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!
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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.
A while back I posted a video for Fun Friday showing a mom-son combo dancing to Gangam Style. Well… time for another one! One thing I think is great about this video is that is caused Pakistani authorities lift their ban on YouTube temporarily so that fans could watch the video. NPR has a nice article on Shahaid Nazir’s rise to fame on their site here: ‘One Pound Fish’: A Pakistani Man’s Passport To Fame.
Tomorrow a group of my coworkers and myself are headed to the GusDay 2013 conference at the University of St. Thomas. Each time I’ve attended this conference I have a ton of fun and we have great creative conversations. Overall the sessions this year aren’t as compelling to me as in past years, but the largest value is in the networking opportunities and conversations with other universities. And even though the 8 of us headed down work on the same campus we don’t always have an opportunity to talk about new ideas together. So the hour long van ride is a great opportunity to toss around ideas and get some internal brainstorming done. I plan to take notes throughout the day in a shared Evernote notebook. Check it out if you’re interested!
It feels like IT at SCSU has been planning and reorganizing for years. We’ve spent time on a SCSU Technology Plan, then we implemented the interim ITS realignment as a part of the lengthy ASAOPSA process, which was followed by an expanded process led by Kaludis Consulting on beginning the search for a new CIO. And finally we’ll have our new CIO tomorrow! What this will mean for Information Technology Services in the short run is unclear. But, in the long-term I think that SCSU can better communication and collaboration between ITS and the broader SCSU/MNSCU community. As a department we’ve tried hard to reach out, but it’s been difficult with our resources stretched thin. I hope that SCSU’s addition of an experienced CIO in with a fresh perspective and new ideas is as exciting for the campus as is it is for us in the technology trenches.
During the interview process I notes several items that I thought made Henry May a great fit for SCSU. Here are a few of my takeaways.
There was a commitment to training and the value of having a technical staff that keeps abreast of the latest advances in information technology.
A strong commitment to assuring that new initiatives and projects brought true business value to the university.
Henry has worked for Gartner and continues to find value in Gartner’s industry analysis offerings.
In order to help leaders understand the value and constraints of new devices, Henry purchased iPads and gave them to his senior leadership to explore.
A commitment to establishing governance processes to facilitate knowledge transfer, decision making, and communication.
A belief in empowering employees.
A record of mentorship to his staff.
An understanding that a CIO needs to go out and build relationships.
2013 should be an exciting year for ITS, and hopefully for SCSU and MNSCU as well. I am excited to welcome Henry as our new CIO and I look forward to building an even better service for our students.
Recently the Desire2Learn Community launched a contest for the creation of a custom widget. I’m very excited that our own Greg Jorgensen won the competition! You can see Greg’s winning widget as well as the other finalists here. Congratulations Greg, and thank you for your outstanding contributions to online learning at SCSU. Below is a picture of Greg’s entry taken from the finalist page mentioned above.
So, call me sheltered but I had never heard of a silent disco until recently. According to 
