Cole W. Camplese

Work Reflection: Importance of Building Something

We make things all the time in this business ... websites, digital bits of stuff, documents, and everything in between. I have found that as my career arc has moved forward (and admidtely upward) the amount of tangible stuff I make has decreased. I post all sorts of stuff quickly all over the place, but I have gotten very bad at pointing to the things I am most proud of and wanted to try and challenge that. I was reminded the other night that I even though I am not making the same kinds of things, I have been heavily involved in new forms of maker behavior the last few years and I feel like I need to reflect on that a bit today.

The other night I had the pleasure of hosting a group of the TLT Faculty Fellows at a dinner. Not all of our current and past Fellows could be there (for all sorts of reasons), but the ones that were there all greeted me with a giant smile, hearty handshakes, and hugs. We spent a few hours having some of the best and uplifting conversations I have had around our shared core values of teaching, research, learning, and technology. It was really what I needed in this moment.

Then today it hit me -- I made that. I wrote a proposal several years ago that was basically laughed at ... "no way faculty will want to hang out with IT people!" I didn't listen. I modeled my ideas after the vision that I discovered a couple of years earlier while visiting the Berkman Center in Boston. I didn't listen. That is the lesson. A lesson I need to start remembering more. There are times that you get to the point where you know too much to challenge the status quo -- you fall into the "that will never work" crew. I need to stop listening -- and I am talking about both to those around me pushing those messages and my own inner voice. I need to remember that not listening can lead to great and unexpected things.

TLT Fellows will play a critical role in the success of many initiatives across ITS. Fellows will become essential to the future of TLT’s network as connecting points of intelligence, insight, energy, and knowledge-sharing. TLT Fellows will help to drive projects from within and to share fresh ideas and skills with the larger Penn State community. In addition to the two Fellow programs contained within this proposal, you will find a request for permanent funding for a related set of projects called Engagement Awards. Our goal for our Fellows is that they further work that we agree upon and help TLT create tangible outcomes that can be shared widely with the teaching and learning community through presentations, publications, and new services.

If you want a recipe for successfully engaging faculty on your campus, you need something like this. This isn't secret sauce or anything as so many people do these kinds of things, but you need to care deeply about more than just the projects. You have to care about the people. This isn't about money, it is about finding ways for people to make deep and meaningful connections -- and trust me, that takes time. As I sat and listened to the group talk and laugh the other night I was struck by a sense of deep satisfaction. A satisfaction that comes from making something, a space that provides an opportunity to do the thing I value most deeply -- connections to each other.

I could write a 12 step program on how to launch something like this, but I can boil it down to one simple thing -- build a team that is so excited by thinking, sharing, and cultivating connections. Killer relationships will follow. Amazing inventions will happen. New forms of teaching practice will emerge. Innovations will go from thought to reality. And "that can't work" will go to, damn this is awesome.

Finding a way to make space for connections is the thing that I am reflecting on today and so that is what you are going to get.

I know this is a miserable post -- I haven't taken the time to write in ages and it shows, but I need to start taking some stock in the things I am building and have built again. All of this is part of a larger eco-system of thought and action ... I should get back to celebrating it and the people who have given so much to help make it real. I'll consider this a step back onto that path.

Time to Rewind and Move Forward

I am really looking forward to 2013 and what we can end up doing with WordPress as the engine to the new sites.psu service that is set to really take off. Honestly we've had it running in very quiet production mode for months now, but there is a whole new look and feel, complete with personal profiles and an all PSU activity stream, on the horizon as well as new themes that will amaze people for both websites and simple things like blogs and ePortfolios. All in all I am thrilled with our choice to return to our original vision from well before we adopted Moveable Type. What we wanted was a system that worked for each and every person for as many uses as they could dream -- and we now have to add to that the ability to publish and manage from any platform and device they want. I am pleased with the progress towards that vision and it has me really excited about the possibilities. So when I saw Jon Armstrong say the following about how docce.com was being overhauled to be powered by wp it inspired me to reflect and share.

Still, for dooce.com, WordPress is the ideal choice.

via Drupal to Wordpress Migration: Prologue | BLURBOMAT.

New PSU Tech Tutors Site

Above is a screen shot of the PSU Tech Tutors site ... not only is it great design and a great program (training for students by students), the whole thing is built on our new WordPress stack. The new service that we are calling sites.psu.edu allows people at Penn State to not only construct typical wordpress style blog sites, but full on web presences. We've licensed dozens of professional themes, have put them through the accessibility ringer, and are making site building easier than ever.

