“My wish is to help design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together. Help me build the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online. I also invite you, wherever you are, to create your own miniature child-driven learning environments and share your discoveries.”
Here is Sugata Mitra talking about his wish at TED.
With $1 million, it is now more than a wish. There is a plan and ways that anyone can help. As a part of the plan they are looking for some core technology assistance including “Cloud-based software design to manage laboratory school operations and education resources.”
SCSU might not be ready to dive into Sugata’s wish just yet, but what if we started with a smaller, more local concept? I am excited about the new ISELF building that will house fantastic equipment for our students to use for their studies.
What if… we made some of the equipment available via the internet? It could be used as a “Virtual Lab” by our own students. It could be used by nearby high schools. Or, let’s get crazy, the world. This concept is already being applied today. iLabCentral is a great example project supported by the National Science Foundation.
Major leaders from the technology industry (Google, Facebook, Apple, and Mail.ru) have joined together to create a not-for-profit corporation, Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, that will offer 5 annual prizes of $3 million to breakthrough scientists. This is pretty darn cool as most big awards like this go to established scientists that have already completed their work. Often the awards come from large government or health organizations. Changing the model may have a huge impact on research.
What If… Information Technology Services teamed up with partners and created our own award to be given to new ambitious faculty using technology in the classroom? This would give us an opportunity to connect ITS with faculty, showcase great work being done, and encourage others to use technology in new ways. There are many schools out there doing this already: Brown University, California Community Colleges, Old Dominion University, Rochester Institute of Technology
First up was a virtual tour of the ISELF building. You can look back to the previous ISELF Tour blog entry to get more info on that presentation.
Next, we met up with Sam Johnson who brought the team over to the UTVS & KVSC studios. Derrick Silvestri gave us a fun tour of UTVS where we were able to see the set used for the recent Trivia Weekend. Beam me up, Scotty! The UTVS studio was decked out as “the bridge” from Star Trek. We talked about the $4.8 million investment that will bring high definition to the TV studio. About $1 million will go to upgrade the cameras. Another big ticket item will be disk storage. Today the students use external computer hard drives. In the future they will have access to a considerable amount of fast storage area network. We also learned that UTVS has a lot of great video equipment that mass communication students are able to check out.
Jo McMullen-Boyer led the group through the KVSC studios and the new Somali Radio. The Somali Radio was the outcome of a grant from the Minnesota Legacy Fund. They told us about the music collection and how it’s organized and rated. They are digitizing their collection, but keep the CD’s around with physical notes from the reviewers attached to the media. The mixing studio in KVSC for Monday Night Live got a big makeover in 2011.
KVSC Offices
KVSC Broadcast Studio
Somali Radio
Then we followed Jared Podratz down to NHEC for a tour with Joe Meierhofer.
Beginning of NHEC Tour
NHEC Atrium Stairs
NHEC Atrium
NHEC View from Suites
NHEC Athletic Training Room. You can run the 100 yd dash in here!
Jeff in the NHEC Women’s Hockey Locker Room
I ran across this YouTube video of Alec Ausmus from UTVS getting his own tour from Joe Meierhofer that you may find interesting.
Images From the Tours:
KVSC Offices
KVSC Broadcast Studio
Jeff in the NHEC Women’s Hockey Locker Room
Beginning of NHEC Tour
NHEC Atrium Stairs
NHEC Atrium
NHEC View from Suites
NHEC Athletic Training Room. You can run the 100 yd dash in here!
Many of us include “participation” as part of a student’s grade, at which an extrovert usually excels. Can we “reframe” participation in a way that also allows an introvert to excel? How could we do that? What would it look like?
Are group assignments “fair” to introverts? Why or why not? How do you balance individual versus group work?
According to Cain, “Introverts need different kinds of instruction than extroverts.” What do you think of the “guidelines” to teachers found on pages 255-256?
