Just a random picture.

The finished product …

I watched the TED Talk from Chris Anderson I embedded below and felt as though much of what I am thinking about as it relates to video was really well stated. As you might expect from the TED Curator, he feels the open nature of online video is providing a critical spark in the ability to connect and change the World. At first I thought it was a bit overstated, but watching all 18 minutes of the video made me feel otherwise. The closing example is worth watching in and of itself.

“What Gutenberg did for writing, online video can do for face to face communication” — Chris Anderson

It is exciting for me to see the rise of personal and professional video online that can build new forms of educational experiences. I remember being an undergraduate at WVU back in the early 1990′s when I discovered QuickTime … at that time QT video was amazing, but also amazingly small and of terrible quality. My first video project was something I cooked up on the side after a killer lecture by my favorite teacher, Phil Comer, gave. I used QT and Apple’s Open Doc technology to capture pieces of lectures and embed them in text-based class notes that I could share on the Psych lab Macs. Dr. Comer had this one great lecture he did on this notion of what he called “the eclectic solid.” It was all about the need to be able to see issues through the lens of multiple perspectives. This solid had different psychological perspectives printed on all the sides. He would toss it in the air, catch it, and whatever was facing up was the lens we had to look at the issue through. If it lands on “cognitive” and we all had to dissect the issue from that perspective … same for “behavioral” and so on. It was so visually powerful that you could never get it by reading notes. By integrating the video of him tossing it in the air with the text of the notes I felt like I nailed something new and exciting. That was the first mash-up I created to support learning.

“Video is high bandwidth for a reason.” — Chris Anderson

Fast forward to today and I don’t need any overwhelming set of skills or technology to make far more compelling learning materials quickly and easily. With something as simple as my phone I can record, edit, and share a story that can connect me to communities on a global basis. When I contribute it in the open, the World can see and engage with it. This is one of the reasons why we’ve decided to add Kaltura video editing to the Blogs at Penn State. We’ve always thought of Blogs at PSU toolset as a simple platform to create, share, and engage in multiple forms … and now it is a platform for text, images, audio, and video.

Watching the video by Chris Anderson reminded me of my own first engagement with video and text mash-ups for learning. With our new toolset rolling out I wonder how some other crazy undergraduate will use it to change and challenge the status quo. I wonder how much more interesting I could have made my own eclectic solid presentation had I had these tools? The bigger thing is that I could have instantly shared it with the world and introduced them to Phil Comer’s brilliant mind and teaching. I bet he would have gotten a boat load of views.

A few years ago we really wanted to raise the awareness around the importance of remix culture and Creative Commons so we had Lessig join us — less than a year later we adopted CC 3.0 as an accepted licensing model. When we wanted to draw light on the importance of open and social learning we brought David Wiley and danah boyd to campus … no coincidence that we’ve launched our first centrally designed fully open CC licensed online courses built on our social blogging platform. When we wanted to inspire faculty to think about how to engage students in large classrooms we brought Michael Wesch to share his stories … I guess that has something to do with our push to work with faculty in pumping up engagement opportunities in sections of Communications 110 (300 students) and Sociology 119 (725) students. At times it almost looks like we are thinking about this stuff.

So when we had a chance to invite Clay Shirky to be our keynote for the 2011 Symposium we jumped at it. His new book, Cognitive Surplus, is an excellent example of how we are thinking about tapping into our own communities to push our agenda forward. Having Shirky here will inspire new thinking and will challenge all of us to rethink how we can leverage the relationships we’ve created to do even more in the coming year. As always, I am excited by the prospect of another Symposium and of its potential for impacting our campus.

