Cole W. Camplese

Wider Perspective

Let me start by admitting that I care about so many new things these days. Six months ago I was a totally different person who thought only about the world I lived in as Director of ETS. I didn't think at all about the whole teaching and learning with technology landscape at PSU like I should have. I thought really hard about my little slice of the organization and the things we did on a day to day basis. I knew my peers within my organization had hard jobs, but I didn't quite appreciate what they were up against. In a lot of ways I had it easy -- space to invent, space to engage faculty, and space to take risks. As I appraoch six months in my new role I am struck at how much wider my perspective has gotten in that short period of time. I now care intensely about so many different kinds of things -- all still in the context of teaching, learning, research, and technology -- but the breadth is unreal and challenges me daily.

I could write pages of stories that support this claim, but I'll focus on one. When I stepped into the Senior Director role we were in the last weeks of the fall semester. We were also in the final days of working with our previous student response system. We needed to move to a new system for various reasons by the start of summer. What that meant was that we needed to identify, test, implement, assess, and decide on a new system in relative short order so we could do a full installation the minute spring semester classes ended. By the way, we need to do that in 249 classrooms.

Here's where the perspective changes started to occur. I will freely admit that I was not at all interested in clickers in my old job -- as a matter of fact I was convinced they supported bad practice in the classroom. I could make that call because I had talked to a couple of faculty colleagues who said that and I trusted their thoughts without probing. ETS didn't do the clickers project, that was the Classroom and Lab Computing (CLC) group (also a part of my new organization) so I didn't have to care. But knowing what I know now, I was dead wrong.

I should have cared then. I care a lot now. I had to take the time to listen to the really smart people in the CLC talk to me about the way faculty were really using clickers and I was stunned at how they were transforming conversations in classrooms. One of the first things I did was ask Brian Young, a colleague and instructional designer in ETS, to join the CLC in the investigation. What Brian did was create a blog and work with Dave Test of the CLC to visit all the classes testing our two evaluation clicker environments throughout the spring semester where he documented various clicker practices being employed. What an eye opener. Through this collaborative work not only did I gain a greater appreciation for the technology, but many of my colleagues in ETS did as well. That is a failure I will not allow to happen again. Our groups need to talk to each other and need to work together to provide the best kinds of solutions in all of our teaching and learning spaces. In the video below you can see one such example of how Brian, Dave, and faculty member, Sam Richards are using clickers to create new forms of conversations.

My perspective was widened further when I was invited to be a part of a social media panel at our Hershey Medical School about a month ago. During the three hour session everyone in the audience was using clickers to respond to framing questions we wrote relative to the cases we were discussing. Amazingly in almost every case, asking the audience to first react to the questions pressed us as panelists in very different directions. I got to see first hand how hard it is to really use and react to clickers well and how much more relevant the resulting discussions were. Based on that interaction, I decided (with lots of Brian's help) to use clickers as a part of the faculty and student panel at the TLT Symposium. The thought was to turn the questions onto the audience and let the panelists react -- an opportunity to create tension and push the conversation into otherwise unexplored territory. It was hard, but created quite the conversation.

One of the things that I am loving about my new position is that this is happening to me on a daily basis. I am gaining new perspectives on the ways our campus works and how much we can do right here within TLT to support it at a high level. I recognize is natural to think only about the pieces you are responsible for, but I think now more than ever we need to demand more. We need to find ways to be more integrated as we make critical decisions to support pieces of the primary mission of our Universities. I know my perspective has changed and it will continue to be changed -- and I like that.

What do you make?

Really nothing to say about this other than, "wow" ... via YouTube - jacklefttowns Channel.

Baiting the Hook

This is a wonderful short presentation by Dan Meyer at TedxNYED (I'd love to do one of those events here at PSU). There is so much packed into 12 short minutes just screaming to be discussed and explored. One of his main points is the potential problems of practice related to teaching from and relying strictly on textbooks -- not that he doesn't say textbooks are evil or anything, shows how to better take advantage of them in a 21st century world. Watch it and see if it moves you to take the time to react. I'd love to hear ideas and reactions.

