MacAdmins Conference 2012 attendees. Photo credit: James Stewart.

By Jay Hoff

Each year while planning the MacAdmins conference, we’ve looked at how we can make it better. This year we’re introducing a one-day pre-conference Boot Camp as an add-on to the rest of the conference.

The goal of Boot Camp is to provide those individuals a bit more fundamental knowledge to help those who need it get the most out of the full conference. The day will consist of single track sessions in which all attendees will be together in one space, in this case President’s Hall 1 and 2 at the Penn Stater. Additionally, content presented at Boot Camp will relate to sessions presented during the full conference. To accomplish this we created a format where we divided the day into five “buckets” of topics–Fundamentals, Configuration, Deployment, Management & Maintenance, and IOS & MDM. For each topic we will have the presenters of seminars from the full conference whose seminar fits into one of those “buckets” on stage for a Q and A relating to that “bucket”. Attendees will be encouraged to ask questions and we will recommend which session(s) during the full conference they should attend to get more in-depth information.

I, along with the rest of the planning committee, are excited for this new addition to the conference.

See the following URL for more information on the Penn State Mac Admins Conference Boot Camp Day:
http://macadmins.psu.edu/conference/boot-camp-day/

Justin Elliot, left, and Dave Test, right, at the 2011 MacAdmins Conference.

Post by Dave Test

This year’s MacAdmins Conference will be the biggest yet, with over 325 attendees and speakers from around the world, almost 50 technical sessions, plus a full Boot Camp Day for new systems administrators. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that it all started as a casual conversation between Justin Elliott, Rusty Myers, and myself while waiting for a delayed flight out of San Francisco after MacWorld 2010.

Right now is crunch time for us, as we’re less than a week away from Boot Camp Day. My primary role is heading up the audio/video production of the event. We’ve recorded the sessions in the past, but this year we’re upping the production value by adding VGA capture in addition to camera recording, so that we can give attendees and the general public the best session videos that we can, and in the shortest amount of time from the end of the conference that is feasible.

It’s a hectic but rewarding experience. We’ve got a great team, and a great community of IT folks who come back every year to learn, network, and have a good time.

Bart Pursel from TLT presenting at Game Day 2013. Photo by Lauren Beal

Last week, the Educational Gaming Commons hosted its annual GameDay event in the University Park Knowledge Commons. In this, our second year of running GameDay, we tried to make a few changes based on what we learned our first year. We kept the great sessions and a variety of exciting speakers from across the University – the core of any good event. But we also shortened the day a bit and added more time for open discussion, collaboration, and of course, play. The result was an even better event than our first one. With more than 70 registrants from six Penn State campuses, we enjoyed a fantastic day of all things educational gaming. But don’t take my word for it. Here are what some of our attendees had to say:

“An invaluable opputunity to meet other across the university interested in gaming. An excellent opputunity to network.”

“great way to learn about new, fun ways to improve teaching. Great chance to hear opinions and experiences of others”

“It was great way to understand how games and gamification can be resourceful in multiple disciplines”

“Take advantage of this informative and fun opportunity even if you don’t think “games” are for you”

For more information on this year’s event, check out the GameDay site.

Of course events like these don’t happen on their own. They succeed because of the passion, dedication and effort of an entire community. I want to thank all of you who were involved in planning, presenting at, or even attending GameDay 2013 – it could not have happened without you.

And because it’s never too early, be sure to save the date for GameDay3:  Tuesday, May 13, 2014!

In a few short days, the fourth annual Penn State MacAdmins Conference will begin. The conference brings together people from all types of industries to discuss the trials and adventures of administrating Macs. While we share the beautiful sights of the Penn Stater Conference Center and the rolling hills of Centre County, we will also share stories and lessons learned. I am looking forward to hearing of the adventures of our Mac community, and the unique methods used to navigate through them. There are always teachable moments that we encounter in our work and having the opportunity to share them with others makes the conference great!

We’re also incorporating a Boot Camp day, which is designed to get new-to-Mac administrators up to speed on Mac specific computer administration terminology. I’m excited to moderate a couple of the Boot Camp sessions, including Configuration and Management & Maintenance.  I’ll also be presenting a session about Shell Scripting with BASH along side Jay Hoff on Wednesday May 22nd at 10:45 am in Room 109. We will introduce simple shell scripting concepts and provide hands on experience to help others understand how to automate common Mac administration tasks.

