Cole W. Camplese

Digital Strategy

Around 2003 or 2004 I was invited to be part of a group of five Universities working with Apple called the Apple Digital Campus project. It was PSU, Duke, Missouri (their Journalism School), Stanford, and Michigan if I recall correctly. The goal of the program was to better understand what was happening in Higher Education and attempt to plug into emerging trends and ideas. I really remember working closely with the folks from Missouri and Duke on their podcasting projects -- Duke with the iPod for all students and MOJO with their laptop and news production initiatives. We even had Carl Berger working with us to help each of us assess our projects. It was a great time and an opportunity that I am very thankful for.

The project I proposed was to look at digital expression as a form of academic evidence and to work to integrate the notions of digital media into a non media intensive curriculum (Information Sciences and Technology). I spent lots of hours writing and working on the white papers that kicked that off, first in the College of IST and later as a primary driver of my strategy here at ETS. The idea was that the notion of students being producers of digital media was on the rise and Universities needed to understand it and find ways to support digital expression in a systematic fashion.

Around this same I really got into the rise of social media, blogging, RSS, podcasting, and all the associated technologies. At the time I and a few friends and colleagues even hosted a weekly "From the Basement" podcast that allowed us to fully understand how it all worked and ultimately fit together. One of the lingering discoveries was how easy it was to move most of my creation and publishing online -- and how that was ultimately a better way for my students to consume things. Still a driving thought for me today.

I loved the ideas we were throwing around back then and wanted to test them with a (much) larger audience. When I left the College of IST here at PSU one of my first initiatives in ETS was to bring a podcasting service to the University. Podcasts at Penn State was born along with the adoption of iTunes U. In hindsight, the Blogs at PSU should have been first out of the gate, but podcasting seemed like low hanging fruit. It still amazes me when I see numbers like the ones reported below by our Digital Commons team for the last two semesters from our public and private iTunes U space:

• 11,197 Total podcast tracks (non-course/departmental and courses)
• 629 unique iTunes U courses
• 7,411 podcast course tracks
• 108 new courses were created since April 2009 (when our new self provisioning toolset became active and we started tracking)
• 3,786 Non-course podcast tracks (ex. departmental podcasts and podcast shows)

What has happened over the last four years has been quite an interesting story related to the continuation of that Apple Digital Campus work -- we have quite literally worked to systematically support digital expression as a form of scholarship and have seen it move into a much more mainstream acceptance across the institution. Not only do we have University wide blogging and podcasting services, but our soon to be rebranded Media Commons (Digital Commons over the last two plus years) initiative has had big impact on the ecosystem.

The Media Commons is a standardized media lab environment that we have worked to install and support at 20 campus locations across the Commonwealth of PA, at three locations here at University Park, and with a couple College/discipline specific facilities scheduled to come online in the next six months or so. What goes on in these facilities is staggering ... as I look at the final report for the Fall I am stunned by the increase in overall utilization across the board -- faculty usage is up, student usage is up, and even staff usage is up. And at some locations it is really up. What is most interesting is how faculty are now coming to us for assistance in integrating digital media assignments -- they are no longer just sending their students in to use the equipment, they are working with us to design activities that make sense within the context of their course. Then the students come and are supported at a much higher level because our staff is already familiar with the goals of the projects. I think this represents "systematic support for digital expression."

As I sat down to write this post I was really only going to highlight the fact that podcasting at PSU continues to go strong ... what emerged was an end of year reflection on a strategy that was laid out six or more years ago. I am very proud of all the people who have gotten behind these crazy ideas, have worked a ridiculous amount of time to make it real, and to colleagues across higher education and industry for helping me think through it all. It is amazing to me that a strategy conceived in conference rooms so many years ago has taken so long to come to fruition and at the same time has happened so quickly.

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?

