Penn State Learning Design Community Hub

The Blogs at Penn State just announced a mini-upgrade. New features include the ability to batch add authors (e.g. a list of student Access IDs) and a quick post tool.

See http://blogs.psu.edu/2010/01/quickpost-add-multiple-users-a.html for details.

Password proteced blogs are now available:

http://blogs.psu.edu/2009/08/protected-blogging-launches.html

(Or go to http://blogs.psu.edu/blog/ & click "News" Tab). Fore more details, please view the screencast.

If you look at the right column, you will see the "Instructional Deisgn from PSU Voices" headalines.

You can post a headline there by writing a blog entry at http://blogs.psu.edu and adding the tag "instructional design".

Try it and see what happens.

This Page

1. What's a Newsfeed?
2. What are RSS and ATOM?
3. Links to Example News Feeds
4. Educational Uses
5. Finding Newsfeeds
6. Applications to View Newsfeeds

What's a Newsfeed?

From Penn State Live - http://live.psu.edu/story/33342/rss30

"Steve Garguilo, Joel Boucher, Matt Prindible and Larissa Andrejko are rising seniors in Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology. They are spending this summer in Bangalore, India, interning for Honeywell International, a diversified technology and manufacturing corporation. They are blogging about their experiences on the other side of the world."

Student blogging about internships and travel was one of the goals of the Blogs at Penn State, so it's good to see this happening

I'm checking the TLT Symposium site in preparation for the upcoming event. One resource a lot of people may find useful is the TLT Faculty Stories.

http://symposium.tlt.psu.edu/stories/

It has several case studies for new techniques such as podcasting, video and blogging, you might want to read some case studies at the 2008 TLT Symposium Conference site. You'll see lots of different examples with detailed notes on what they did.

Even if you can't make the conference, this could be really helpful.

FYI - The Blogs at Penn State do allow users to input an ALT tag when an image is uploaded. It's actually generated from the Name field on the image upload form. The default name is the file name, but can be easily changed.

See http://blogger.psu.edu/help/upload/images for details.

The Blogs at Penn State generally produces accessible HTML....but that doesn't mean it couldn't use some improvement.

If you are as obsessed with CSS as I apparently am, you may be interested in reading how you can tweak the theme CSS templates to get a really nice display of H3 and H4 in blogs (these are for subsection headers of long posts or portfolio pages).

http://blogger.psu.edu/node/368

Example blogs can be found at
* http://blogger.psu.edu/about
* PSU Blog Directory - http://blogger.psu.edu/directory
Add your blog today!

You can click the BlogsAllID.ppt link below to download the Powerpoint file from today.

FYI - We added a mini RSS tutorial page at http://blogger.psu.edu/help/basics/rss

It explains the basics of what RSS is and some principles of how to use an RSS reader. Any comments appreciated.