Category Archives: musings

What I’ve been up to

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Happy New Year! It’s been a while since I’ve posted an update here. Time to get cracking on those work projects for the new year, both ongoing and new ones. Here’s a brief outline of what I’ve got going on:

Quickbase

The improvements we saw in staff efficiencies over the past year have been tremendous, including:

  • the ability to better track IT requests
  • automated much of the course creation process that had been previously handled manually
  • automated much of the quality assurance process
  • better tracking and automation of permissions, IP agreements, and copyright sources

Over the next few months, plans will be in the works to also integrate budget information, time tracking, and tasks. It’s a lot of work but always rewarding when you get good feedback and see real results in the form of improved use of people’s time. No more redundancies and bloated amounts of time spent on “administrivia”!

Evolution usability testing

This one’s coming soon, and it’s something I’m pretty excited about. I’m going to be working with Mike Brooks on devising a plan for testing our new and improved Evolution student and faculty interfaces. It’s something we’re definitely rolling out in most World Campus courses over the next year,  and we have a good opportunity now to do some usability testing with our students and faculty, and develop a longer term feedback plan for when the new interface rolls out. We’ll be trying out a newish usability testing application, Silverback: http://silverbackapp.com/

Blogs

I don’t really have a specific plan or application in mind here yet, but I’d love to see Blogs@PSU have more of a role in World Campus courses and programs. I’m tinkering with the creation of a “geoblog” similar to the application created by Chris Stubbs over at ETS (and I’ve consulted with him about this), the Geoblog for students studying abroad:
http://geoblog.psu.edu/
I think something like this would be a great way for World Campus students to connect and share. The visual of the map adds a sense of place and connection that might be lost by students just saying text-wise where they live or work. Stay tuned.

Mobile announcements

Over the summer I took a workshop on the creation of Web mobile and native iPhone apps. The workshop only lasted one day so it really only allowed the participants to dabble in this stuff, but I was able to put together a very crude prototype of a mobile announcement app that we could use in our World Campus courses. I hope to refine this prototype a little further and share it with my colleagues.

Summer’s End

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Yesterday was Labor Day, widely recognized in this country as the official end of summer. Am I sad? A little. But truth be told, I am excited (though a little anxious) to begin class tomorrow.

I am working towards my M.Ed. in Adult Education, and the class I’m taking is entitled Historical and Social Issues in Adult Education (ADTED 510 here at PSU). I enjoy being in the Adult Education program; its focus on critical reflection grounded in practice is an ideal compliment to the work I do and the interests I have. The program requires LOTS of reading, writing and dialog – in short, it encapsulates the ideals of a traditional socratic education. It is rigorous and intellectually challenging. I expect to continue to have my assumptions tested by the learning materials, the faculty, and my learning peers. I have 12 credits to go in the M.Ed. and hope to be finished by Summer 2011.
Why do I torture myself like this? Isn’t it easier to just operate on the same assumptions that have brought me life and career success to this point? Why spend ridiculous sums of money for an education that is in no way guaranteed to pay itself off anytime soon (and tuition is ridiculous these days, even with the 75% discount I get as a PSU staff member)? The answer lies in the intangibles, and I suppose the best analogy I can come up with is to compare intellectual pursuit to physical fitness.
I spend a monthly fee to go to a local gym, which I try to frequent at least 3-4 times a week. If I could run or follow exercise tapes like some of my peers, I would, believe me, to save money. Physical limitation dictate that I can’t, however – besides, I like the social atmosphere of an exercise club. But I digress. Even though I can’t run, I still have a deep need for rigorous physical exercise. The benefits are numerous and so are the drawbacks to not exercising – without regular exercise, my body gets soft, my mood sours and I lose some ability to focus. With regular exercise and meeting its associated goals, I get a sense of pride and accomplishment that is nothing to scoff at. I believe that equally important is the regular and rigorous exercise of the mind and intellect. Doing things the same way all the time, never really learning or being intellectually challenged, leads to the same type of atrophy that lack of exercise leads to. This is a belief I have for which I have no concrete proof (though I’m pretty sure that mentally challenging activities can stave off dementia in the elderly). I just feel it. I am a lifelong learner, just as I am a lifelong exerciser.
I will come back to this blog space as I can as the semester progresses. I won’t bore you with the mundane details of my individual class assignments here (unless the class requires it), though I will still post my writings to the Writings section. My intention is to use the blog for outside-of-class reflections on how what I’m learning relates to my work or life. Adieu for now.

iPad fever

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The tech world and even the popular culture world are abuzz with the imminent arrival of the iPad. We’re starting to see iPad apps popping up on iTunes, and the tech blogs are rich with screenshots and descriptions of these apps (see Mashable and Engadget to see what I mean).

I’ve been a fan of the iPhone for some time, and it’s hard not to see Apple’s newest product as just an enlarged version of it. The interface and the way one interacts with it are nearly identical on both products. The large majority of the apps I’ve seen thus far for the iPad look like nothing more than enlarged versions of existing iPhone apps, perhaps with a few added bells and whistles. A lot of games are easier to play on the larger interface, but nothing to really stir the soul.

