Fourth Annual One-to-One Computing Conference

A short week here at Penn State with the Labor Day holiday, but of course quite busy. The beginning of the semester crunch stops for no end-of-summer holiday.

Cole Camplese, ETS director, lives on a cloud - that is, cloud computing. Google’s Chrome open source browser project has Cole interested due to the potential is holds for cloud computing in education.

Brett Bixler, ETS lead instructional designer, has two interesting posts in the Educational Gaming Commons. The first is on browser-based gaming, which is exactly what it sounds - games played off an Internet browser. He weighs the pedagogical possibilities and links to a great article about browser games.

Brett also talks about a new wiki on Virtual Worlds that is a treasure trove of information on these worlds.

Jeff Swain, ETS instructional designer, posted the latest ANGELshorts to the ANGEL Community Hub. This one is titled Five Things Instructors Should Know about Downloading All Drop Box Submissions. If you are not familiar with ANGELshorts, they are very handy brief guides to doing specific actions on ANGEL, and are produced by Jeff and Mary Janzen, ETS writer/editor.

Allan Gyorke, ETS education technology manager, goes Zen on us this week. More specifically, he talks about when things and people take on roles other than what they are “supposed” to do.

Looking for training? ITS Training Services just issued the following announcement:

Technology workshops and overviews now open for registration

Registration is open for the technology workshops and overviews offered by Information Technology Services this fall.

Registration is open for the technology workshops and overviews offered by Information Technology Services this fall. This semester, students, faculty, and staff at all Penn State campuses can take advantage of live or recorded sessions that are being offered online through Adobe Connect meeting software. Popular overview and hands-on topics include Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Data Warehouse, ANGEL, Access, Excel, PowerPoint, podcasting, cascading style sheets, and many more. Visit the Web site for details on all available training options or to register for training at http://its.psu.edu/training/.

That’s it for this week’s BuzzLion.

Cat and Mouse Tale of Textbook Piracy Continues

Has anyone heard of textbook piracy here at Penn State?

Just running through a lunchtime feed reading frenzy and came across a post by my friend and colleague, Bart Pursel. Bart and I have worked together in one capacity or another for the last half dozen years or so; first when he was an Instructional Designer in the IST Solutions Institute and now as a Fellow of sorts in ETS focusing on games for education. Bart spends about a week a month in our offices … sort of a part time residency for him. Today I read a post he wrote at his excellent Virtual Learning Worlds blog titled, Evolving Spaces. It is interesting to read his view on our ever-evolving space here in ETS — another one of the grand experiments we are always talking about. Either way it was interesting to read and I thought I’d share.

With the release of Office 2008 for the Mac and (I think) 2007 on the PC Microsoft introduced the .docx file type. I have no problem with it, but I no longer use Office only Google Docs. The problem is that from what I can tell Google Docs will not import .docx files … when I get one via email I am out of luck. But a couple of links emerged today … the first is the utility that Microsoft itself provides to change the file types. Simple application that is downloadable from the Microsoft site. The second, and I haven’t tried this one yet, is a site called Zamzar. It looks promising, allowing you to convert files into dozens of formats via the web. So the next time you get a .docx and need to work with it, there are option.

Zamzar Online File Conversion

As I type, members of the ETS staff are working with a group of students from the Penn State Schreyer’s Honors College to get them going on a very cool new project we are a part of. About a year ago, I was having lunch with Dean Chris Brady from SHC and we started talking about how important it is for students to think critically about the things they are learning both in and out of the classroom. The thing Dean Brady talks about is the importance of the things that go on outside of the classrooms in an honors education. We talked about how powerful blogs could be as ePortfolios and really looked at how categories could be easily used to link program goals and outcomes to student posts. We promised each other we’d find a way to make it happen.

A year later and I am thrilled to see we are launching a pilot with first year Honor Scholars who self selected in based on a great post by Dean Brady that will see them posting their learning and life experiences over the course of the semester, year, and perhaps their entire college career. One of the key ingredients here is the linkage between the SHC mission and the students’ reflections. Scholars will use the three main themes of the mission as categories … these themes are:

• Achieving academic excellence
• Building a global perspective
• Creating opportunities for leadership and civic engagement

So as the Scholars move through their academic careers they will reflect on events in an ongoing fashion and critically select the categories that match the experience. The other piece that makes this very interesting is how Dean Brady envisions these Scholars’ advisors using the portfolios to assist in academic advising. The way it typically works is that as a student comes to visit an advisor for a meeting, the advisor pulls the transcripts and talks to the student about their curricular progress. With the added notion of the category driven portfolio, these same advisors can quickly use the categories to filter content and get a more complete look at how the student is progressing through their college career. I am very eager to see this take shape.

My colleague, Erin Long, is the lead instructional designer working on the project with the Scholars. She wrote a post that outlines some of the things we’ll be asking the Scholars to think about as they participate. I like situations where we end up with “wins” on multiple levels — students thinking critically about their intellectual development, faculty more actively participating in the advising expereicne, and us getting honest feedback in a real world use of the technology. We’ll be reporting back throughout the year … are there other things we should be considering along the way?

