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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.