Schreyer Honors College Portfolio Blogging Project

From ETS

Contents 1 Project Overview 2 Project Team 2.1 ETS 2.2 SHC 3 Resources 3.1 Dean Brady's Note to Scholars 3.2 Getting Started with Blogs at PSU 4 Student Blog Links 5 Meeting Notes 5.1 October 23rd Student Meeting 5.2 August 29 Agenda 5.3 August 22 Agenda 5.4 August 15th Notes

Project Overview

Education Technology Services (ETS) is working with the Schreyer Honors College (SHC) to investigate the use of the Penn State blogging platform to support student portfolio and ongoing reflection. As part of this initiative, SHC scholars will be supported by members of ETS 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 at PSU) to track reflections of their work as students at Penn State. 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.

Project Team

ETS

• Allan Gyorke, Project Manager
• Erin Long, Lead Instructional Designer
• Chris Stubbs, Lead Educational Technologist
• Brad Kozlek, Portfolio Support

SHC

• Chris Brady, Dean of the Schreyer Honors College

Resources

Dean Brady's Note to Scholars

• Original Post

Getting Started with Blogs at PSU

• Quick start guide: activate personal webspace and make first post
• Blog help documents
• Email the Blogs at PSU team at blogs@psu.edu
• ETS ongoing work on Blogs as Portfolios

Student Blog Links

Here are the blogs that we know about so far:

• http://www.personal.psu.edu/ram5400/blogs/intothevoid/
• http://www.personal.psu.edu/jlk551/blogs/shc_blog/blog/
• http://www.personal.psu.edu/saw5164/blogs/shawns_schreyer_blog/
• http://www.personal.psu.edu/bap5126/blogs/perch/blog/
• http://www.personal.psu.edu/mlj5070/blogs/mjs_niche/blog/
• http://www.personal.psu.edu/scd5029/blogs/was_ist_das/
• http://www.personal.psu.edu/rcd151/blogs/improbable_discourse/

Link to all blog posts tagged with "PSUHonors":

• https://blogs.psu.edu/mt4/mt-search.cgi?search=PSUHonors&__mode=tag&limit=20

Meeting Notes

October 23rd Student Meeting

Attendees:

• Shawn Wendel
• Katie Stratico
• Lisa Lotito
• Ryan DeNardis
• Bernadette Perchalski
• Erin Long - ETS
• Brad Kozlek - ETS
• Chris Stubbs - ETS
• (Davis Shaver came ahead of time to learn how to start a blog but could not stay for the meeting)

Overall I'd say that the meeting was a success. It started a little quiet with a couple of newcomers but they were having spirited discussions at the end that led to some of the blog postings this week. A common statement was that the students felt that they did not have as much time to devote to blogging as they had thought. A couple of students talked about how it was hard to write something having to do with the six Schreyer categories and we suggested they just start by blogging about anything and eventually something will relate. A thought for the future is posing a weekly question to the group for them to respond to. At least this would give them a little direction to start out on.

We're planning two more meetings for the semester. The first will be the week of Nov. 10 and the second the week of Dec. 1st.

August 29 Agenda

• Tag for the project: PSUHonors
• Tags for Schreyer Mission:
  • Academic excellence
  • Civic engagement
  • Global perspective
  • Honor
  • Integrity
  • Leadership
• Use tags for everything because of the search/RSS feature
• Chris is working on the technical training
• Erin is working on the design/best practices training

August 22 Agenda

Technical:

• Standard tags (or categories) and how to preset them (can we change things in someone else's blog?)
  • We could do this if we set it up like Carla's course
• Aggregation
  • No automated aggregation on the SHC site, but Brady could pull out comments
  • Highlighted blogger of the week, but link to the other students
  • PSUSHC as a standard tag
  • No category aggregation
• A "Share This" tool
  • Chris and Brad will talk about Sociotags plugin, will have to have ASET install it and refresh templates
• Options for media-based blogging
  • 50 MB limit on file uploads
  • instructions on podcasting with the blog -http://blogger.psu.edu/help/upload/podcast

Design:

• Content for the initial meeting with students
• We should have all students with a blog before then
• Work on migrating them from 4 to 4.2
• Discussing best practices such as:
  • Posting at a regular interval
    • Recommend: 2-3 per week, but at least 1 relevant to one of the topics
  • Listing out questions to address
• What should Chris Brady be doing?
  • Commenting once/day?
  • Posing weekly questions to students?

August 15th Notes

Goal:

• Like an ongoing reflection paper
• Advising tool
• Not about mandating requirements, building culture and community
  • Courses with ethics integrated
  • Penn State principles: First-year seminar and Freshman composition
• 2-3 posts per week from each student
• Reflection/journaling built into study abroad experiences. Learn more on reflection.

Advisers:

• Are assigned now, but may change with changes in majors/colleges
• Will be brought in later
• Faculty advisers assigned from day 1, may do research with them down the road

Students:

• Goal, 12 students, expecting that a few would drop out (9-10 active in the end)
• Freshmen at first, but may expand to other classes
• This may be an expectation for all scholars at some point
• Some students may have started. Will have to transition to 4.2

Categories:

• Pre-set categories
  • Achieve academic excellence with integrity (can be seen on transcript to some extent, but academic integrity can cause a dismissal)
  • Build a global perspective
  • Create opportunities for leadership and civic engagement

Timeline:

• Training on 2nd week of classes (early evening, pizza)
• e-mail list to check in on a weekly basis at first
• Students get up to speed in 6-8 weeks
• Students will register for classes 2-weeks into the fall semester
• Get everyone together mid-semester
  • Feedback from students
  • Discuss how this is working
• Won't be mandated with advisors
• Spring focus group: was this useful, was it worthwhile?
• Next year, first-year students do a recorded screencast to mentor newer stduents

Training:

• For students
• Not needed for advisors, send them the URLs for their students

Highlights/Encouragement:

• Current students blogging on the existing site for prospective students (1 post/week for 2 years)
• Tag cloud for the first group to show the latest posts tagged with a topic?
• Social rating (must be VERY easy and automated)
• Share this (Facebook, etc...)
• Blogroll, Yahoo Pipes, PageFlakes to connect students with each other

Next Steps:

• Who has blogs created already?
• Recruitment for additional students
• Define category terms (SHC tag as well as mission-related)