Cole W. Camplese

Accidental Openness

I was reading my friend and colleague Jim Groom's blog and came across another one of his spectacular posts ... this one wasn't long and detailed, just short and to the point. Jim, or the Reverend as he is nicknamed, is the mad genius behind the Blogs at University of Mary Washington, the EduPunk movement, and so much more incredibly cool stuff. I was lucky to get to present and hang out with him at the ELI annual meeting and I can tell you he gets this stuff. He gets it a level that is hard to describe ... and he does it with his own style. His post, What I Learned from UMW Blogs Today ..." calls out two interesting little facts he learned by reading posts on the Blogs at UMW about Salvador Dali and his work and influence on animation in the 1940s ... to be honest I don't really care at all about the topic, but the fact that he could learn that by browsing the Blogs at UMW is a wonderful little happenstance that needs to be explored further.

The same kind of thing is happening at Institutions all over the place -- content that has been locked away in the LMS/CMS of choice is now being freed by the easy publishing enabled by Institutional blogging platforms. I find the notion that there is this vast sea of open content being generated without the official blessing of the Academy a wonderful incidental benefit to it all. Let me put it this way ... MIT made a huge splash with a "real" open courseware initiative several years ago that cost millions of dollars. The money went to invest in content management systems, convincing faculty it is good, developing models for openness, to support faculty development, pay for marketing, and all sorts of physical and virtual infrastructure. No doubt MIT's initiative is amazing and has been successful for lots of reasons, but the fact of the matter is that this information inherently wants to be free ... so the bottom up community-driven approach I am seeing is a wonderful thing.

Here at PSU our own Blogs at Penn State environment is working to free content in new and interesting ways. Faculty who until recently would not have bothered writing and engaging students openly are doing so. I wonder if it is the toolset or the times we are living in? There is an unprecedented acceptance of technology in our everyday lives and I can't help but wonder if we are a part of a larger movement in general ... a movement in which citizen journalism is reaching into otherwise fortified verticals. Our own vertical, Higher Education, has been one that has promoted locked content for some time now ... but what is happening is the convergence of easy to use platforms, social pressures and acceptance, and an interest in participation. It is amazing to watch it unfold. Can it continue in the absence of administrative blessings? I hope so.

I am seeing a day rapidly approaching where many of the major Institutions provide platforms that empower open content and scholarly activity ... a place where the next LMS/CMS is simply a browser, a social bookmarking toolset, and perhaps a social recommendation space (like Times People). Imagine how amazing it will be when the best content is published in the open where debate, conversations, and discourse happens at the micro and macro level. Think of how concepts will be brought to life when a single blog post could generate a decades worth of comments from millions of people! Will it be like attending a Symposium on a single post where perspectives are shared from all corners of the globe? I can see how it will allow an individual to see the thinking of the author and react to it and the comments of the community ... can that happen? Perhaps.

No matter how one looks at all of this, it is impressive. There will always be the need for closed environments for testing and grades, but why lock away original thoughts? The fact that there are open accidents happening all over the educational blogosphere gives me hope. Anyone care to chime in on any of that insanity?

Discovering Open Resources at Home (and Beyond)

With all my yelling for openness on campus recently, I am proud to show off some of the open content emerging within our iTunes U space. There are thousands of course podcasts that are still behind the log in wall, but so much great open content is being published every single day. It is really cool to see. If you have iTunes installed and you click this link you'll be taken to our top downloads area to see for yourself.

The one thing I'm not sure we are doing a good job at is exposing this to the teaching community as a resource. I'm not thinking about it as a resource for just posting content, but a resource for linking content into an existing course. A quick browse through the WPSU stuff alone brings to light hundreds of amazing assets that are very well done and could support all sorts of learning needs. If there isn't anything to discover at PSU for you, it may be time to take a look at the content that has been appearing in the overall iTunes U space. Not only is there an excellent selection of open content items from higher education available, but the folks in Cupertino who manage this environment have done an outstanding job bringing open and available content to us from all sorts of sources -- take a look, there are some high quality resources just waiting to be used, mashed, contextualized, and shared.

