Cole W. Camplese

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.

C is for Community

As is the case with most Fridays when the weather is nice in State College I came home and spent the majority of the evening outside in the yard with the kids listening to music. This evening we decided to forgo the typical "Dinner Mix" playlist of grown up favorites and instead played selections from the Sesame Street gang. My little boy, who will be two in September, fell in love with Cookie Monster's "C is for Cookie." I'm not going to make the parallel that we are doing the work of children or anything, but I will say that there was a line that resonated with me -- "C is for Cookie and that's good enough for me." What struck a chord with me is that our approach to community is very similar to what my little man's interest in cookies feels like ... serious. I must say that the power of the local community is emerging and it is good enough for me.

A stretch perhaps, but on target for what I am feeling on and around campus. Let me share a living example ... today we had the first meeting of the Learning Design Summer Camp committee members. Typical stuff for higher education in most cases other than the simple truth is that not a single person was assigned to their post. All we did was establish a wiki, share some opening thoughts, and Tweet the existence of the thinking out to those who were listening. A strange thing happened -- lots of people contributed. And then they volunteered. Then another even more amazing thing happened -- people outside the standard Twitter stream joined the conversation. Community happened.

Our Summer Camp is shaping up to be quite the event. I am personally hoping it pushes a conversation forward related to the tools we've been building on campus to support new thinking for teaching and learning. The idea is to get people together to actively engage in discourse that is well beyond the typical "how to" format we all deal with. No matter what I am hopeful to see about 100 of my colleagues working together to think critically about how we design learning spaces. Seems like a very cool thing. It is time we all start to raise the level of our conversations.

All of it shows me once again the power of the collective. It also reminds me just how open and engaged the community is on our campus. I am very proud to be a part of it!

Examples from the Digital Commons

Now that there are several new Digital Commons studios in place across the Commonwealth of PA we are starting to see some amazing things come out of them. The thing I am continually excited to see is that faculty and students come up with amazing ways to use the things we envision and install. We knew from our data that students were engaged in the creation of digital media, but we weren't really sure what they were making. We've also been told over and over by faculty that they are more likely to accept a digital asset as evidence of learning -- think of asking students to do a short film instead of giving a PowerPoint presentation on a topic. All of it was on the upswing, but as we set about installing studios we were anxiously awaiting the outcomes that would flow from the creative spaces.

Towards the end of the spring semester we started to see some amazing things emerge. From the Google Earth centered enhanced podcasts Dr. Laura Guertin's students produced to the digital video that is shown below produced by Lindley Jones, the Digital Commons is providing a platform for faculty and student innovation -- on the teaching and learning side. That is what is most impressive. Who would have dreamed we'd see something as powerful as what Lindley produced?

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.

Digital Media Value Chain

During the last few weeks I have started to see some really amazing digital media artifacts coming out of our classrooms here at PSU. Two weeks ago I came across one of the most amazing uses of a student blog I have ever seen. I hate to say it, but I am reluctant to link to it without her permission, but suffice to say she gets how a blog can work better than most of the people I talk to. This post was based around a video project she and her team did in class -- a simple interview of a faculty member edited to be of interest. Here is what made it amazing, she spent time not only posting the finished product, but wrote a reflective narrative about the process she and her team used to create it. Pictures showing the team working together, a map of their storyboards, and even a discussion of the script. Just an amazing illustration of how powerful digital media can be.

If you look at the pieces that add up to that example you can see a value chain emerging. We start by doing a hot team ... this usually helps us decide if a technology would be appropriate for use in the classroom. Funny that we never come up with ideas that match up to the things that actually happen in our classrooms. The hot team can lead to a call for proposals from faculty under the Engagement Project. When we select a proposal, we meet with the faculty to discuss their needs and find ways to support their activities. From there the faculty teach their course and engage the students in all sorts of cool activities that require them to create digital artifacts. On campuses where we have them installed, students typically visit the Digital Commons to work with killer technology, get hands on help, or connect virtually with a DC Consultant. Once they use the physical spaces to create something they publish it online -- with the Blogs at Penn State, the Podcasts at Penn State, or ANGEL. Every step of the process is supported (or has the potential to be supported if need be). I know it is a very simple view of the value chain, but here is how I see it:

I also think of it as a stack ...

Which leads me to the example that inspired me to write this evening ... a faculty member who submitted an Engagement Award proposal for the Fall semester sent us a couple of examples of her students work today. The first is a virtual tour of the 2007 solar decathlon. The second is just as cool, a walking tour of the tree biodiversity at Ridley Creek State Park. All I can say is that it is amazing. She is integrating blogging, podcasting, Digital Commons, Google Maps, digital photography, and so much more into her classes. The amazing thing is that her students are doing work that will blow you away! Looking at the outputs I can't help but feel excited that the opportunities that are being created can support it all. Just some killer stuff!

Blogs at Penn State - The Real Thing!

