I’m a little late today with the One Post a Day, but given I am on vacation and the month is winding down, writing has become a little more difficult for me. Today as I was bouncing through email and feeds I got a note that I had a friend request in Facebook … so I logged in and confirmed the request, but while I was there I looked through my personal News Feed. One of the videos that a friend commented on was from last night’s Democratic National Convention. I watched that and started to think about a couple of things that I thought I’d share. The first is how irritated...

I am in Madison, WI where I am presenting at the 24th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning. I am part of panel discussion looking at institutional transformation to support both resident and online learning given the shifting demographics of our students. I am going to talk specifically about Digital Expression and what it means to me and how how PSU has been working towards providing platforms to support it. I used to get asked to describe what I mean by Digital Expression, but not so much anymore — I think people are arriving at their own conclusions. From my perspective,...

During the last few weeks I have started to see some really amazing digital media artifacts coming out of our classrooms here at PSU. Two weeks ago I came across one of the most amazing uses of a student blog I have ever seen. I hate to say it, but I am reluctant to link to it without her permission, but suffice to say she gets how a blog can work better than most of the people I talk to. This post was based around a video project she and her team did in class — a simple interview of a faculty member edited to be of interest. Here is what made it amazing, she spent time not only posting...

I got asked a very interesting question today during a committee meeting today. The question was about the use of the Blogs at Penn State toolset as it relates to student portfolio activity. I have been saying for about 36 months or so that a robust blogging environment could serve as an “ePortfolio Light” toolset to enable students to focus on the reflection of their learning without needing to learn commodity web skills. As an aside, for a long time I have been trying to talk about a blogging platform in terms of personal content management and as a publishing platform. What...

After my post last week about creating opportunities for Digital Expression we spent time discussing it on ETS Talk. Number 32 is now available … if you have any thoughts for us, either drop us an email or leave me a comment.

I’ve written about my personal interest in providing opportunities for faculty, staff, and students to engage in the creation of digital media — text, graphics, podcasts, videos, and whatever else this group needs to use to communicate ideas. One of the things I have been working towards over the last few years is envisioning what a platform for digital expression in an educational environment might look like. I have also written quite a bit about the projects that we’ve been investing lots of time and energy into here at PSU to power this approach — namely Blogs at Penn...