Back at PSU we are in the midsts of a total redesign of our entire podcasting service -- from the Podcasts at Penn State site to our iTunes U environment. We are consolidating, working to make things more discoverable, and trying to find new ways to encourage the open posting of content. We are hoping to start releasing some of the new stuff around the start of the Spring 2009 semester. With that in mind, we are all ears! What should we be doing to promote this in a wider sense and raise greater awareness on and off campus?

The Revolution is in Full Swing

I got back from an interesting little unconference experience yesterday where Brad Kozlek and I attended the WordCamp ED at George Mason University in Virginia. It might seem strange that a couple of guys working a University wide blogging solution built on MovableType would have the nerve to go and spend the day with other faculty and staff doing the same, but with WordPress as the focus. I was convinced that the trip would be worth it and the discussion would center on the power of open publishing platforms for teaching and learning. I wasn't disappointed. Nearly the entire day focused on the outcomes and practices being realized via a campus wide blogging platform. It was cool to see people giving up a Saturday to get together and talk.

One of the big reasons I wanted to go was to get to finally meet Jim Groom in person. Jim is a passionate educational technologist who runs the Blogs at University of Mary Washington service. His work has been an inspiration to lots of people trying to free learning content across campuses. If you read his blog you know he is really into shattering the status quo and destroying the walls that have captured our institutional content for the last 10 years. Let me just say that his presentation rocked and it pushed Brad and I to spend nearly the entire 4 hour drive back to State College talking about how we are also thinking these thoughts -- and frankly how to push a little harder.

His talk was titled Permanent Revolution and told the story of how important it is that we promote the use of open publishing spaces to save the academy. He told it with the intensity and emotion of a man worthy of the nickname, The Reverend. He makes the claim that the "Notion of the Permanent Revolution" is at the core of what we are trying to do with education -- we need ways to rethink the digital space we are living in and how to take advantage of the affordances inherent in instant publishing. He claims that WordPress is a platform for revolution, but was quick to point to us and say the tools don't matter just the ways we allow them to be used. His assertion is that we must work to liberate student content -- in the LMS/CMS model students must pour it in and then after the course it gets packaged up, archived, deleted, and ultimately becomes inaccessible to the creator. It isolates the contribution. In the blog world, it belongs to the individual and the individual decides how to share it with the community (or the class).

A great talk that I wish was given more time. What I really wanted to do was explore the underlying principles with his talk and walk away from any thoughts of "my platform is better than yours." I think Jim and I were both very interested in talking about affordances of the concept, not of the individual tools. He and I are going to be joining forces with Brian Lamb, D'Arcy Norman, and Alan Levine at ELI in January to present a session on the use of personal publishing tools to drive educational practice ... I can't wait to have the conversation with he and the rest of that crew.

At the end of the day, it was a very worth while trip and one that has me thinking more critically about the notion of openness on our campus -- and how much louder we need to be shouting for its creation.

More Hulu and Big Media

I am still taking in the greatness that is hulu.com ... a big media company that has gotten it. This morning I bounced over and saw that they've recently added a new "program" called, Hulu How-To's. Nothing earth shattering -- the typical screencast of how to do things on the site. The thing that is entirely interesting to me is that the three how-to's I saw were all about how to share their content. They teach you how to embed it (with the ability to embed only the parts you want), how to link it, and how to email it. Can you imagine a year ago a big media company teaching you how to redistribute their content?

Update ... here is something I didn't know. Hulu is unavailable outside the US. While I have no interest in supporting Internet filtering I am torn about the notion of perceived progress related to limiting access to content.