Cole Camplese and Scott McDonald opened the 2008 Learning Design Summer Camp with a discussion of how they used social media to help bring their graduate seminar to life. In this session they spent time talking about the design of C&I 597C: Disruptive Technologies for Teaching and Learning and shared some insights into the things that surprised them the most. If you have any comments or thoughts about the presentation, please feel free to share them.

Blogs Keep Students Connected

“Myspace and Facebook opened the gateway for a new generation of social networking over the internet. Now, online blogging sites like Wordpress, Livejournal and Blogger bring a whole new level of intimacy to the online world.

“At first I was against blogging,” said sophomore Bree Gant, a film production major. “I thought it was just another way for people to whine and get attention. But I realized as a writer, blogging is a good opportunity to not only journal, but get your opinion and writing out there and get some feedback from both experienced writers and interested readers.”"

High-tech costs strain families

This is an issue that should not be ignored. How do we bridge the Participation Gap?

This past summer ETS was lucky to have Dr. Carla Zembal-Saul as a resident Faculty Fellow. Her work centered around the blogs at Penn State as a platform to power student ePortfolios. She worked closely with Brad Kozlek, Chris Stubbs, Erin Long, and myself to come up with new ways to think about how a publishing platform could change the way portfolios are thought about. Her work has far reaching potential on our campus and beyond. The video below is her session from the 2008 Learning Design Summer Camp held at University Park in August. Please take the time to watch and if you have any thoughts, leave us a comment.

I started last month writing quite a bit about living my life in the cloud with my new MacBook Air. I’m now even further into this experiment and I show little sign of turning back. There are a few things that continue to confound me — when I travel, for example, I take a ton of pictures and don’t want to dump them to the Air, but I have little other choice. I hate the idea of having multiple digital versions of the pictures … this seems like a silly thing, but trying to go completely into the cloud isn’t going to work for me. Keynote presentations are a whole other issue, but let’s just say I need to have at least a half dozen or more stacks so I can assemble presentations to fit the audience. And no, Google Presenter isn’t going to work (yet). So I guess at this point I can’t say I have left all local applications behind, but Microsoft Office is no longer part of my routine.

What really prompted this post is Google’s announcement of their Chrome open source browser project. What I find interesting about it is that it really looks like a micro-operating system to me. In other words, it will have built in functionality that will allow it to run web applications at new speeds with layers of protection that are usually reserved for an operating system. I’m no specialist here, but the fact that they are writing their own javascript engine (even though webkit already has one) tells me they want to make working with google web apps feel like working on the desktop. Imagine the Google Applications running in a browser that has its javascript tuned perfectly for performance from the applications … and then add full on Google Gears support and their little browser can now do anything you local app sitting on the OS can do.

If Chrome is successful, I imagine we’ll see new breeds of devices that can take advantage of the Chrome/Gears combo in new ways. I know I won’t be switching to it for full time browsing, but as my life in the cloud experiment continues I will be exploring it as the alternative for working with my Google Apps. It doesn’t look like a Mac version will be first out of the gate, but when it hits I’ll be ready. Any thoughts on this one?

Spring has always been my favorite time of year. There has always been something about shifting out of winter and seeing the hope and promise of new opportunities. The new green grass, the buds on the trees, and the extended hours of daylight all seem to recharge me. Historically I’ve been less bullish on Fall. I always seem to dread the move from Summer into Winter, often ignoring the fact that Fall in PA is a wonderful time of year. But for the second year in a row I find myself really excited about the change of season … it never used to mean much to me, but I am strangely eager to see the leaves change. Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention.

Yesterday I went to the opening PSU game and took my daughter along. We had great seats and unlike the game we attended last year, she made it well past the first three minutes. She seemed to look at it all with very different eyes this year. I think she is seeing the spectacle of it through new lenses … the energy of the crowd and the power of the student section in particular really seemed to perk her interest. At times I caught her paying quite a bit more attention to the fans and the surroundings than the game itself. But, since at one point she said, “Daddy, I only cheer when all the people in blue do” I figured the game of football hasn’t quite made it into her conceptual framework. No problem … Beaver Stadium is quite the place to take in the sights and sounds of the experience.

Pass Attempt

It dawned on me as I prepare to see her off to first grade this year that answering the bell in the Fall is one of the things I’ve started to look forward to. I tend to measure my life in semesters for the most part — spending two decades in school and now a third as a member of the higher education community, my view of time is influenced heavily by the academic calendar. Maybe that is why my interest in Fall has started to take over — I see huge promise in the start of a new year. Not sure, but I like it.

It also makes me realize that I am feeling a real sense of belonging … I am now more than ever convinced that my choice to be in higher education is the right one. If I am eager to hear the school bell ring at the start of a new year, I must be in the right place. I’ve struggled with this choice for quite some time, but feel proud of the fact I spend my time here. I am watching with great anticipation as my daughter heads off to public school to see how long her enthusiasm for school lasts. I hope it is a lifetime.

It’s not quite the Labor Day weekend yet, but a busy week at ETS is finally winding down.