What did you think of Cain’s new version of groupthink? Is your own experience supported by the evidence that creativity and productivity is fostered by more time alone than working in groups? Is there a way to structure work to gain the benefits of both?
The ideas put forward by Susan Cain are a timely for consideration as we seek to develop new collaborative computing spaces on campus.
How can we build new spaces for introverts?
How should we design spaces to accommodate the broad range of work/study styles and needs?
What elements contribute to learning spaces for introverts (i.e. lighting – amount, hue, lamp vs. natural; furniture – chair, desk; sound – white noise, music; visual surroundings – view, colors, artwork)?
If you are interested in an abbreviated version of Susan Cain’s thoughts, see her TED presentation titled “The power of introverts”.
Last week I was fortunate enough to join a few other members of the ITS team on a tour of the new ISELF building. Dean DeGroote was kind enough to be our tour guide showing us around and explaining the function of the various areas of the building. The key takeaways for me were that the building is very open, flexible, and ready to support the emerging science fields.
When we first entered the building we could see that there was a lot of windows and open spaces. Dean DeGroote pointed out many areas that he described as “informal gathering spaces” – particularly on the West end of the building. As we toured the Dean’s Reception Area, and the Senior Design Lab he explained that the layout was intentionally open, with casing on the exterior and the floor space was flexible and reconfigurable to support any number of activities and configurations. In the lab areas that meant that power, data, gas, fluids, etc. would be available overhead allowing for furniture and equipment to be movable. As a side note, the Dean’s Reception Area reminded me of a video on the “Workplace of the Future.”
While the current configuration of the rooms is flexible, so are the walls themselves. Most areas have walls that could be removed or reconfigured without great expense. Some rooms are deemed “unassigned” and can be renovated to accommodate future needs (i.e. a 2 year grant from the National Science Foundation). The ISELF building itself may be expanded on with another phase added to the West of the building. The loading dock was built large enough to serve the new addition removing the need for another loading dock to be added.
Dean DeGroote explained that the entire building is intended to be a space for research and lab work, not for offices and residency. The thought here is that professors will have their departmental space and office services hosted in other buildings. When it comes time for the faculty and students to work in the lab, they will be able to leverage the spaces in ISELF. After they are done with their lab work, they may collaborate informally in ISELF, but otherwise they will most likely return to their departmental areas back in other buildings on campus.
Earlier I had blogged about ISELF getting an X-ray diffractometer. Turns out, we got it! There are a lot of really cool spaces and equipment that we be available to our students and community once ISELF is complete. I am proud of the work Dean DeGroote and his team have done. And I am excited to see our students, faculty, and community make the most of this cutting edge resource. Added to the recent announcement of the $4.8 million enhancement to the UTVS TV studio, and the Presidents engagement in attracting the brightest students from all over the world, this sets SCSU and our community on an exhilarating trajectory.
I’ve built a quasi-virtual tour of ISELF on Prezi if you are interested in seeing more.
First things first. Please help us by filling out the following survey concerning this Creative Friday. Even if you were not able to attend, we want to hear from you!
[formidable id=9]
And now onto the recap!
Arduino Demo
Josh Hjelmstad presented on the work he’s been doing with an Arduino and a gumball machine. Here is how Josh describes it.
“Arduino is an open-source, programmable, cost-effective hardware device that gives SCSU the ability to control our physical environment with code. The Arduino device is quickly expandable with over a thousand “shields” (plug-in modules) that allow you to interact with sensors (accelerometers, GPS, photo-receptors, voltage, temperature) and communicate with the world (Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, high voltage circuits, servos).”