I do see a lot of potential in the iPad as an e-reader though, and I’m a little disappointed to see this capability lost in the midst of all the iPad app buzz. I love the natural touch page-turning capability as well as the ability to read in vertical or landscape mode. I think it could be a great improvement over the Kindle and other existing e-readers whose interfaces I never really liked. Turning and reading pages by manipulating buttons is just inherently not intuitive. The e-ink technology they use is nice, however, and I wonder how the iPad will fare in terms of eyestrain (iStrain?) with its backlit LED display.

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Mobile phone development

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At the end of October last year, I attended a day-long workshop on Quickbase. The sessions at this “Tech Fest” were led by real world developers who had come up with unique solutions in their own deployments of the Quickbase product. Now, I have blogged previously about the intricacies of the productivity problems we’re trying to solve with our own Quickbase solution, and I believe we’re getting closer to implementing some real solutions that will make everyone’s job in the office easier (thanks in NO SMALL PART to the efforts of our database guru Jeanette Condo). The Tech Fest really got me thinking on a grander scale about what possibilities there are not only with Quickbase but with other ed-tech related projects as well. Two sessions in particular that really inspired me to run with it were a session on jQuery and one on using jQtouch for iPhone development.

I’ve recently upgraded to a paid personal account on Safari since Penn State’s access only includes a subset of the full Safari library, and not a lot of recent works. I’m learning jQuery fast and finding that I really love it. Just like css, jQuery allows you to keep your HTML pages clean and uncluttered. Unlike css, which controls the styles on and appearance of your pages, jQuery adds dynamic and interactive effects. It’s pretty slick and easy to learn. It helps to know some javaScript, but luckily I’m not too rusty from my days coding javaScript in the 90’s. Back then, a lot of javascript actions were inserted directly into the HTML, as was any element styling or document layout coding (read: HTML tables for layout). I’m most familiar and comfortable with client-side scripting, which is how jQuery primarily works, so this is all a piece of cake!
Here are the books I have on my Safari shelf for learning jQuery (with links to their Amazon pages):
Now to return to the title and the original purpose of this post. Knowing jQuery is a good foundation for becoming familiar with jQTouch, which is the library of javascript methods used by the iPhone and other mobile devices (so I’m told, but only real-world testing will tell). Supposedly too there are utilities for turning your jQTouch-based mobile apps into native iPhone apps (negating the need to learn much Objective C). Mobile apps for productivity purposes in the workplace sound intriguing to me. Time tracking or project management while on the go? Would potentially eliminate some of the inevitable “catching up” time on these necessary evils when returning from a conference or offsite meeting. Maybe I am just dreaming, but I think it would be fun to try. Besides, in a more mission-focused sense, if we are to pay attention to the needs of our learners, mobile learning is really looking like the next big thing. Perhaps it is better to rephrase “mobile learning” as “reaching our learners where they are” because I think that is really what we are looking at enabling with mobile phone development. The 2010 Horizon Report lists mobile computing (their term) as a technology for educators to adopt in one year or less. We are here now, folks!
In that vein, I plan to read about mobile phone development from a strategic and planning standpoint by reading this:
This book seems to touch on the actual details of mobile app development but does not delve much into it. For the real nitty-gritty, I plan to read this:
One more thing on the jQuery front. I have some ideas, based on the exercises I’ve done, for ways to improve the usability and interactivity of our course content pages that I plan to share with the Evolution programming team.
That’s all. If you have any thoughts on any of this, please leave a comment. In particular, if you know of any good resources or books on jQuery, jQTouch, or mobile development that I haven’t listed, please let me know.

Vacation dispatch

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I am currently on my last day of vacation. It’s been largely a “staycation” with a couple of quickie trips out of town thrown in for good measure. I’ve been using the time to get caught up on spring cleaning (I know it’s late) and generally organizing my personal life and improving my mental health status.

I’m reading A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink, and it’s got me thinking about a lot of things. A lot of today’s hot business/work life books encourage us to step outside of our comfort zones (Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week comes to mind). A Whole New Mind takes a unique approach in making the case that right-brained aptitudes and abilities are going to be among the attributes that will help workers achieve success in the workplace of the future. I have always thought of myself as foremost a left-brained thinker but I have also become aware that I am a much happier person when I pay attention to right-brained thinking. I also believe it makes me a better contributer to work and personal relationships. Right-brained thinking, as Pink defines it, is all about patterns, style, empathy, synthesis and holistic thinking, as opposed to logic, detail and language which are attributed to the left brain.
Yesterday I mowed my lawn. Not a terribly exciting chore normally, but I had a bit of a revelation this time round. Perhaps I had Pink’s book for inspiration, but for some reason I decided to mow a different pattern than the one I had always used. I simply mowed diagonally rather than the usual straight up and down:
lawn.JPG
What’s so exciting about this? Well not much on the surface. I don’t think it saved me much time or effort. But it did make the activity a little more joyful than usual and it didn’t feel like it took as much effort. And I enjoyed the artistic effect; enough that I was inspired to snap this picture with my iPhone.
What I’ve taken from this is that it’s really important to change things up from time to time and approach things from a different angle. The next time I find myself in the doldrums at work without much inspiration, I will challenge myself to do things differently; to break out of my comfort zone. The worst that could happen is I fail, learn from my mistakes, and move on. But there’s also a pretty decent chance I’ll end up inspired and motivated to see things and act on things in a different way. And that’ll take me closer to where I want to be – a more content person with more to contribute to the world and the people around me.