Clickity Clack

One of the things that keeps my energized is knowing that the work we do here in higher education almost always impacts students somewhere along the line. Even though we mostly work with faculty, the fact of the matter is that when we work with faculty to rethink their practice the resulting design ultimately happens to their students. Knowing that leads to a very positive sense as I do my work, but I do wish I had more time to talk directly to students ... and I need to figure out how to do that.

Case in point -- I had a really interesting morning where I got to spend about 90 minutes in a Communications class with 30 students who want to be journalists talking about the iPad. I was invited by Steven Sampsell to come and answer questions on a relevant technology issue in education while all 30 of the students role-played Collegian writers. Getting a chance like that is at the top of my list of things to do. I always leave feeling amazingly positive and the same thing happened today. One thing I will mention is the sound of 60 hands typing feverishly on keyboards is really disconcerting at first -- imagine the silence as a student asks a question and then all 30 of them spring into action clickity-clacking on really loud PC style keyboards. I hadn't heard that since I was in high school typing class.

One thing that was interesting was how much I had to think about what I've thought about the iPad as a tool to support my workflow the last two weeks and how that might relate to a college student. I was a little surprised that I struggled to answer questions like, "why would a college student want to buy this?" or, "would you buy one of these for your kids?" Those are tough questions that I had to really stop and think about. I was looking at skeptics and I didn't have answers immediately to address them.

It wasn't until after the 20 minute interview session was over and we just started talking did it start to become clear why one might want one ... and the answers are a bit surprising to me even now. They are the simple things -- a really long battery life, the size, and the ability to get on and off the device with a swipe of a finger seemed to really resonate. When the iPad was introduced so many people said this was the killer device and it was going to save newspapers, magezines, television, radio, movies, textbooks, music, and of course education. From where I sit much of those things don't really need saving and the ones that do maybe they don't deserve to be. Not a single student asked me about digital textbooks. What finally got the students' attention were the conversations about those simple things -- and the idea that you can actually use the iPad with an iPhone to flip Scrabble letters through the air.

In my own work the past two weeks I have found the iPad to be a smart and very serviceable device for doing much of my work. Is it as killer for my work as my MacBook Pro? No. Can I go for really long stretches without needing to use my MBP now that I have this device? Yes. Simply put, this thing is different from a laptop and it does support a similar set of work tasks well but it is doing it in way that has challenged my traditional patterns of interaction. I do the bulk of my work moving between apps, but they enter and leave so quickly it is a heck of a lot like expose on the MBP. I am struggling with some things because I am learning how to compute all over again -- I am still unconvinced that rethinking all of it is a bad thing. Let's revisit this after tomorrow morning when I give an hour keynote using nothing more than my iPad (I am terrified of that).

As an example, the students were honestly blown away that "documents" don't go in a folder or on the desktop. They are instead embedded in the application that you would expect them to be accessible from. That made a heck of a lot of sense to them -- they are used to just putting pictures "in" facebook and not worrying about where they end up. They don't need to care where there stuff is "physically" located because it is part of the application that created it. I think this is a fundamental change that bothers a lot of us in the tech space, but thrills those outside it. I want to look at pictures, I open the Photo app. I want to work on a spreadsheet, I open Numbers. I want to work on a presentation, I open Keynote and all of my existing stacks are sitting there. I know lots of people who recreate content over and over again because they have no idea where it is. And let's get real, more and more of the stuff we create is in the cloud and if that is your workflow an app like Good Reader gives you access to all of it.

I hope you aren't reading this as a fanboy post, but one that is made after really struggling to find a place for this device over the last two weeks. Have I found a place for it yet? In a word, yes. I'm not sure if that place will be the same in another two weeks, but so far this fits not only my work workflow, but it is now part of my life workflow. It moves more elegantly from my early morning email and feed reading to full day work back to evening browsing and play with the family. When the students and I started to explore their workflow I saw them think about what a device like this could mean for them and when I passed it around I did notice the looks of wonder on many of their faces. They started to see it in a light that wasn't a distorted reflection of a laptop or a phone -- they started to talk about how they work and live and where this could support much of it. And when I showed them Scrabble it was all over.

