UberNoggin

First, before you read on, let me assure you that my blog has not been hijacked. This is, in fact, Sarah writing and not the result of someone stealing my login.

That being said, I’ve just spent an hour at the BlackBored booth at Educause and I think I may have drank the preverbial kool-aid. Many of you have heard me knock Blackboard in the past for being boring, oblivious to social media and prosumer content, and frankly having missed the boat. Version 9 may have just changed my mind. Here are a few reasons:

• The interface is Ajax enabled and allows you to drag content modules around the page to customize the way the course materials are presented
• An editable CSS allows users to fully customize the look and feel of the pages to suit your campus etc
• Bb finally has mashup capabilities so you can pull in content from flickr, Facebook, RSS aggregators and other social media tools
• Bb can interface with Sakai, Moodle, and other management systems so we don’t have to put all of our eggs into one basket
• Finally, the community piece enables students to create groups, clubs, and other affiliations that have all the same functionality

So there’s the cheerleading. Now the caveats…

• All of these groovy functions are optional and can be turned off by administrators who fear allowing users to contribute content that they can’t control in advance
• The mashup features will only be as useful as they are used. No matter how cool the tool, if folks aren’t creative enough to imagine using it in creative way then there will be no change
• All I saw was a demo in action. We’ll have to wait to see if 9 really has all these features functioning as they’re being advertised

That being said, most of my caveats aren’t concerns about the tool itself but about how it will be adopted. Frankly, I’m excited about the possibilities that such openness may foster. I hope that faculty on Bb campuses embrace them, enjoy playing with them, and see the possibilities beyond simply uploading a syllabus. There’s real potential here for institutions to feel safe adopting a new student-centered way of delivering content and engaging in academic communities but the jury is still out. We’ll see what happens when the rubber hits the road.

Thanks to the Bb folks for tolerating all my annoying questions and skepticism.

Phew! I’m one tuckered out Intellagirl. Educause 08 in Orlando is a non-stop brain-fest. I haven’t met a single person who I coulnd’t spend hours chatting with. The collective IQ of Florida must have gone up by a few points this week.

Yesterday AJ Kelton and I ran a full day pre-conference workshop to help folks understand a selection of Web 2.0 applications and the larger implications of the shift in information consumption and creation. We had about 30 people in our session and everyone of them was engaged, excited, and full of ideas that I hadn’t even thought of. I usually leave an all day session totally drained but yesterday, after 6+ hours of running the session I was buzzy-brained and excited. Thanks to everyone who came. The session was archived in a google presentation that we edited throughout the day and I’ll link to that here in a few days when I’ve cleaned it up a bit. It’s full of brilliant insights from the attendees and well worth a skim.

Today I’m all scheduled up with meetings with even more super smart folks. Breakfast this morning was with a few publishers who are up to a new project that sounds amazing. This afternoon I get to go poke at the Black Bored Board folks about their new tools and tonight I’m having drinks with the great folks from Purdue’s TLT group.

If nothing else, I’ll take away a huge amount of positive mental mojo from my week here. If you’re at Educause leave a comment about what’s inspired you so far. If you’re not, well…don’t be too jealous of all the fun we’re having and take comfort in the fact that it’s really cold here in Florida. Serves us right, huh?

Educause08, originally uploaded by intellagirl.

blurry photo

These are the slides from my AoIR 2008 talk being presented in Copenhagen tomorrow. The Camtasia file with audio can be found here.

If you have questions or comments please feel free to leave them here. I’m eager to hear what folks think.

I’ve talked to several folks lately about where they’re most productive. In the office? On the train? At home on the couch? Thanks to our ever-connected lifestyle face-to-face meetings are the rarety for many of us. In fact, for me it’s sort of a special occasion now to actually drive/fly to meet someone. If I want to see their face…well there’s all kind of webcam apps for that. If I need to hear their voice there’s the phone, Skype, SL and lots of other options. All of this adds up to a whole lot of reasons to have a really comfy place to work at home. Over the years my at home workspace has gone from a pile of books next to the couch to a pretty spiffy set up in the center of my house. Today, Mark and I added another goody to our home office.

Our super desk set up!

The monitor from my old computer, which now lives as a server under my desk, got moved up top to be a TV. We hooked it up to the cable (thanks to handy Media Center) so we can have Hulu, Netflix, or just MSNBC playing up there and viewable by both of us. We’ve also got the Twitter election stream going up there.