The convocation of the Penn State MacAdmins Conference provides a fantastic opportunity for networking with peers. I’m excited to greet familiar and new faces in less than a week, as it’s the attendees that make this conference great. If you see me during the conference, please stop me and say hello so I can say Thank You!

Recent news from San Jose and the “antis” has not dampened the push to MOOC it. Here, Yale joins the push.

Yale Joins the MOOC Club; Coursera Looks to Translate Existing Courses

May 16, 2013, 4:56 am

By Steve Kolowich

For all the star power harnessed by massive-open-online-course providers, Yale University has been a notable absence. While many of its elite peers scrambled to get out ahead of the MOOC wave, Yale bided its time.

That’s about to change. Yale announced on Wednesday that it would soon offer MOOCs through Coursera, the Silicon Valley-based company.

Yale plans to offer four courses beginning in January, focusing on constitutional law, financial markets, morality, and Roman architecture.

Read it at: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/yale-joins-the-mooc-club-coursera-looks-to-translate-existing-courses/43849?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Image courtesy of Flickr user violarenate via Creative Commons

The monthly Learning Design Community meeting kicked off the 2013-14 schedule last Friday, May 3, with a session discussion about how to foster creativity in the workplace. The session was titled The Wisdom of Crowds?: The Brainstorming Fallacy and featured a wide range of conversation from the origins of the practice of brainstorming to working with introverts and extroverts, to creating a fertile environment for creative thought and action. I started down this line of inquiry after attending a workshop aimed at improving communication skills. On the whole, the workshop was well done and I walked away with several new ideas for improving how I communicate with others. But there was one part of the workshop that left me deeply unsatisfied. My dissatisfaction had nothing to do with the facilitator, who was excellent, or the topic, which was informative. Rather, my feelings of dissatisfaction came from an exercise I’ve always loathed–brainstorming.

Brainstorming is the process of bringing a group of people together around a problem that needs to be solved and asking them to come up with ideas on how to solve it. The goal is to generate as many ideas as possible, no matter how crazy or out there they may be, with the assumption that this process will unleash the collective creative might of the participants. Because brainstorming aims for quantity over quality participants are instructed to suspend criticism of their ideas as well as the ideas of others because critiquing ideas stifles the imagination. The refrain, “No idea is a bad idea,” is usually expressed by the facilitator at the beginning of the exercise and throughout the process whenever the facilitator senses group members may be holding back.

Brainstorming has never done it for me. I do not think that way nor work that way. And, while I’m sure there are examples of good ideas coming out of the exercise, I, for one, have never been part of a brainstorming activity that left me feeling like the group came up with a killer idea, one that would have not been possible without it.

In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I am a complete introvert, at least according to the Meyers-Briggs personality-type indicator test. I mean my score was absolute. You could squeeze me until I was dry and you would be hard pressed to find a drop of extroversion in my personality.

Shortly after the workshop I cam across an article online written by Jonah Lehrer for the New Yorker about how research studies have demonstrated brainstorming just doesn’t work, not for generating high quality ideas nor for generating more ideas, which is what brainstorming is supposed to make happen. Lehrer’s article led me to the research on brainstorming, from studies on productivity, to performance, to perceptions, to the social factors involved. From there I went into studies on creativity and the creative process and from there I went into personality types, culminating with watching a TedTalk given by Susan Cain on the power of introverts. It was the combination of all this that inspired the topic for the first community meeting of the year.

If you have never attended a meeting, we, the learning design community, get together once a month to discuss the big issues around teaching, learning, design, and research. The purpose of the meeting is not to come up with answers but, instead, we hope to begin a line of inquiry that ultimately becomes an opportunity for exploration and growth by the community members. The format of the meeting is collaborative. That is, the week of the meeting I’ll send out an agenda that includes links to any articles, movies, etc., that will be discussed and during the meeting. The topic of the meeting is broken down into segments, either a reading from an article or watching a snippet of video, with each segment comes a group discussion. The format is meant to be inviting and engaging and relies heavily of the participation of the members, which, fortunately, are very learned and expressive. These meetings are open to everyone so please check one out. A recording of this month’s meeting can be viewed here https://meeting.psu.edu/p5vz1y3qn1s/?launcher=false&fcsContent=true&pbMode=normal.