Potential Uses
Quadrocopter
Twitter/Foursquare controlled gumball machine
Washing machine availability notifications via email or web site
Greg Jorgensen presented on the widget he created for D2L. He explained that the idea came from a faculty member who had asked about allowing students to see their office hours. The widget connects to Adobe Connect and allows students to know if their professor is available to help. More information here: http://desire4community.com/course-home-page-widget-contest-most-useful/
Windows 8 Demo
Special thanks to Eric Dietz for stepping in to present while Kristen was out sick. Eric showed off the new UI features of Windows 8. A good reference site for the features Eric showed can be found here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/basics
User Feedback & Data Collection Discussion
I spoke for a short time on ideas to capture user feedback and get users involved as a part of early adopters in upcoming projects. We cut this conversation a bit short to spend more time on the Collaborative Space discussion. Here is a link to a concept blog site
Collaborative Space Discussion
Mark Kotcho showed off examples of collaborative classrooms at different institutions. He discussed the concept of Active Learning Classrooms (defined here), SCALE-UP design (defined here), and Flipped Classrooms (defined here).
Below are a list of sites that were referenced as examples of collaborative spaces.
Every other Friday the ITS team tries to get together and work on something creative. This Friday I’m working on coordinating the agenda. The plan is to spend the first part of the meeting on short presentations and the second part will be an open discussion. Here is the agenda:
So, call me sheltered but I had never heard of a silent disco until recently. According to Wikipedia, the concept was first introduced in 1969 in a sci-fi movie called Ruusujen Aika, “A Time of Roses“. And as it turns out silent discos have been going on since the 80’s in Europe. In particular the Glastonbury Festival has made good use of the concept in order to comply with noise regulations. And right down the road from us in 2012, SilentArena and Live Nation held the biggest silent disco event ever in America with over 3000 headphones at the River’s Edge Music Festival on Harriet Island.
Here is a quick video of a silent disco event during the Midsummer Night Swing dance party at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York.
Universities are another common place to see a silent disco. Princeton has a fun site setup showing off their recent event here. So my friends, what about SCSU? #What If… we get UPB together with the IT and Library folks and we have a silent disco in the Library! Wouldn’t the juxtaposition of a dance party and rows of books be cool? Okay, okay… maybe that’s too nerdy. Well, once warmer weather hits it’d be a fun event for the Atwood Mall too.
Before I start I want to thank Casey Wagner for her help organizing the trip, Craig Overboe for organizing the van, and Jim Pesta for driving us all down to GusDay. We headed out at 7:00 AM and had some light conversation on the way down. It was good to hear a little about what else was happening outside of the Miller Center from Chris Fandel, Jim Pesta, and Aaron Gordon. We talked a little about rooms on campus that might be good candidates for collaboration spaces. Mentioned were a lab in the 2nd floor of the Education building, B31 in the Miller Center, and spaces in the Miller Center library.
Once we arrived at the Anderson Student Center at the University of St. Thomas we could see a fun recreation area through the windows. While the outside of the building was an old-school brick, inside was a much more open and modern layout. The building was awesome, with lots of windows, a huge atrium, windows conference rooms, and oodles of digital signage.
Pictures of main atrium:
Pictures of recreation area:
Another thing I noticed right away was a ton of glass walled conference and collaboration rooms. I noticed a few students collaborating on a floor to ceiling whiteboard and took a quick picture.
Another thing we noticed was that they did a great job of featuring outstanding students on their digital signage:
The keynote speaker was John Tauer, who is the head men’s basketball coach and also a professor in the department of psychology. John did a really good job with the keynote address. Two items from his talk stuck out to me. The first was the “Parable of Ausubel” – the message was that sometimes reframing a situation can cause a paradigm shift and turn a negative into a positive. I was left wondering what projects I could possibly apply the idea to. The second was his statement that one trait that the most successful people have is resilience. It was a good reminder of the importance of not giving up.
There was some discussion about fiber channel vs. iSCSI vs. FCoE. A little talk about backup tools and strategy. But the biggest note I took during this session was that there was a consensus among the schools that they are not needing to add more storage for students. One school will actually stop provisioning any personal storage for students this year.
Next up was a session on iPads in the classroom. Ben Phillip from Hamline was the first speaker. Ben works in Hamline’s Center for Teaching and Learning department. As we seek to develop a strategy for our own Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, I think it makes sense to reach out to Hamline and others to get feedback on what is working in their organizations. Ben talked about how they’ve setup an iPad user group and how that group works as well as their iPad cart.