Two additional observations:

Several years ago big media started demanding that higher education take action against piracy on our networks. I have to say that I do not blame them doing so. Piracy of music, and more recently movies and software, is illegal and should not be tolerated. I think a lot of people didn't agree with the approaches the big boys utilized and we all wished they saw the value in being more open -- we've all heard both sides of the conversation so no need to rehash. One of the things we all did to help fight illegal file sharing was limit bandwidth on our campuses so students could push fewer bits through our pipes. We don't monitor what gets pushed, we just make sure they aren't using too much. When they do, we are forced to assume it is because they are sharing large media files and we turn off their access for a time. Am I the only one beginning to find it incredibly ironic that some of these same big media folks are now seeing the value in allowing open access to their properties and all of it requires a boatload of bandwidth? I am guessing they will now cry foul about our limiting the very networks they were once so concerned about.

The second observation has to do with Obama's decision to share his Fireside Chats via youtube instead of just radio. I heard some folks on NPR bashing the decision and coming up with a handful of reasons why it is wrong. I'm not so much impressed that he chose youtube as the platform, I am impressed that he decided to do it on a social platform. Youtube allows for feedback, video responses, and the reuse of media via embed tags. Imagine what an amazing open archive these will be as we go forward. Open educational resources at their best.

About Open

Lots of chatter across the edu-blogger web the last week or so about the notion of open -- what does it mean, why bother to discuss it, and why should we care. The idea that we (as Institutions) would take the time to debate the value or the process by which we arrive at the notion of openness is complex to say the least. If we value the ideals of the Land Grant Institution (or education in general), then why argue when we can just be open? These are questions we deal with when we talk about the notion of open and they are difficult at best to answer. Tonight I think I found an example that may make sense of some of the conversation.

Most of you already realize Google is hosting images from the Life archive. They are brilliant and it speaks to the amazing power of not only Google, but the Internet in general. I spent only a few minutes today using the special, "source:life" search addition and the results were at once moving and inspirational. The power to see and access such historically significant works of art is nothing short of stunning. I was, for some reason, compelled to look at old Life photos of JFK ... I think it is because I watched an excellent, American Experience episode on PBS last night about the his assassination. The image that struck me can be found here.

Did you look at the link? Did you notice something about the way that I referneced that beautiful and powerful image? I linked to it. I didn't embed it. I linked to it. Maybe I am missing something with the Google/Time archive, but I didn't see anything that asked me to use that photo in my context. I like that the images are accessible but to me, this is an example of what closed now means.

Now, when I do the same thing at Flickr in relation to Barack Obama's campaign photos something very different emerges. You'll notice something significant -- You can see the image below in my context. Powerful imagery with unreal historical significance, within my space telling my story. Where do you see it? Right here from Barack Obama's Flickr page, shared via a Creative Commons license. That to me is openness. Any thoughts?

Participatory Culture

I'm starting to really think it is working. The "it" I am referring to is the adoption of not just web 2.0 tools, but web 2.0 philosophies. I have been professing the notion of the "conversation" since I re-read the Cluetrain Manifesto a handful of years ago. I say re-read, because the first time I tried it just blew past me like the wind. When I read it the second time I was starting to have success re-imagining my life with a blog, using del.icio.us, sharing on Flickr, and started discovering all the other people out there who were doing the same. I quickly started to understood that the web was a platform and we were the nodes -- not the machines themselves, but the people ... we are the nodes on a knowledge network that the platform empowers to connect. Once I got it, I was hooked on the idea that we can participate in a global conversation -- even if the people we are talking to are two doors down.

At the start of it all, I thought it was about the tools but then it started to click that under all the tools were these basic tenets that were driving some really smart people to create them. From what I can tell they are openness, sharing, connections, and empowerment. To me, these are the basic underpinnings that drive the tools. The developers got it before we did and that strikes me as odd only because our traditional view of developers is that they work alone. Clearly, that is folklore and not the way the new economy pushes us to think. These early pioneers knew something was missing with the web and that was the opportunity to engage. Here I sit several years later -- perhaps a good 10 years later -- and can see we are all getting it.

