Archive for the ‘Blogs at PSU’ Category
Schreyer Honors College Blogging Project
ETS is working with the Schreyer Honors College (SHC) to investigate the use of the Penn State blogging platform to support student portfolios and ongoing reflection. As part of this initiative, members of ETS will support SHC scholars as we jointly explore the impact of personal publishing on academic advising, personal reflection, and personal content management. Scholars will be asked to maintain a blog (powered by the Blogs@Penn State) to track reflections of their experiences. Categories will be used to help better organize reflections and to align them with SHC programmatic goals and outcomes. Additionally, SHC scholars’ faculty advisors will be asked to participate by periodically tracking scholar progress via their blogs.
As of the spring 2009 semester, there are nine SHC bloggers taking part in the pilot program. ETS representatives meet with them approximately once a month to discuss the project and form ideas to move forward. Christian Brady, Dean of the Schreyer Honors College, has included setting up Web space as part of FTCAP and creating blogs during the freshmen orientation training for incoming SHC students this August. While not mandating, Dean Brady will highly encourage all incoming SHC freshmen to set up their portfolios and maintain a blog.
To keep up with the pilot group and their blog postings, you can look at or subscribe to the PSUHonors tag. Other categories (tags) that are being used in this project are: academic excellence, civic engagement, global perspective, honor, integrity, and leadership.
English 202C Redesign
ETS is working with Dr. Stuart Selber to redesign English 202C. Our goal is to ensure that Penn State’s composition program be brought into the 21st Century. In the past, very little technology has been used beyond word processing. Currently, the six paper assignments in the course are disconnected. They neither build upon each other nor allow for the application of composition principles that are discussed throughout the course. Faculty who teach these courses realized that the current format was not preparing students for working in the Digital Age. Employers expect their employees to be able to do more than submit paper reports.
The English 202 faculty would like to transform the course to a digital format. This will involve publishing student assignments online through students’ personal Web space, making multimedia versions of certain assignments, and having students work in teams.
As of Spring 2009, we are piloting a new course design in eight sections of English 202C. In these sections, we have updated five of the traditional paper assignments to a digital format. Early reports from the instructors indicate that while the students need additional help learning the blogging platform, they are getting more out of their experience and the assignments are “much more rich than in the way the course was previously taught.” If all goes well, the redesigned course will be implemented in all sections of English 202C in Fall 2009.
In addition to the redesign, ETS will assist with obtaining the technology required for successful implementation of the pilot project. We are working to integrate both the Blogs at Penn State and Digital Commons into this and future English courses. This project has started with a focus on English 202C with the intention of making similar changes in English 202A, B, and D, as well as English 15 and 30.
LDSC08: Blogs as Portfolios
This past summer ETS was lucky to have Dr. Carla Zembal-Saul as a resident Faculty Fellow. Her work centered around the blogs at Penn State as a platform to power student ePortfolios. She worked closely with Brad Kozlek, Chris Stubbs, Erin Long, and myself to come up with new ways to think about how a publishing platform could change the way portfolios are thought about. Her work has far reaching potential on our campus and beyond. The video below is her session from the 2008 Learning Design Summer Camp held at University Park in August. Please take the time to watch and if you have any thoughts, leave us a comment.
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
It 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.
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