Archive for the ‘Blogs at PSU’ Category

Service Sheet: The Blogs at Penn State

The Blogs at Penn State is the Web-based blogging platform centrally supported by Information Technology Services (ITS) across the Penn State community. The Movable Type platform supports blogs, portfolio publishing, and team document collaboration.

Our Service Sheets have been designed for you to print and share with others. It will provide you with the main details around this service and should give you all the information you may need to begin taking advantage of this Penn State resource.

Download the Blogs at Penn State Service Sheet.

Aggregation and the Blogs at Penn State

Blogs Tag SmallIt isn’t a big surprise that more and more faculty, staff, and students are taking advantage of the Blogs at Penn State for all sorts of things. We are seeing incredible examples of student blogs, faculty portfolios, staff spaces, and course sites popping up all over the PSU Personal Webspace. It also doesn’t come as a surprise that as more people start to create more digital content that discoverability becomes more of an issue. With this in mind, one of the things we are thinking a whole lot about is creating an easy solution for aggregating content into discoverable spaces.

In our world we think quite a bit about how to do this for teaching and learning purposes. One of the things we are looking at are social rating tools that also act as aggregators. I took the plunge this semester along with my co-instructor, Scott McDonald, and installed the open source tool Pligg for our C&I 597C course. The way it works is that students blog in their own PSU Blogs and their content is aggregated into our course Pligg site where it can be read, voted on, and commented on. Voting makes the top posts rise to the top. Commenting creates a vibrant community where students can share ideas in the open. So far it has proven to be a very interesting model.

This year we will be exploring more aggregation tools to help faculty and students create mash ups of the content that matters to them. We aren’t going to build the next iGoogle or Ning, but we will be spending a lot of energy in this space over the next year. If you have interest in this area, please contact us or leave a comment.

Faculty Success Story: Christopher Long

Chris LongChristopher Long in the College of the Liberal Arts teaches “Tragedy, Comedy, Politics” and “20th Century Philosophy” courses. To help students develop their critical thinking and writing skills, he asks each student to create a blog on which they post assignments. The blogs allow students to write for a broader audience than their instructor alone and encourage them to develop a unique voice. Long’s ability to provide regular, dynamic feedback helps students grow as writers and thinkers.

Long said, “I intentionally chose a decentralized model, where each student would have his or her own blog, because I wanted them to have a sense of owning their work. My main goal for using blogs is to get students actively involved in their own education.” The student blogs, as well as blogs Long set up for each course, were created using the Blogs at Penn State.

The course blogs provide a description of each blogging assignment, including a detailed grading rubric. Long also writes blog posts related to course topics as “food for thought.”

Students are often asked to relate current events to course readings. For example, after reading the Oresteia by Aeschylus, a trilogy of Greek tragedies unified by the theme of retributive justice vs. justice based on law and reason, students are asked to submit a blog post with an example of the tension between these two concepts of justice in modern society. Long explained, “One of my goals is to encourage students to make concrete connections between philosophical ideas discussed in class and events of contemporary social and political life.”

Having students post their thoughts on a blog can result in a less isolating experience, said Long. “Blogs get them writing with an eye toward a larger community. They now write not only for themselves and for me, but also for their colleagues and other online readers,” he said. “There’s a potential for broader exposure and feedback, which can’t happen when they’re just dropping assignments in drop boxes.”

As Long pointed out, blogs allow anyone to post content on the Web. He noted, “I think there’s something significant about what’s happening in the larger society and culture with the Internet and this technology. Students have to come out of Penn State with an ability to not only be creators of content, but also critics with good judgment.” Long added, “As creators of thoughtful, well-crafted content, they also learn to become analytically more critical of the content they encounter online.”

The Blogs at Penn State

Blogs Tag SmallThe Blogs at Penn State is a project exploring the use of blogs (Weblogs) in higher education. Once you have established your blog, you are free to use it as you see fit. Blogs are published in your personal Web space, so they belong to you. To learn more about the Blogs at Penn State or to get started go to the Blogs at Penn State Community Hub and explore. The site includes a forum where Penn State bloggers can gather to share information on how to get the best use of the Penn State blogs.

The Blogs at Penn State are powered by Six Apart’s enterprise blogging platform, MovableType 4. This open source software has been adapted to work within the Penn State environment. We are constantly working to envision new uses for the blog platform — as a matter of fact we see the blog platform as a personal content management system. This perspective allows us to think about blogs as the basis for all sorts of opportunities — from faculty web sites to student eportfolios. If there are things you’d like to explore about the Blogs at Penn State, please don’t hesitate contacting us so so we can get together and talk.

Blogs at Penn State

Blogs Tag SmallAfter close to a year of planning, testing, and development the Blogs at Penn State project has entered into its open pilot. In the last two weeks we’ve added about 60 new people to the pilot test group. The idea is to add about 20 or so a week for the next few weeks until we have everyone in who has requested an account. So far, those of us who have used the environment seem to like it quite a bit. It is honestly very exciting to hear people’s reaction to it … especially those who have never used a dynamic publishing environment to manage their content.

Long term the vision is to leverage this platform as a way for Penn State faculty, staff, and students to rethink their use of the web. The toolset will allow us, over time, to add new features to enable all sorts of opportunities. As people become more familiar with how it all works we’ll be able to help people think about how they will take notes, share course materials, work on study groups, share research findings, and really anything they can imagine. The ETS Blog Team has also started a companion PSU Blogger Community Hub site to help people get started … take a look and let us know what you think. It feels like the start of something good.