Yammer at Penn State

About one year ago I started negotiating with Yammer to bring the enterprise edition to Penn State. In the past year we have had a Yammer implementation team working to make that a reality. I met with the project manager, Heather Huntsinger, this morning in our monthly update meeting and we had a very interesting discussion. One of the things she asked was now that we are winding down on the implementation phase, how do we move this into the "product" phase ... essentially closing out one project and starting another one that looks at Yammer as a product/service going forward. A great question and one that made me step back and look at the service in general ... are people adopting the platform? Who is using it? How are they using it? Are things trending in the right direction? Having access to both the Yammer analytics and our own Data Warehouse allowed us to get a sense of where all this is heading.

The first thing I will mention is that Yammer has significantly changed my workflow and communication approaches. Within TLT, we make very heavy use of Yammer for ongoing discussion. In the past year we have moved nearly all of our organizational conversations to a series of private and open Yammer groups. TLT is made up of several units, each with its own proviate Yammer group so those local units can have conversations. There is a larger TLT private group for larger conversation and we have a TLT Leadership Team private group for ongoing strategy and operational conversations. I even have private groups that are just for my direct reports. In the end I have eliminated hundreds of daily emails for myself and am able to stay on top of so much more in a much more streamlined way.

But this is more about who is using Yammer at Penn State -- I was shocked at what the team was able to discover. The data is about a week or two old, so the numbers are a bit lower than the total user count as of today, 4,695. People use their Penn State user ID to log in, so we can look at various attributes by mashing that data against what we know of people via data warehouse ... based on what we pulled, there are 4420 user IDs in the Yammer user list. Taking out 62 unknown users, we retrieved information of 4358 users from Penn State Data Warehouse. Among these users, 481 of them (11%) are faculty members, 1948 of them (45%) are staff members and 1929 of them (44%) are student members. What blew my mind was the student number ... I expected staff to be another 2,000 and have students be about 500, but that is not the case.

It gets more interesting as you look across the Penn State system -- remember we have 24 campuses across the state of Pennsylvania. There are 2970 users from what many people used to refer to as our main campus, University Park. Among them, 325 users (11%) are faculty members, 1687 of them (57%) are staff members and 958 of them (32%) are students. There are 1386 users from other campuses. Among them, 156 users (11%) are faculty members, 259 of them (19%) are staff members and 971 of them (70%) are students. For example, there are 271 student users from World Campus.

What is striking to me is how differently the user base is at University Park and the Campuses. At campuses, about 70% of the users are students versus 32% at University Park. And the difference in staff use is staggering to me. The next set of questions need to address what are driving these differences and what is going on differently here at UP versus across the Commonwealth.

Seeing Data

Part of what makes what I do so interesting is the interconnectedness of the moving parts of the organization. My group, Teaching and Learning with Technology (TLT), has many moving parts and a handful of groups within it that all do different, yet similar things. Our Classroom and Lab Computing (CLC) team focuses time on our physical spaces and the infrastructure that supports them. Education Technology Services (ETS) is a different type of organization in that they not only evaluate, test, and recommend technology solutions for faculty, staff, and students but they also look to unpack the affordances of those technologies. ITS Training Services spends most of their time designing and delivering training to faculty, staff, and students but also manage big projects that deliver all sorts of other services. WebLion is a team that focuses intensely on the overall processes inherent in the design, development, and deployment of large organizational websites. What amazes me is that each of these groups are all part of a larger value chain of sorts that serves our University very well.

They also all produce lots and lots of data. Some of that data comes from the services that we offer, while a whole bunch of it comes from the questions we ask of our audiences. A couple of examples of service level data might be stuff that our Adobe Connect service collects for us, or the data we get each time a student prints in one of our labs, or each time an application is launched. With this kind of data we don't know what happens in an Adobe Connect meeting, or know what the application does once launched, or the contents of the pages printed (we'd need to do a different kind of analysis to get at that) but we do get clues that help us ask better questions that presumably help us make better decisions. From where I sit the days of, "I betcha ..." planning are long gone.

To this end we've embarked on trying to make sense of the data we have in new ways -- visual ways. A small team in TLT has been working at using the Roambi platform to do just that, visualize otherwise flat data tables to help us make better sense of what is being gathered. The unfortunate thing about this blog post is that you can't get a sense of what it is like to not only see your data, but to be able to touch it and manipulate it in real time. The screenshot below is a simple representation of the percentage of overall pages printed during the 2011 academic year (Spring, Summer, and Fall) from the College of the Liberal Arts faculty, staff, and students using our managed lab environments.