2013-2014 Learning Design Community Meeting Schedule

2013                                Topic                                                                                
May 3                              Wisdom of Crowds?: The Brainstorming Fallacy
June 28                           Communities of Practice
July 26                             MOOCs, Huh! What Are They Good For?
Aug. 30                            What Is An Instructional Designer Anyway?
Sept. 27                            The Multi-tasking Myth
Oct. 25                             Teaching As Performance Art
Nov. 29                            TBD
Dec. 20                            TBD

2014                                  Topic                                                                                
Jan. 24                             TBD
Feb 28                              TBD
Mar. 28                            TBD

Meetings are from 9-10am in 202K Rider and via Adobe Connect athttps://breeze.psu.edu/PSULDC.

This free event with an informal atmosphere is a community-designed gathering of anyone interested in issues related to the learning design process, including instructional designers, faculty, librarians, students, multimedia developers, and education technologists.

This year’s theme is “Mindful Design.” The program will focus on increasing mindfulness in the design process in order to help us better define problems, identify patterns, and see all possible solutions.

Three event tracks will reflect this theme:

• Designing with Empathy
• Designing with Others
• Designing with Inspiration

A continental breakfast and lunch will be provided each day.

To register, fill out the brief online form at http://camp.tlt.psu.edu/register/. For any questions, email kem32@psu.edu.

For the latest discussion around Camp, join the Yammer group “Learning Design Summer Camp.”

Wherever there are demands and markets, agile organizations will find a way. Instead of arguing globally about the value of the MOOC or about the faculty concerns for quality or about awarding credit, Georgia Tech just “did” it.   Low-cost (not free), for-credit, large-enrollment courses. I love the part about “and, in some cases, have their assignments graded by people.” Interesting….

Georgia Tech to Offer a MOOC-Like Online Master’s Degree, at Low Cost

By Jeffrey R. Young

In an unprecedented arrangement that involves aspects of MOOCs and a major technology company’s support, the Georgia Institute of Technology will soon begin offering an online master’s degree in computer science at an unusually low cost.

Georgia Tech announced on Tuesday that it would work with Udacity, a company that runs massive open online courses by well-known professors, to offer a series of online courses that students could complete to earn a graduate degree from the university.

AT&T is donating $2-million to help get the program started, and the company will play an active role in some courses, if professors agree—offering guest speakers or suggesting class projects.

Courses in the program will be free through Udacity’s site, made up of video lectures and computer-graded homework assignments. Students who want the possibility of credit or a degree will have to apply for admission to the university and pay tuition, and those students will get access to teaching assistants and, in some cases, have their assignments graded by people.

More at: http://chronicle.com/article/Ga-Tech-to-Offer-a-MOOC-Like/139245/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

I generally troll the App Store for one of two reasons: either I need something, or I’m bored. Every once in a while though, I come across a tool that satisfies both needs for me. Now you should know that the kind of apps I look for when I am bored are not always the latest and greatest version of Angry Birds (Star Wars happens to be my favorite to date). I get a little nerdy about several types of apps – and one of those guilty pleasures are those that deal with productivity. I know I’m not the only one interested in refining my own workflows and making better use of my time. Ironically, I get a kick out of thinking about the amount of time I have spent looking for productivity apps that will help me save time. Oh well. At least now others can be the beneficiaries of my efforts.

In my searching, I have come across a small handful of gems that really can make a difference in productivity. Whether they save me time, allow me to work collaboratively on a project, or just help me stay more organized, these apps stay on my short list of essentials. I’m excited to be able to offer trainings on them because I will be able to share what I have learned and I’m sure I’ll pick up a couple other tricks in the process – a welcome bonus.

While we look to expand the locations of the One Button Studio we are also looking to re-develop the software to accomplish more. Currently, Advanced Learning Projects(ALP) is working towards building a Mac App Store app that will increase distribution not only at Penn State but nationally as well. The app is an effort to decrease the complexity in setting up a studio and also decrease overall costs. This new app will also increase our ability to add future features easily to the One Button Studio, for instance we will be able to use any HDMI enabled camera that would allow the studio to significantly increase picture quality while maintaining the same easy workflow. Future features may enable the studio to be used for high end video capture including Lecture Capture and MOOC development.

We are also now starting to see interest in the Studio from other institutions. The One Button Studio was setup in partnership at Abilene Christian University and we have had requests for information from King University, University of Northern Iowa, Purdue University, University of Central Oklahoma, Baylor, Dartmouth, Virginia Tech,  and Auburn University at Montgomery.

To learn more about the One Button Studio, how it’s being implemented and more, visit onebutton.psu.edu.