After Learning Design Summer Camp, one of our undergraduate writing interns put together a short piece on her reactions from the day in a post called, Learning Design Summer Camp from the student perspective. There was one part that really struck me as interesting and thought provoking …

The one presentation that I found particularly interesting as a student was Sam Richard’s presentation on teaching Sociology 119. I actually took Sam’s Sociology 119 class during the spring 2010 semester, so hearing him speak about the actual teaching of a class that I had taken just recently was very interesting for me. His presentation at Camp focused heavily on engaging students in a large lecture setting, especially through the use of technology. Sam’s Sociology 119 class was one of the most engaging classes I have taken at Penn State, especially amazing, since it is in such a large lecture setting. Before hearing Sam speak at Camp, I never really thought about all the things he actually did to keep me engaged and interested in a class so large that it would be easy to feel forgotten. Hearing him discuss choosing these technologies and why they work in the classroom helped me to better understand from his perspective how he can make a class of 700 students work so well.

What grabbed about it is that I’ve never really thought about what classroom practice looks like to students. What I mean is that I never recall thinking about the kinds of things my faculty did to engage me in the classroom … and I certainly never really thought about the fact that they were doing something deliberate. It makes me wonder if any of the students on our campuses think at all about what goes into making a particular class interesting or engaging?

With this new perspective I have been talking about an idea that would go along with some sort of more structured video based OER project. What I would like to do is to not only produce a video based OER series, much like Yale’s, but add shorter vignettes of the featured faculty talking about their designs, motivations, inspirations, and reflections on how and why they teach. I think it would be terrific to hear in short bursts from the faculty about what is going on in their heads as they prepare to stand in front of their students. I could see it being very much like a powerful digital story that can inspire other faculty to think critically about their practice and it may be really interesting and engaging to students to hear their faculty talk more informally about what is going on behind the scenes. It may also help inform design practice in ways we haven’t yet thought about.

For quite some time Brad Kozlek and I have had an ongoing conversation about how to reduce the friction in using any old school blogging platform. For this post, I am calling any platform that generally separates the content creation from the content presentation as old school. I know it is hard for those of us used to blogging that the notion of the Blog Dashboard is confusing as hell, but it is. When you add to it that the URLs are sometimes so wildly different between where you go to write and where you go to read and things get even crazier. Our platform requires me to not only remember that to create content you need to go to http://blogs.psu.edu, log in, navigate a content management system, find the right menu that allows you to create a new post, create the post, and publish it but also to view that content I then have to point my browser at http://personal.psu.edu/cwc5/blogs to view it! When you step back it is bordering on crazy town. I then have to go back through that process to edit a post. I think that is out-moded and may be keeping people from getting it.

It honestly reminds me of the gripes I have had with tools like ANGEL and Blackboard for so long. Why force people into interfaces to accomplish tasks that should be so much more fluid and straightforward?

Clearly it isn’t much of a stretch to imagine a platform that still gives power users the ability to manage from the Dashboard, but one that also eliminates the need to ever see or travel to the Dashboard. In the World of the One Button Web it is easy to never really have to see the Dashboard to publish once a bookmarklet is setup … but again, that is a concept that is lost on most. Furthermore, the emergence of Twitter and Facebook as a place that allows users to both create and consume their own content at once has created a pattern of interaction that is 100% different than that of the Dashboard to Blog paradigm. New bloggers aren’t raised on Dashboards, they are raised on simple boxes within the flow of the content that allow them to publish.

To that end, we are embarking on a project that could eliminate the need to use or see the dashboard. A personal publishing space that allows its owner(s) to instantly create from the context of the site without ever moving away from the content itself. I’m sure people think this is crazy, but what we are moving towards is something that we feel could get us over the hump of people really embracing the blog as a real platform for personal content management. What we are thinking about is below.

Simple, but really different. All you do is remember where your website is and once you have logged in most of what the Dashboard is used for (composing, editing, and deleting) is available from a Quick Compose right on your blog. If it is a class blog, any member of the class can instantly publish to the space without the overhead of the Dashboard. Simple but very different.