Elizabeth Pyatt, ETS instructional designer, runs a plagiarism site (well, more like an ANTI-plagiarism site). She blogs about her experiences dealing with plagiarism as an instructor, and how plagiarism often does not offer the benefits students expect.

Elizabeth also issued a request for PowerPoint tips to add to a list she is compiling for Penn State faculty.

Keeping with the students-being-naughty theme, Cole Camplese, ETS director, blogged this week about the Penn State Copyright site. He talks about the work that went into the project, pulled together in just a few months, and shows off the results, including a very cool video.

Tim Perry, ETS advanced learning projects coordinator, recently posted the latest statistics of the Podcasts at Penn State project. Take a look, and marvel at how this program has grown in a few years.

Allan Gyorke, ETS information technology manager, posted recently about using wiki history as data. Allan may have found a new use for wikis here.

Brett Bixler, ETS lead instructional designer, normally talks about the cognitive benefits of video games on the Educational Gaming Commons. But what about the physical education benefits?

Jeff Swain, ETS instructional designer, is working with others on the ANGEL Innovative Quiz Tool Initiative. Jeff talks about it and offers a link to keep updated on the project.

That is all for BuzzLion for this week - have a great Labor Day Weekend.

Well, today is the last work day in the month of August. It has been a month filled with travel, events, and writing. All of these things have shifted my perspective a bit and given me new reasons to be energetic about starting another academic year. The month was kicked off by my own, self-imposed, One Post a Day challenge that a bunch of others took up. That in and of itself was surprising, the fact that I am now writing the final entry in my August challenge is stunning. When I set out, I was fully prepared for the reality that I couldn’t pull it off … I think deciding ahead of time made it feel more improbable. With a little perspective, I’d like share some things that I’ve discovered along the way.

Including this post, I’ve written 22 individual entries here at this blog this past month. I actually posted a few more over at my PSU Blog during the month as well. 22 entries is the most I’ve ever done in a month — but not by many (I actually had more a couple of months, but those numbers were inflated by the import of class blogs). It surprised me to dig through my archives and see that I was writing quite a bit in 2007 — actually getting close to a post a day on a few occasions. I think what made this different was that I was joined by other people and it felt like a community activity.

There have been 93 comments contributed this month … this is perhaps the best part! Of course some of them are by me and I think I learned something early this month about sustaining conversations … I learned that I have to be an active participant in the comment stream if I want it to stay alive. Too many times I write and wait for comments … one or two trickle in and I don’t engage those people. It appears to me that when I actively respond to comments it really does generate new comments. I’d like to add that I also got one comment via email that pushed me through the last week when my travel got crazy. I won’t share who it was from as I didn’t seek permission, but I’ll share the comment … BTW, it made the month worth it!

“Before I acquiesce to the demands of another semester I want to send a quick thanks for One Post a Day. It’s been a staple of my daily blog diet. You added an important, needed dimension to my summer thoughts.”

Now, when I started I had established some rules for myself to follow … the most important to me was that I wouldn’t mail it in and just post a link, instead working hard to share insights that are related somehow to the things I do on a professional level. I think I accomplished that — for the most part. I admit to having a few really difficult days finding my voice as it relates to educational technology. Some days it just doesn’t flow. I opted once or twice to offer more personal reflections and I allowed those through. I hope it didn’t offend.

I found that there were times that I couldn’t resist writing … in other words, there were days when I would write four or five posts and force myself to time release them. I would write and use the tools in WordPress to auto publish posts at the right day and time. One nice by product of that is if you set the publish date into the future, the post is available on the iPhone app for editing. That made it very nice while traveling. The other thing it did was give me a chance to more completely explore a thread … early in the month I was hooked on the idea that the cloud was supporting much of my work. Writing a handful of posts in a row gave me the ability to write more of a story (chapter style) and really explore my thinking. I’m not sure, looking back, if the connected posts over a few days were more appreciated by readers than the seemingly random topics that emerged as the month wore on.

Finally, as I stated in an earlier post, there have been some strange outcomes. I’ve felt more balanced as a person — spending more time focused on my health, family, and other responsibilities outside the office. I’ve found that writing in a consistent way gives me a place to retreat to. I am not the kind of person who take a lot of time to write and edit posts — I would say I spend no more than 10-20 minutes writing and posting each one of these entries. But doing it everyday has driven me (in a positive way) to reflect in an ongoing way … thinking about my ideas for a longer period of time as I walk through my days. I like the way its made me feel.

The funny thing is that I hadn’t checked my google analytics until just now and I have to say I am a bit stunned at the increase in daily traffic … I guess it stands to reason, but fresh content really does bring people in. I wonder what that would do to a course site that was using our Blogs at Penn State? If we as instructors posted everyday would we see increased contributions from our students and the world in general? I’m not sure, but it may be worth finding out. So, with all that I say thank you! Thank you to all those who left comments, showed up to read, urged me on via face to face conversations, or took part in the challenge. The whole thing has left me with new energy and new questions to explore. I know for a fact I won’t be publishing once a day from here on out, but I do know that I will be having critical conversations with colleagues who are teaching using blogs … there are new things to explore and I am excited to do so. Talk to you sometime in September!