Matthew Hammen from Luther College in Iowa was up next. Mathew presented from his iPad connecting wirelessly to the computer. He talked about their success using AirServer in their classrooms. He also talked about his realization of the iPad as a game changing device that enables mobility in learning. Matthew also talked about their iPad checkout program.
Both Matthew and Ben talked about evaluating apps for learning by leveraging the SAMR model developed by Dr. Ruben R. Puentedura. The SAMR model categorizes apps into four buckets: substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition. They gave the example of writing a paper.
Substitution: Typewriter
Substitute pen for typewriter.
Augmentation: Word Document
Augment paper with a portable document with metadata, etc.
Modification: Google Doc
Create a paper by allowing multiple users to contribute at the same time.
Redefinition: Video
Create an entirely new product that is conveyed in a different medium.
They also shared a poster that Greg Swanson had put online at the Apps in Education site that gave examples of how some apps could be classified using the SAMR model. See image to the right.
I had four key takeaways from this session. The first was that we should explore implementing AirServer in our eClassrooms. The second was that the SAMR model could be very valuable in evaluating technology and apps that we deploy. Third was that the tablet form factor can really redefine the learning experience. And lastly, we need to reach out to other institutions to collaborate on best practices for excellence in teaching and learning.
Lunch was great. We had some light conversation. The “big idea” discussed was redesigning Miller Center B31 into a collaborative learning space. Removing the traditional desktops and replacing them with a mobile device cart with devices like the Apple MacBook Pro, Microsoft Surface Pro, and/or Lenovo Helix. Much like the iPad Cart described in Session 2. Then leveraging AirServer for the tablets to display on the instructor screen at the front of the room. We could possibly leverage a device checkout system like used at Drexel – for use in B31 or elsewhere on campus.
Session 3: Optimizing Enterprise Desktop Deployment with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit
There was not too much to report back from this session, other than to say the University of St. Thomas and others are moving toward Microsoft deployment tools like the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit and System Center Configuration Manager and away from 3rd party tools like Symantec/Altiris much like the path SCSU is on. This is another opportunity for future collaboration.
Session 4: Identity and Access Management in Higher Ed
This was the session that hit home for me the hardest. There were several schools that had been using the Sun Identity Management product recently purchased by Oracle. There was consensus that Oracle had done a poor job with the transition offering little support for the Sun product and forcing an expensive commitment to move forward with the Oracle offering. Everyone had decided to look for an alternative. This is exactly the situation we are in at MNSCU. For most folks it came down to Quest/Dell, NetIQ, and Microsoft. While folks really liked the Quest offering, price made it a non-starter leaving Microsoft and NetIQ as the reasonable options. It seemed that folks with a more Microsoft centric backend selected Microsoft and folks with a more Linux-based backend NetIQ was the selection.
There was a good conversation about identity structure within Active Directory and how to manage the provisioned accounts. Additionally, the handling of a complex and large backend system (UST has almost a million rows in their ERP system), guest accounts, supplemental/sponsored accounts, passwords management, and more were discussed.
Trip Back to SCSU
The trip back was filled with conversation about file storage and user profiles. As the backend administrator for these services I was all-in on this conversation (I probably would have been better served practicing my listening skills…). We talked about SharePoint as an alternative to traditional file services. We talked about the potential move to drop roaming profiles and personal file storage for students offering only a cloud based file storage solution. I spoke about my interest in deploying Box and leveraging Evernote as cloud-based collaboration tools. It was great to hear creative ideas from Craig Overboe and hear about upcoming strategies from Casey Gordon.
Major leaders from the technology industry (Google, Facebook, Apple, and Mail.ru) have joined together to create a not-for-profit corporation
So, call me sheltered but I had never heard of a silent disco until recently. According to 