So much has been going on that proves it is happening to me. My trip to Harvard for Berkman at 10 showed me tangible evidence that people can study this stuff in a practical and pragmatic fashion. My participation in the global Twitter conversation has proven to me that my local community is brilliant and willing to step up to the challenge of showing that off. My continued blogging has opened new doors and created new relationships that are more meaningful than most can comprehend. The Learning Design Summer Camp was the most recent piece of evidence that the notion of participatory culture is alive in a huge way right here on my own campus. These things are all local examples -- and by local I mean happening to me. These are things that have opened my eyes to the power of the philosophies of web 2.0 ... the tools are great, but seeing the people take over from the tools and rise up in a real sense has been stunning.

If I think back to the way I was thinking around the time I was leading the Online IST project in 1999 or so. I can say I had a totally different perspective. I was closed. I wasn't interested in sharing experiences and I certainly willing to participate outside of my group. I believed we were the smartest people and there wasn't anything anyone could tell me to prove me wrong. I was naive and immature to believe there wasn't so much to learn out there. In the years that followed it took quite a bit to get me to see the power and intelligence in the community -- admittedly my eyes started to open only as I began to discover other smart people at other Institutions exploring the social web. I was still turning a blind eye to my local community however. It took time for me to see it emerge here ... and I use the word emerge to mean that I began to pay attention to the things around me. Again, admittedly it took technology to get me to pay attention -- and maturity.

Now I am more excited when I see my RSS reader light up with posts from PSU people than anywhere else. I love seeing the triple digits of PSU Tweeters following each other, and I can't say how proud I am of watching our community grow. I now know much of it is my own movement away from being close minded and taking notice ... I also know that I am excited by the affordances the adoption of not just the tools but the philosophies will provide us all going forward. If I could go back to the early days of all this I would tell myself to stop trying to hoard the ideas, stop trying to know the most, and most importantly to embrace the power in an open and engage community. I can't go back, but I am certainly excited about the movement forward. It is nice to be part of it. Thanks.

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!

More Thoughts on Open Course Design

I am going to make a quick return to some previous writing I did on the potential power of community to drive course and knowledge creation. Bear with me, as I am still getting my head wrapped around this whole thing. I am clearly not there yet, so this is an open call for discussion around this concept.

Let me just say that I am loving the wiki. I have never (in my 10 years at PSU) seen the power of the collective more clearly than I have through the use of the ETS Wiki to drive thinking forward. Nearly as many of the edits to the things we are working on internally are coming from those outside the ETS staff -- amazing and very powerful. Since I said no more invitations in my last post, let me say that I was wrong. You are invited to continue to participate. It is making my work more meaningful on levels I didn't anticipate. With that said, I am getting set to explore a new use of wikis here at PSU.

With the closing of the IST Solutions Institute, a place I called home for six and a half good years, I have been working through emotions about lots of things. One thing I am struck by is the fact that much of the work of SI in the early days centered around creating courses for use across the State of PA to help manage curricular drift, create new standards for problem based learning approaches, and unify faculty in their curricular decisions. We built the Online IST courses to serve as the basis for the core undergraduate curriculum for a brand new College at a big, geographically dispersed University. The most amazing thing about it to this day was that faculty used it! They used these centrally designed course materials as their textbooks, delivered the problem activities we designed, used the ANGEL templates to quickly generate their semester sequence, and they participated with us by offering to help edit, create, and grow the content so it better matched the needs of the curriculum. Amazing participation and for me it was career changing observation.

So flash forward to the SI closure and a note I recieved about how the course materials would be "frozen" and left in their current state -- no new updates. Perhaps an opportunity to explore new thinking? Why not go the other route? Why not "defrost" the materials and turn them into wiki articles and invite the IST community in to participate? Think how a concept as simple as "Knowledge Worker" (update ...compare the linked Wikipedia article with this lesson from Online IST 110 on the same concept ... sorry, PSU authentication is required.) could be created and grown through active participation. Think about dozens and dozens of these articles being created and shared openly within the community so the content grows and becomes as rich a resource and it once was -- only stronger with the power of community behind it.