Disruptive Technologies

Scott McDonald and I are getting set to once again teach our CI597 Disruptive Technologies in Teaching and Learning course again. I love the reaction people give us when they ask us the title of the course. I think so many people walk around with a really negative view of how technology can be used to support learning -- way too many folks think we are just shoving technology at students. I don't think that could be any further from the truth in our course. Our goal is always to help students work to understand the affordances of technologies within the context of designing learning environments. We will once again press our students to explore notions of community, identity, and design as we ask them to participate in lots of mini experiments along the way.

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

We want them to see not the specific technologies but what can be accomplished along the path of teaching and learning with technology -- we want them to recognize how many of the new environments we are all participating in online can create and support a much richer learning experience. We want them to sit up and take some risks and explore. I'll be sharing more thoughts about where we are and what we are doing as the spring semester gets rolling.

Taking a Break

I've been quiet here for the last week trying to collect thoughts after writing so much last month. I think I'll be a little quiet for the next several days as well. I'm not giving up on writing, just need to find my voice again. Before I sign off to enjoy Spring Break, I wanted to mention something ... I dropped a friend of the family's son off at school today for them and walked him to his pre-K classroom. It is the same private school my daughter went to prior to moving on to first grade this year at the public school. As I was walking down the hall I saw the quilt her class made last year as a culminating project. I was stopped in my tracks -- I was just in awe of what it means.

It was filled with color, life, and inspiration. I recall hearing her talk about the quilt nearly every day last year and didn't quite understand why it was such a big deal. Even at her graduation when they showed it off it didn't quite hit me. Seeing this living example of my daughter's contribution to the intellectual, emotional, and perhaps spiritual embodiment of her school in the hall today made me both very sad and very happy. It is, in every single way, in stark contrast to the representation of her contribution in the public school system -- the "adequate sign." I can't tell you how it made me feel to know she made something tangible that the current students point to as a model for how they learn to contribute, share, and participate in the process of learning. Really an amazing thing to see.

And with that, I'll talk to you when the mood strikes!

What to Write About? Flickr Video?

It has been a week since I've written and I am still struggling with what to share ... I find myself in a bit of a post Symposium holding pattern with things. I can't seem to pull it together. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that here at PSU we are in SRDP time. The SRDP is the staff review and development plan that is done with all staff every year. So I have been spending tons of time reviewing people's plans and trying to be very thoughtful in sharing feedback and providing organizational direction for my direct reports. Let me just say that while it is a critical task, it is both time consuming and takes most of my mental energy to complete.

I do want to mention how interested I am in the Flickr Video announcement from the other day. I am very interested in it because of its limitations to tell you the truth -- I am very curious if the 90 second time limit will push people to be more thoughtful with their video posts ... much like Twitter pushes us to express our feelings in 140 characters bursts, will the 90 second limit unlock a whole new way to think about video expression? I did a quick video yesterday and things seemed to work very well -- other than me on video. I really want to ask my students about it later today and class and get their sense, but I am thinking there are some really interesting things that we can dream up to get people to think hard about how to share a fully baked concept in 90 seconds or less.

Speaking of class, I am still having a blast with it and have been really happy with how things are progressing. I am going to really miss teaching over the summer and may not have a chance to get back in the classroom for quite some time. This has been a very good experience and I have learned a ton about so many things.

This blog is now running WP 2.5 which is a good thing ... took a little time to get everything back up and running after the update, but it has been worth it. That's it.

Reading Thoughts

As I sit at my counter on a lazy Saturday morning with Jazz playing in the background I am struck at how nice it is to see the thoughts of my students streaming before my eyes. Now that I am finally home after what feels like weeks on the road, I am taking a little time to get caught up on my RSS feeds. The big difference is that I'm not reading my typical array of Apple news or Enterprise 2.0 stuff ... I'm going through entries my students have made in their own blog spaces over the last few weeks. What I see are a lot of really insightful thoughts as they relate not only to the assigned readings, but to all sorts of things they are thinking about. What I am struck by is that none of my students in the past have taken the time to post thoughts unrelated to a course in an CMS/LMS such as ANGEL or BlackBoard. I wonder why that is ...