Long term the vision is to offer this as really a one button solution. Students would arrive at their personal space for the first time and with a single click they have a blog space sitting there that they can instantly start publishing to. After they get comfortable with the notion, they may decide to dive into the Dashboard to mess with styles, templates, and all the power that a content management system like MoveableType has to offer. But then again, they may just enjoy the ability to type, read, and share instantly. Anyone have any thoughts?

Occasionally we encounter emotions at random. More often, we have no choice, because there’s something that needs to be done, or an event that impinges itself on us. But most often, we seek emotions out, find refuge in them, just as we walk into the living room or the den.
Stop for a second and reread that sentence, because it’s certainly controversial. I’m arguing that more often than not, we encounter fear or aggravation or delight because we seek it out, not because it’s thrust on us.
Why check your email every twenty minutes? It’s not because it needs checking. It’s because the checking puts us into a state we seek out. Why yell at the parking attendant with such gusto? Teaching him a lesson isn’t the point–no, in that moment, it’s what we want to do, it’s a room we choose to hang out in. It could be something as prosaic as getting involved in a flame war online every day, or checking your feeds at midnight or taking a shot or two before dinner. It’s not something you have to do, it’s something you choose to do, because going there takes your emotions to a place you’ve gotten used to, a place where you feel comfortable, even if it makes you unhappy.

An interesting thought from Seth Godin in a post titled, “The places you go.” Makes me think about my daily patterns of interaction. Do I do things that make me unhappy because they are safe? Do I need to walk into these “rooms” (as Seth calls them) out of some need to generate an emotional state or do I actually need to go there because of my work/life demands?

It may require a little more conscious effort to better understand my own behavior. I think at times I am seeking some sort of emotional experience in an unconscious state — even if those reactions are negative in general. I can say that lately I may not be seeking out emotions on the positive side of the equation … and at the end of the day I know that without balancing the equation things get out of whack.

Something to bring a smile?

At the end of the day it failed to fill any sort of void for most people and I think that has to do with the fact that it wasn’t built to fill a void. It was built to be transformative and mind blowing. I am convinced that aspects of Wave will make their way into Google Docs, Sites, Gmail, and their other properties — you know, the tools that were built to do specific things. Imagine Docs with a Wave like panel that allowed teams to dialogue in real language while co-authoring something. That’s a feature I could use right now.

I am actually really impressed that Google killed it so quickly (and sad) … sort of restored my faith in the fact that they release stuff as beta and in this case saw it just wasn’t happening. I need to eat a little crow at how much attention I paid to it in its pre-release days, telling everyone how much this was going to change things. In the end it did a ton of stuff, just not for a ton of people. Again, seems amazing to me that Google could just kill it. Maybe that is the transformative lesson to learn here?

My friend and colleague, Scott McDonald, and I are constantly talking about how important it is for us to become curators of our own content — sort of like personal librarians. Not really to expose the work more widely, but to have it in a way that it is organized and managed. With all this in mind I recently went through a couple of boxes of 3.5″ floppies left over from middle school, high school, and college to see if anything is still living. What I found was disappointing in that very few of the disks were still readable … to my point, I let all that go away. What I did harvest I tried to make sense of and organize in new digital archives.

Yesterday, Brad Kozlek and I were talking about some of these ideas and I mentioned that I might start putting some old content here to work it into this space. I want to find a way to bring it into the larger story this space tells about me … and that story certainly started well before my first post here in 2004.

So, with that in mind, the month of August will be my Pre-Blog Challenge month where I will attempt to get as much old stuff in here as I can. At the moment, I am using the category PreBlog to organize all of it. I am also dating back to the original date that the files themselves have on them … so my archives now stretch back into the 1990s … I am hoping to find some even older items as time goes by (I might even have to retype some stuff). My only rule is that I cannot edit the content (as much as I might want to) and have to let it simply hang out as it was when written. I’ve already discovered some interesting things about myself by reading my own words 15 years later. I am also sure as I go along some of what I post won’t be text, but might include old video, pictures, or audio. Who knows. Anyone else doing something like this and want to join in my new one something a day challenge?