Now taken by itself this is an interesting piece of information that lets you see that we print quite a bit still in total and that the College of the Liberal Arts prints about 15% of the total number of pages here. But if you take that data and mash it up with our ability to look at it from the departmental level you can begin to make sense of how to address it as a problem to be solved. Printing is expensive and while we do all sorts of really great things to be eco-friendly, it isn't the best thing for the environment. When you look at the drill down at the departmental level you can pinpoint specific programs that print much more than others. When you do that you can work at a level where some sort of intervention can be applied.

This is where the organizational integration starts to really become powerful. Having the printing data and the departmental data mashed together I can sit down with the unit level directors and begin to construct a strategy to change the overall behavior in a positive way. I can now work with instructional designers in other parts of TLT to construct a workshop for faculty on digital assessment strategies, create learning opportunities for students to understand how technology can be used in the writing process to eliminate passing drafts around, and look at new software that enables new workflows between those audiences. Then we can easily measure the pre and post states to see if our intervention might be working.

Another example that happened not too long ago ... we had a meeting to discuss changes with one of our smaller public labs on campus. Essentially we were asked what the impact of moving this small lab might have on students. This happens all the time -- construction needs to happen for all sorts of reasons and typically they are good reasons. Well the meeting started and I was able to quickly show just how intensely popular this out of the way location really is. Needless to say the person we were meeting with was blown away and offered new space to better meet the needs of students. It is hard to pack this much information into a readable spreadsheet. The visualization below shows all sorts data represented in an easy to read format ... I snapped a single day that represents 3,917 unique userids that logged into the machines in this small out of the way location. By having this kind of data available and readable we can instantly see trends in use and share that in a meaningful way.

We are just at the beginning stages of this approach and haven't figured all of the details out. But as we go forward we know that using our data in this way could be truly part of a transformative way to get at the future states of our services, our spaces, and the ways we plan for them.

Serendipity Day: Beyond 20%

A couple of years ago I outlined an idea for the staff at Education Technology Services that would allow for mini sabbaticals. The idea was met with lots of nodding and lots of questions -- it was fairly simple ... you share an idea and how much time you need to work on it and I figure out a way to turn you lose with it. The only caveats were that it couldn't be more than a week and you had to come back with a product to share. Lots of people threatened to actually take me up on the offer, but in the end exactly zero people did.

I always wondered why. I still don't know. Maybe it is time to dust off the idea?  I was reminded about it after reading, NPR tries something new: A day to let managers step away and developers play.  I really wonder what would happen if we twisted it so it wasn't about some sort of structured approach and instead something more like what NPR is doing?

NPR is experimenting with something called “Serendipity Day,” wherein everyone on the technology side abandons their day jobs to work on…whatever they want. Bugs that need squashing, scratches that need itching — the ideas that never get to the top of a to-do list. The managers step back, available only if the workers need anything. (I need a designer, I need a room, I need a bagel.) The only rule: In the end, you have to share your work.

“It turns out that that one day of pure, undiluted autonomy has led to a whole array of fixes for existing software, a whole array of ideas for new products, that otherwise had never emerged,” Pink says in the talk. He argues that motivation derives from autonomy, mastery, and purpose: the desire to control one’s own destiny, to get better at something, and to serve a greater good.

(Via NPR tries something new: A day to let managers step away and developers play » Nieman Journalism Lab.)

Clearly we'd have to do some planning, just as NPR has done, but I wonder what kind of participation I would see in my own organization. Seriously, it is a great idea and I wonder if I'd have any takers?

This post also appears at my PSU Blog. Sorry for any multiple linking.

Organizational Frameworks

I have been in my role as senior director of Teaching and Learning with Technology at Penn State since November 15, 2010 and in those nine months I have been working to better understand the organization both in terms of its external requirements and the overall internal dynamics. I feel very lucky across several dimensions in that I have a great leadership team in place that has rolled up its sleeves with me to help explain the various functions inside their own units and who have also embraced this idea that we have a real opportunity to rethink how we work together.  Another critical factor at play here is that I still have access to the person who built this organization and was a huge driving factor in the creation of such a robust teaching and learning with technology ecosystem here at the University.  What that affords me is an opportunity to grow into my role and have people to lean on in all directions -- it has been critical as I work each day to better understand the overall depth and breadth of TLT and its overall role here at the University.