Yeah, there’s a little bit of showing off here but there’s also a couple of serious points to make. First, I share this space with Mark and, in the past, if one of us wanted to watch something we had to run it on our side monitors which meant the other couldn’t see it and had to rush to mute it if the phone rang etc. So having the central machine there with a remote control makes it a more friendly space to share. Next, well…now there’s no reason to leave my desk at all. Moving to the living room to watch Olberman (drool) was my break but now I can just sit right here at the helm and take in all the media I want. So yeah, it might mean that I work longer, but it also means that I get little breaks now and then when my eyes migrate to something entertaining on that middle monitor so I don’t mind sitting here getting things done.

Shared monitor…as Martha would say..it’s a “good thing.”

Here’s the pitch:

There’s a quiet plague breaking out. One by one the number of infected rises around the world. Dismissed as only the stuff of monster movies, real zombies go unnoticed and unreported. Until now!

The site invites and collects witnesses from around the world to submit photos and videos of zombies in their communities. The media is linked to a global map depicting the level of infection in areas around the world. As the contributions grow, the level of infection rises.

With enough user-submitted content, the clips will be combined into a mockumentary following the plague and the conspiracy to hide it.

Like the idea? Think it sounds like fun? Drop me a line! I’m looking for help building the site, promoting it, and encouraging contributions.

Flickr. Youtube. Facebook. Kwippy. If you’re like me, a social media fanatic, when you see a new service which might be useful you rush over, sign up, and at least claim your username for later when you’ll have more time to try it out. It easy, though, with the multitudes of new sites popping up everyday (to keep track of some check out Go2web20.net or Web2List.com) to forget where you’ve created an account which means it’s easy to leave behind half-finished or abandoned presences all over the web. Which ones will others find first when looking for you? The spaces you care about and tend to or the casual, incomplete test spaces?

One way to check up on your social media accounts is to use UsernameCheck.com. It’s a handy site that looks for a username on over fifty different social media sites. Not only will you be reminded of services long forgotten, you may just notice your username being used on a service you never signed up for.

I recently keynoted the Young Professionals Summit in Cocoa Beach FL. My talk centerd around how YPOs can use social media to reach out to new members and keep existing members engaged.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

Douglas Adams

Things have been exciting here lately. The semester started and Typewriter is up to his eyeballs in statistics homework and a new book with pressing deadlines. The kids started first-grade with all the acclimation issues related to being in all-day school for the first time. Telly, our little gray cat, is no longer a kitten and has taken to chasing the kids around the house for sport. Meanwhile, the pink-haired lady of the house is experiencing change as well.

A month or so ago I hired to take on a large-scale research project with an online university to examine their use of online communities and how to improve their use. Today marks the official start of that project and I’m totally stoked to be the one who gets to the answer questions that may just help us all be better at what we do online. It’s a four month project that should keep me hopping about half the time. The other half of my time will be spent on another great new opportunity in a role with Kelley Executive Partners at Indiana University where I’ll be helping move more of their custom training projects online using a wide variety of technologies. Executive training like KEP does has never been conducted online so we’ll be the first! The folks at KEP are simply amazing and I feel very lucky to be part of their team.

Both projects are huge and that time investment means I’ve had to leave my full-time job with Media Sauce. It’s only been a day and I already miss them terribly. The folks in that office are by far the most creative, generous, fantastic people under one roof ever! I’m still hoping to help them out now and then just as an excuse to hang out with all the amazing people and the innovative projects they get to work on.

Meanwhile, the dissertation is still chugging along and I’m still travelling lots for talks and conferences. Last week I was in Cocoa Beach, Florida at the Young Professionals Organization Summit. Over 150 professionals between twenty and forty years old, all gung-ho to change the world. It was absolutely inspiring. Thanks to Rebecca and Marti at Next Generation Consulting I was able to deliver a pretty ass-kicking keynote (if I do say so myself) but it was the smaller conversations that made me come home feeling like I could change the world. I have renewed faith in my generation. We rawk!

So much to do and so little time to do it all but I feel truly fortunate to be where I am. Stay tuned for more fun info and updates. Meanwhile, leave a comment about your fav project. What are you working on that really lights your fire? Share the love and we’ll all pass the kudos around.