Well, people say that is fine, but what do you do with hundreds of disconnected articles? I guess my answer is to invite the community in to create meta articles -- articles that creates a narrative story about the collection of concepts you are trying to string together into lessons/topics/chapters or whatever you want to call them. Let a course committee determine how the meta articles link and drive the course structure, but do it from a wiki approach.

I would have to think new affordances would present themselves ... here are a couple I am thinking about:

• Faculty could weave their work into the articles in a more seamless way. By exposing their research and citing their publications in a wiki article students would get a more complete perspective of what the field is all about. Encouraging debate within the articles would open up new perspectives on otherwise mundane topics.
• Students could be asked to contribute new knowledge and make it available to the course committees for inclusion in the meta articles. Students are often out in front of us on emerging trends and getting them to contribute seems really exciting and very appropriate.
• Alumni, Doctoral students, and industry partners could participate in new ways that brings in perspectives that would otherwise be locked out. One of my former colleagues at IST, Shawn Clark, has done amazing work with an advisory board member and letting him work side by side (virtually) with the students. The reason it works is because Dr. Clark gets that there are people outside the academy that have much to contribute to the work going on inside the academy. His futures site is a model of open collaboration and contribution. If Shawn can pull it off, don't you think other interested parties connected to IST could as well? Wiki content could help that.

There are more, but at the end of the day this would be a ton of work -- not at all hard to move content out of existing systems, but really hard to socialize the whole approach. Someone would have to apply that energy and someone would have to see the value in it all to make it real. With the closing of the Solutions Institute, I'm not sure who that person is.

Invitations? Not Anymore.

Running through a lazy Saturday read of the feeds and I noticed that my long-time colleague and friend, Chris Stubbs, has written another one of his great posts. I have to admit reading Mr. Stubbs' blog is one of my favorite things to do. If you don't read it, go on and give him a shot. At any rate, Stubbs has a particularly good post today titled, No Invitation Required in which he comes right out and says what so many of us feel -- don't wait to participate.

Its not so much that he says it, it is that he says it well. I was particularly interested in his closing paragrph (right before he goes and quotes John Mayer ... not that I don't listen, just surprised):

So if you are reading this and you've ever hesitated to participate in the web 2.0 world - to comment, to friend someone, to offer up your $0.02 or jump into a conversation, take heed: don't wait for an invitation. Not only is an invitation not required, but frankly it may never come. Even with the best analytics, the internet is closer to a one way mirror than a transparent piece of glass. Just because you are interested in a web 2.0 idea, podcast, or post, doesnt mean that the creators know it. The web is too big for invitations. And if you are worried about sounding stupid, worried you don't have anything important to contribute, or are not willing to take the initiative, to speak your mind and to join in the conversation, you will never be recognized. Your voice will never be heard. You lose a chance to participate. The world loses your contribution. No one wins.

I think too many of us forget that the spaces we live in are very new to whole bunch of folks and that they aren't aware of the protocol -- they don't know the rules are different in the web 2.0 space and many are very uncomfortable interrupting their understood social norms. I hear it from people quite a bit myself, "I didn't know I could participate in the [insert name of event/opportunity/space here]." I just never really took a minute to step back and think that I am contributing to the problem by not being more overt, by not going beyond assuming people know they have an open invitation, by not being more clear. For that I am sorry, but as Stubbs says if you are waiting for the US Postal Service to show up with an invitation to the conversation you could be waiting a long time. But with that said, let me go ahead and say it so those who are here can read it for themselves -- You are Invitied to Participate!

Now, how to get to the rest of the world who doesn't know I have a blog?

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!