More on Moving MT to a New Location

Last night I wrote about exporting one blog out of the Blogs at Penn State platform and importing into a commercial (or self hosted) blog environment ... clearly it is really easy, but I didn't think of a couple of things. So today I did the same thing with my Spring 2007 Podcasting Update that I had done in the Blogs at Penn State about a year ago. You can see the whole thing here at this space now by using this link. This time I did three things while moving it:

1. Grabbed all the images it references from my PSU Personal space and uploaded them into my common directory here at this blog. I obviously preserved the names to make it easier. Another thing I do with all my blogs is organize all the media I reference in each post into a common location ... because of this I was able to take the export file and do an easy find and replace with the old path to the new path. Perfect! Now all my posts reference local media files.
2. Next thing I did was create a new category here at Learning & Innovation that I wanted all these posts to show up in -- I chose PSU Podcasting.
3. Again using TextWrangler I did a quick find and replace to set the Primary Category to PSU Podcasting. This brought all my posts in under a common category. I didn't do that on my iPhone blog import and it made me go through and update each by hand ... not too bad, because I only had 20 or so posts, but if it would have been a big blog it would have taken me some time.

I could easily create a script to do that here locally, or by working with someone smarter than myself we could come up with a simple little utility to do it all via the web. All told, it took me under 10 minutes to make it all happen. Seamless move!

Podcasting at a Big Univeristy and iTunes U Thoughts

Podcasting at Penn State is getting closer and closer ... we've worked very hard since January to provide an end to end podcasting opportunity that supports both in and out of the classroom activities. In the last few weeks we've gotten quite a few pieces of the puzzle figured out ... our podium machines are getting Audacity, LAME encoder, and potentially ProfCast (for the Macs). That is in addition to the standard and growing suite of audio tools currently installed in all of our classrooms and labs. Wireless microphones are coming in to support this activity as well. We are launching a call for participation program next week that we hope will get faculty engaged. Both our Faculty Multimedia Center and student centered, Studio 204 are gearing to help get people moving as well. All in all, things are moving fast as we race towards Fall.

In addition to all that, we are getting closer and closer to testing iTunes U here on our campus. With that in mind, I thought I'd jot down some of the major questions I am getting as I am sharing the news with people. I get asked some basic questions from faculty and staff every time I start the iTunes U discussion. We will be maintaining our public podcasting site as a portal to open and free PSU content as well as a big front door to iTunes U on our campus. The big questions I hear going in look something like:

• Can we have both public and private content in our our single iTunes U implementation? You know, I have heard a couple of different takes on this and am very interested in seeing this in action. There is so much content that we would want open to the public while keeping a bunch of other items closed. We did a very limited pilot this past Spring and there were some serious concerns about posting lecture-based podcasts in the open. The single biggest concern was that the microphone would pick up some sort of private conversation between instructor and student -- a real concern. I am hopeful that we can simply designate certain areas open and certain areas private ... that would make life much easier.
• How will iTunes U play with our CMS, ANGEL? For now I am telling people that every space in our iTunes U space can expose a URL that will allow instructors to easily provide a direct link to the space itself. I think for the first few months that is the direction we'll explore. After we get our ideas straight and really understand how it all works, I am guessing we'll explore a greater level of integration with ANGEL. Imagine tools in ANGEL that allow instructors to manage much of their iTunes U spaces without jumping around different environments.
• How easy will it be for faculty to use? I have no idea ... I am assuming it is very easy, but time will tell. I'll be able to report on that soon enough. For now, from what I have seen there will be a small learning curve, but once it is climbed we should be OK. We have amazing adoption of ANGEL on our campus, but that took time. I am expecting that this will take time as well. I doubt we'll have explosive use of the service without solid programmatic initiatives in specific Colleges and disciplines. In the early going that is what we will focus on -- getting specific partners moving and see what we learn from there.
• What kind of content can be delivered? This to me is the exciting part of the whole thing ... instructors can use the space to deliver audio, video, and PDF documents. When I get to that part in my discussions with people I can see light bulbs going on. Once they get the whole subscription model, the next thing they get is that things they want their students to get just show up. If managed correctly, this could have profound effects on efficiencies in the classroom. Imagine not having to worry if your students get their feedback, assignments, or whatever it is you currently push around via email or LMS/CMS? That is a powerful thing ... it also gives us the chance to look at how an iTunes U space can be a dynamic syllabus environment.
• Does it support teams? No idea, but I seriously doubt you can make certain tabs and spaces private to sub-groups within a class. We shall see.

So there's a quick brain dump to get me back on the blogging bandwagon. I have been off for a week or so ... been crazy busy and dealing with some things that have sapped my writing energy. Any thoughts from people out there about these questions or have questions of your own?