As part of this process I challenged my leadership team to come together and help me rethink the way we work together and present ourselves to both the on and above campus audiences we serve. I've pressed them into the idea that we can no longer do what we need to while being a handful of individual organizations -- we need to think, talk, and act as one TLT. This idea, that we are better together than as separate and vertical organizations is something I believe very strongly in. My push is that we need to see ourselves as a horizontally integrated organization -- an organization where our teams leverage the talents across the lines of the individual groups. I say this because I truly believe TLT has been constructed in a very intelligent and thoughtful way .. we are an organization that has each piece of the puzzle as it relates to envisioning, implementing, and supporting large and small scale technologies that influence teaching and learning.  What I mean is that we have a value chain of sorts in place that allows us to actively investigate new and emerging technologies and practices with an incredible amount of agility in Education Technology Services, we have the ability to install, manage, shape, and support all that activity in both physical and virtual ways through the Classroom and Lab Computing team, have the ability to drive adoption and appropriate use of technology through Training Services, and can work to communicate much of it on the web through standards-based accessible web presences powered by WebLion.  These organizations need to compliment one another as we work to deliver the kinds of services our audiences need and want.  They need to act as One TLT.

This perspective, when implemented, allows for our project teams to organize around successful implementations in ways we may not have considered in the past.  As a recent example, when we set out to replace our student response system, we didn't just turn to one of the organizations to make a technology decision, we assembled a team that included not only purely technical people who focused on the integration issues, but also an instructional designer to investigate and document teaching practice, a trainer to construct training opportunities from the start, and communication people to share progress openly as we drove towards selection and implementation. Sounds simple -- and it is conceptually, but the act of actually making that the new framework in how we do work is the complicated thing.  We can't live in a world where any one of the organizations within TLT does its own thing from end to end -- end to end requires the skills only available when you look across TLT from a horizontal perspective.

This is also true in the way we need to begin to represent ourselves as well. One of the things we have done every year I have been a part of this organization is write an annual report. Typically the responsibility to construct the report would fall directly on the shoulders of the director in each of the primary groups. What this meant was that the report read more like four or five different reports under one cover page. This lead to some strange reporting -- CLC and ETS would both report on projects they were involved in (like the Media Commons) and often times the data shared might be slightly contradictory and tell two different stories. What we set out to do this year was much different -- we wanted the report to represent our thinking as it related to TLT. It honestly took quite a bit longer than I expected to work through the thinking, but in the end I am left very proud of what we developed and I believe it will be the blueprint that much of our work will follow over the next couple of years. Last year's report was nearly 140 pages, this year's report is 23 in total. (What follows is mostly for me, so I can capture the process of creating it while it is still relatively fresh in my head.)

Several months ago I started the conversation about the annual report with the TLT leadership team and we all agreed we wanted something that could more effectively speak to who we were as a collective.  Our first step was to take the 140 page report and break each headline into a blog post. Each post included the title of the section and a short description of the initiative.  The blog gave us a multipage digital representation of a static document.  We fully intended to use that as a platform to allow all of TLT to vote on the most important initiatives to form the basis of the report.

But once the blog was in place and we looked at it, something different ended up happening. I walked into my colleague, Derek Gittler's office and he had taken every headline and placed them on sticky notes. He even color coded them based on what I'll call the organizational owner.  We looked at it and were at once shocked at the overlap and the emergence of themes. I was able to easily construct a handful of themes that highlighted what our largest and most impactful initiatives are. Within the hour we had taken the blog built around what should be a hidden org structure from our report and turned it into a thematic representation of TLT.

Once the themes emerged, I was able to assemble a Keynote presentation for the leadership team so we could drive towards consensus as a team. The presentation outlined the themes and how our projects and initiatives come together to tell an amazing story of the organization. A story that allowed us to share short details about how TLT focuses intense energy around:

• Teaching, Learning, and Collaborative Spaces
• Collaborative Platforms for Teaching and Learning
• ANGEL and the Future of the Course Management System
• Enriching the Community
• Engaging the Community
• TLT Events
• TLT Research and Assessment
• The Future of the Web
• Conservation in TLT

The themes turned into a series of wiki pages that the leadership team constructed from the outline from the whiteboard. From there the leadership team took a couple of days to gather the appropriate data from each item and write it up in the wiki. I was able to leverage the wiki and write the final report, with narrative in less than 24 hours. Once the communication team did the editing the report came together remarkably fast -- after the months of preparation and discourse.

I know it seems almost silly, but for the first time I can look at TLT and see how we work together to provide services and opportunities that truly supports our mission to guide the University in the appropriate use of technology to enrich teaching and learning. When you read through the TLT Annual Report for 2010 I hope you can see that what we are attempting to do is provide not only a new way to communicate our accomplishments, but a new willingness to address our own organizational framework to better serve those who depend on us the most. Maybe taking a few months to craft an annual report seems extreme, but in this case I honestly feel the work that we did here will provide the foundation for how we work together going forward. It is something I am very proud of.