application and distribution system built on the iLife tools with big hooks to .Mac ... that would be a major deal for me. I podcast here and there -- for both personal use and, with more frequency, for educational purposes. The process is relatively straightforward, but still not easy enough for my tasts. I want one click easy ... you know, click once and record, click again to stop, encode, add meta data, and publish ... ok, that's two clicks, but you get the picture. For my dollar iLife is missing a simple publishing tool (read personal content management system) that supports RSS enclosures. .Mac would provide the perfect platform.  BTW, we are working on a simple classroom podcasting toolset at PSU ... more on that later.

The second is some sort of media transfer capacity ... this has been writen about before and as cool as it all sounds, doesn't get me as excited as a podcasting/writing application does. Trust me, I have my eye on the whole Intel Mac Mini as DVR/Media Center thing rumor mill thing but at the end of the day I can live without it. I know it would be great for a lot of people, but my life isn't driven by TV or video so I am not as jacked at these prospects.

Eiter way, that is my big rumor post for the new year ... I am hoping for option 1, that's for sure. Thoughts?

Adium ... Gizmo Plugin

Almost all my friends here at PSU who are Mac users launch Adium every morning instead of iChat. What do I care, right? Well, the big thing about iChat is that it lets me have a good old fashioned vocie/video chat with them. Sometimes that is just easier when you really need to get things done. The conversation usually ends up with me saying, "why don't you quit Adium and launch iChat so we can talk?"

This morning I came across a potential solution. I am sure most of you know about both Adium and the Gizmo Project. Adium is a multi-protocol chat program and Gizmo is a VoIP application a little like Skype. Well, here is the Gizmo plugin for Adium ... it lets them use their fancy multi-account Adium and gives me a way to "call" them when I have the urge to talk.

Skype and Gizmo

I have been looking at VoIP technology and the associated tools (Gizmo and Skype) for the last few months to see how it can be used in (and outside) the classroom to enable communication ... both tools are very cool. Although I believe Skype is more of a peer to peer model, while Gizmo is a real VoIP application. I even switched to Vonage for my home phone -- and it is great! I save a bunch of money every month and there isn't any difference in service. Might be worth a look. At any rate, some people from my new group gave a talk last week about SecondLife -- the virtual world software. It was cool that they didn't all physically show up for the talk, they used the SL space and Gizmo to give the presentation. They even went so far to build a virtual conference room that they all met in and projected that in front of the real room. I think it made an impact -- as in, people started to see some interesting application of the whole thing ... I wonder if you'd count that as a mash up?

Oh, and speaking of Skype here is a great resource if you like to integrate a "call me" link on your site.

iTunes in Education

I am really starting to enjoy seeing things like this. Stanford has joined the party and started using iTunes for content distribution. It is a very cool project ... there are several of these out there. I spent an hour or so talking with some of the folks from U Mich during Educause -- specifically in one of the Apple Digital Campus Podcasts (Subscribe via iTunes) -- about how they are using it as well. What blows my mind is how this product (iTunes) wasn't really built for this, but over time Apple has really listened to its education customers and realized just how powerful the iTunes environment really is. I mean, if you get right down to it, eEducation is a whole hell of a lot like eBusiness -- transactional, relies on scalable infrastructure, and the notions of community. At any rate, these are good stories.

Social Bookmarking ... In Courseware?

I was spending some time with one of my colleagues here today, Bill Rose, discussing social bookmarking. He hadn't heard of the concept and we were just discussing the basics ... I showed him how de.licio.us works and he got excited ... we kept talking and we started to wonder if we could really put it into place for our Online IST courses. If we could add an open source social bookmarking tool (know any good ones?) as service within our Edison Services toolset and let students click a simple "remember this" link on any page of a course and bookmark it. From there, they could do the simple tagging that goes along with this stuff -- that makes sense to them. That could lead to all sorts of good things -- shared resources, note-taking capabilities, and so much more.

After doing some quick google work I did find one open source tool, de.lirio.us based on the Rubric framework. I can't figure out how to get it running, but when Millet gets back from the Gathering of the Vibes festival his non-profit, helpingmusic.org is assisting with this will be sitting on his plate. Does anyone out there have any ideas on how we could make this work? And any good ideas for lessons built around a semester long tagging exercise? One thing I was thinking at the minimum was having all my students this fall get an account and tag resources with the course number (110) and do weekly peer reviews of each other's links. Just some thoughts I didn't want to misplace. Any other ideas or pointers for me?

Update: I got an open source tool, scuttle running. Take a look, create, an account, and drop a few bookmarks (with tags) in so I can see how this will play out. Jump over. Thanks!

A Little H2O ...

I'm not sure what to make of this quite yet, but from what I have seen (and understood) this could be quite interesting. Its out of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law, so I gotta figure there is something to it ... the H2O Playlist site ... it lets you make playlists of interesting topics that can be shared. I like the concept ... If I get around to it, I'll post more after I've had a chance to bang on it a little longer.

AJAX ... Nice.

I've been tracking this for a while now, but I am becoming more and more interested in this AJAX stuff, AKA Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. I am really seeing it as a major piece to the web 2.0 puzzle -- I know, duh. If you couple that with the whole Ruby on Rails stuff that is going on, you have the building blocks of the new read/write web interfaces. Just thought I'd write that down ... sorry if its old news. I can see how we can use this to change quite a bit in education.

Google ... Step Off

What is it with me and search stories lately? Last week I was impressed by Yahoo and its attempt to make the secure available -- at least on the surface. Today, I came across this in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Publishers' Group Asks Google to Stop Scanning Copyrighted Works for 6 Months. During those six months, the Association of American Publishers wants to know from google a few answers -- namely, are you in violation of copyright law? This type of thing will show up more on our radar screen as the search continues to be the next big thing -- have you noticed search is the interface for everything now? At any rate, its a good read and poses some interesting perspectives ... don't you think?