So this semester (after about a year of work) the Blogs at Penn State will be used in classrooms to support online conversations (and probably all sorts of other stuff). We decided after much debate to restrict the pilot to 1500 people, but probably have the capacity to jump to 2000 if requests and numbers continue to flow in. In all honesty we could probably handle more, but the point of a pilot is to learn. We'll be doing a while bunch of that this semester! As I type there are students clicking the links for the "self-enroll" process so they can start blogging right away within PSU. To me it is very exciting -- the Daily Collegian even ran a little story about the new opportunity this morning. We are already evaluation Moveable Type 4 as it offers all sorts of new features we think will be critical. We are also starting to build our list of features we think we should be providing when this thing hits production status and the whole of the University can have at it. One thing I am noticing is that the Blogs at Penn State Community Hub is picking up steam -- people are showing up and posting questions and answers. It is very cool to see the community rise up and work to support itself. One of the things I thought I'd link to is a page that has a bunch of links to help faculty get the most out their blogging experience. I'll be reporting numbers and reaction as they roll in. Exciting stuff!

The Intranet -- Gee, That ' s Exciting

That seems to be the general reaction I get from people when I start talking Intranets. Back in the day we didn't really think about how we worked to use the web to influence what was going on inside an organization -- we were so damn busy just trying to build and launch some sort of externally facing site. I recall our first Intranet at Cogence Media back in 1996 ... it was an old Apple FileServer that we discovered we could deep link into via a browser. The funny thing was that we didn't do this deep linking via web pages, we did it from a bunch of individual Word documents that we kept on the shared space of the file server. I embarrassed to say that I was part of the web team and it just didn't dawn on us to use real web pages to manage the knowledge of the organization. But when I really step back and think about it, we were doing the best we could with the tools of the day -- sort of.

The last couple of years that has all changed though -- especially for me. I have become just as interested in the conversations that go on inside an organization as the ones that are directed at customers, readers, audiences, or whatever else you want to call the people you are speaking to on the outside. The emergence of web 2.0, especially in the last year or so has given rise to many new ideas I am banging around in my head related to increasing opportunities for internal dialog. I have started reading more and more about the notion of Enterprise 2.0 (mainly from Andrea McAfee from Harvard) and I have to say it seems to be a perfect blend of my interests in communication technologies, organizations, and people. One of Dr. MacAffe's posts that I have gotten a ton of mileage out of is a simple profile of one organization's use of MediaWiki as a very powerful Intranet tools et. In it, he profiles this organization and the way they are using this site as a hub to both changing internal and external communication. To me it is a fascinating, yet simple study in how to get organizations to pay attention to important internal conversations.

One of the things I discovered when coming to ETS 21 months ago is the importance of an online place for sharing organizational information. This stuff takes the form of posts, stories, wiki pages, travel reports, and all the things that make a medium to large sized work-group go. What I found is that without some sort of hub at the center, keeping up on it all is just too difficult. Once we jumped the hurdle of simply providing a platform and the encouragement for people to participate as a part of the organizational story, we have started to think about how to better organize it all.

I have been working with one of my colleague here at ETS to rethink our Intranet space ... let me say that I feel our local Intranet (it supports about 100 people within Teaching and Learning with Technology) is successful at helping us all share information in a somewhat organized way. We still struggle with architecture, but we are getting better at it. We are also getting better at bringing content from outside sources in ... currently there are dozens of staff who are blogging, tagging links in del.icio.us, and photos in Flickr that are relevant to what we do and we are working on. The goal is to make all that "meta-content" seamlessly integrate with our internal content. It has been fun and an interesting little project. Just today I did a wire frame to share my thoughts on how we could mix the internal with the external to provide access to dynamic and organizationally important content in one location. As it comes to life, I'll share more of it. Now that people are writing as much as they are around here I am struck with the need to have greater access to it all.

At any rate, the real reason I am posting is a cry for help ... I have recently been asked to help with creating a new Intranet strategy for my parent organization here at PSU -- Information Technology Services (ITS). ITS at Penn State is a very large and diverse organization that takes residence in no less than a dozen buildings on campus. This creates all sorts of challenges as it relates to sharing information in an efficient and effect manner. We do a good job, but it is high-touch and requires a ton of work. With that said, we are just too big to get together as much as we should and now that many of us are blogging the discoverablility of content is very low. One thing I would love to learn more about from all of you is what type of Intranets are you using within your organizations? How are you leveraging your understanding of information technology, people, communities, and web 2.0 to create new opportunities for computer mediated communication? I'd like to know more and I'd like to find ways to talk with you and explore what you are thinking and how you feel it is impacting the organization. Any takers?

Being Digital

I really couldn't think of a title for this post ... I wanted to share a quick story about the Digital Commons project we are currently working on. The Digital Commons is an initiative to provide a common set of tools at all locations of Penn State that enable students to create digital artifacts in a supported way. Too often we (we being administrators and instructors) have these expectations that all our students can easily envision and create digital media. I mean if you look at some of the reports that people like Pew Internet and American Life Project provide you may get the picture that every single person under the age of 25 is capable of creating content that will be shared at youtube. While it is true that there are a whole bunch of these kinds of kids running around our campuses it is just as true there are a whole heck of a lot more who can't. Just reality.