This isn't really news to me as I've used blogs in courses I've taught before, but the combination of our own PSU Blogging platform, an interesting course topic, and a more mature group of students is creating some interesting results already. I recall a few years ago in a small study I conducted with my colleague, Bart Pursel, we asked students if they were more motivated to post in the blog environment compared with ANGEL and they overwhelmingly reported that they were. I am very interested in seeing how these students continue down this path.

What does this give me? I am already learning so much more about the way they think, write, and discuss. The fact that there are more artifacts for me to begin to build my impressions of them is amazing to me. One of the themes of the course we are teaching is identity ... with that in mind I find it interesting that I am already able to create a stronger sense of who these students are by not only interacting with them in class, but by reading their blog posts. Makes for a stronger sense of community (which is another one of our primary themes).

So, as I sit here and read the thoughts of my students I know there is something important about giving students their own place to think out loud. I am also struck by the fact that I would rather read their thoughts than those typically clogging my google reader on a lazy Saturday morning. I've shared out a Meta-Blog of my students if you are interested in exploring with me ... you can always check out what is happening in the class by visiting the Pligg site. We'll also be posting our first class podcast as soon as I can get it edited. Until then I have some reading to do.

Social Ratings in Teaching and Learning

A while back we completed another Hot Team white paper related to social rating sites -- think of digg.com as the big example. Essentially a space where content is either aggregated in or submitted by users and then voted on by the community to raise the opportunity for exposure to all readers. Lots of people find these types of spaces very important for helping them filter and discover the things that are interesting to them. We've talked about it on the ETS Talk podcast in the past and we are all agreeing there is something in this for education.

So, in a typically crazy move Scott McDonald and I made the decision to put a pligg (open source) site at the middle of our CI 597C course we are teaching this semester. At the start it confused students a bit, but I am starting to see content coming in from student blogs, with comments, and votes. It is really cool to see a community developing before my eyes. It fits the theme of the course -- Disruptive Technologies for Teaching and Learning -- so it is a natural fit.

This week we will see if our vision of this will work. What we hope to see are students responding to the course readings in their own blogs (so they "own" the content) and they are aggregated automatically into the Pligg site. They are then given three votes to give to the top posts (and they must comment on the post as to why they voted for it). The top vote getters rise to the top and these then form the basis for the face to face discussion for the week. It feels like it is a solid way to bring lots of pieces of content together and give students a real voice in the organization of emerging conversation. It is worth watching. Anyone else exploring social rating sites for teaching and learning?

Divided Attention

Posts are coming at a very slow pace these days over here. It is obvious I have entered into a very hectic travel, work, life period again. I have been on the road much of January ... first to FL for vacation, then to Arizona for a couple of talks, back to FL for more vacation, and then back here it State College. I spent a whirlwind four days in the office this week catching up and digging out from under the avalanche of work that had been stock piled while I was away. Tomorrow AM I head out to the annual Educause Learning Initiative meeting in San Antonio where I'll be presenting with my colleague, Allan Gyorke. That should be fun and if anyone is going to be at ELI, leave me a comment and we'll get together.

I am also teaching this semester and this past week we had our first face to face session of the semester. I was hoping to write a post about it, but work got in the way. I think teaching with my good friend, Scott McDonald will prove to be a ton of fun and really challenging -- challenging only b/c Scott is one smart guy and he will push me to be more prepared and academic in my approach. I will probably learn as much as the students this semester just by getting to work with him. The first class was excellent and we had an outstanding discussion around how we as educators need to be more aware of what our students are all about as we attempt to design learning environments. Lots of fun and the new social rating site we are using to aggregate all of the student blogs is really coming to life.

At any rate, the posting here will be light over the next several weeks as I continue my traveling and course schedule.