The Digital Commons is an attempt to help promote and support the notion of being digital. We work hard to encourage faculty to allow evidence of learning in the form of videos, blog posts, podcasts, and more but when they assign it we just sort of assume the kids will just figure it out. Most of the time these kids do, but they do it on their own machines with substandard software tools and without access to things like digital cameras, green screens, lighting, etc -- and forget about any education as it relates to things like using lighting, production, planning, or even copyright. That's where the Digital Commons comes in -- it provide more than the equipment, it provides a framework. It is a killer project that has potential for real transformation written all over it.

We are working really hard to install five of these studios across the Commonwealth of PA this Summer. That is tough -- there are more factors at play here than are imaginable. Communicating the potential and requirements to each campus is very difficult given the time and geographic challenges. Today we made the first attempt at doing that ... instead of getting in the car and visiting each campus we ate some of our own dogfood and used Adobe Connect Pro (you know, Breeze). We have a killer ACP setup here at University Park so we paired it with a call in line and delivered the hour long briefing to multiple campuses from the comfort of one of our conference rooms. I couldn't be there -- I was scheduled to be off site having a meeting at a local restaurant ... the place had wifi, so I got there early and pulled out the MacBook Pro. I simply plugged in my earphones, fired up the browser, connected to the ACP meeting, and dialed the conference call with Skype. It was nothing short of amazing -- the technology worked and the briefing went exceptionally well. I took a screen cap of the whole thing:

The Digital Commons project is one to watch ... I will be sharing more as it all becomes clear, but this is one that we feel very good about. By providing a common platform at all locations there is so much we can bundle under the overall umbrella. Things are off to a very good, but very demanding start. Stay tuned ...

Engagment Stuff

Boy, it has been a long time since the blog has published any new content. I can tell you why -- real life. Work has been more than insane the last three weeks and the personal life (you know the one that really matters) has been over the top busy as well. A little travel thrown in last week and major preparation on the new Digital Commons project we are starting up at PSU this summer has put a major dent in my ability to write, read, or even think about anything other than work and family. But with that said, those new iPhone ads rock ...

At any rate, this post is about engagement ... not the kind that leads to marriage -- by the way that is another thing that is part of the insanity, my sister is getting married in a month and we seem to be a big part of the planning process. I am talking about the Engagement Initiative we maintain here at ETS. This whole thing came out of my interest in us thinking more strategically about the kinds of ways we work with faculty and drive adoption of the things we are thinking about and working on. Last year at one of our ETS Leadership retreats I sketched out a process that we are now using to take ideas through to projects ... the rain cycle, as many people around my office call it, is designed to help us be agile about starting new things but also be very cautious about what we take towards University service. Getting to the University service level is a dangerous thing -- supporting 100,000+ users is not to be taken lightly. What this process gives us is the ability to engage faculty in the use of emerging technologies in a rapid fashion while giving us the time to assess the value and cost of implementation. I wrote about this quite some time ago. At any rate, here is the process map I created:

The process starts with the Hot Team concept and follows a series of opportunities for collaboration and assessment all the way around. What is nice is this articulates that it is cool to try something and see if it works ... if it doesn't then we get out. It articulates that a bad idea is OK as long as we know why it is bad.

Fast forward to this week and the fact that NMC Conference is going on. I have several staff there and one of them, Brett Bixler decided to submit a poster that shares the Engage Process Map. He worked with Dave Stong to create a stylized version of it ... Brett is all about serious games, as a matter of fact he runs our serious games project and manages our Virtual World blog. He and Dave redesigned the process map to be a game board ... just blew me out of the water! I love it ... take a peek:

I hope you all like as much as I do. As an aside, the Engage Initiative is working. We have been able to take a dozen or so projects ideas into the cycle and produce not only white papers about them, but we've been able to work directly with some great faculty to help us understand where we should be taking this stuff. I wonder how other people get faculty engaged on their campuses?

BTW, you have to read about the process Brett and Dave took in creating their award winning poster.

Update: I just found out the poster won the Judge's Choice award at the NMC Summer Conference!

Social Stuff at PSU

Tomorrow I am presenting to folks from the PSU Libraries. Originally this was going to be a small discussion, but it appears as though it has turned into a bigger deal. The talk will be available via the Libraries use of Media Site Live (Windows Media Player required) so tune if you are at all interested. The talk is tomorrow at 9 AM here on the east coast.

I think I'll probably reuse much of what I did at Maricopa with a little more hands-on demo time. We shall see how it all shakes down. What I am hoping for is an active audience and lots of conversation. Again, we shall see. Should be fun!

My slides are available over at my PSU Blog.