Now that I am seeing the power of this space, my mind can't help be jump to my IST 110 class this Spring. I will want to use this and I will want all my students to as well. What I will want is the ability to easily aggregate all their separate blogs into a META Blog site that can be the center of the class blog. I see things like that as the areas where we can really innovate and create value add.
October 2006 Archives
I will start to keep track of features we should look at adding to this environment. This will just be a list to get us started ... some of these will be interface tweaks as well as features.
Tweaked Blog Creation
Right now there is way too much for end users to screw up when creating a blog. The piece that will need tweaking is the URL Path of the new blog creation screen. If we are committed to placing all the files in a directory "blogs" (which, BTW I am not too convinced that is the right thing to do) then there isn't any reason to make a user worry about the full path. It should simply ask them for a directory and pull all the other information together automatically. For example, this blog sits in a directory call "pilot," with the full URl looking like http://www.personal.psu.edu/cwc5/blogs/pilot/ ... when I set it up I shouldn't have to see all of it. Only fill in a blank with pilot ... the system should take care of the rest.
SPAM Control
We will need to focus energy on this. Comment and TrackBack SPAM are killers for blogs. There are a ton of plugins available ... some of them are really well designed. Without a good SPAM control plugin this whole solution will be a mess.
Enclosures and Other Feed Enhancements
If we could handle enclosures from this environment we will be providing a podcast deliver and management solution as well. I came across a plugin that claims to provide serious feed enhancements that we should take a look at. There is also a MT hack that provides enclosure support. Comment feeds would also be of value for us to explore.
I started asking faculty to present interesting things they are doing to integrate technology into their teaching after last April's TLT Symposium. Yesterday the second presentation from the TLT Innovators Speaker Series took place on the University Park campus. The talk featured Brian Smith, Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Technology and Instructional Systems entitled “Live and Learn: Supporting Everyday Cognition with Computation.” Brian spends a great deal of time envisioning ways to effectively use the things we do when we are outside of formal learning spaces to create learning opportunities. Brian's talk focused heavily on those informal learning spaces and ways he has found to tap into them.
Brian and I are good friends, although he may not talk with me after I made him bring his GameBike into the talk ... actually he brought it on stage and we couldn't get the PlayStation hooked to the screen in the Auditorium, but ... at any rate the talk was great and the demo was very cool. You see Brian has done a bunch of research into how you can take the mundane of playing video games and turn it into a healthy activity ... we showed that off by asking a member of the audience to play a game sitting in a comfy chair eating chips and then on the GameBike doing the same (without the chips). Very effective.
Brian followed Kyle Peck's talk by doing something a little different -- he focused a lot of energy on technology and how it is used to transform everyday opportunities for learning. I thought it was really well done. He even held court at Whiskers afterwards (picking up the bill) talking to us all about some really cool things. Engaging the community in these ways has been both very stressful and very worth while! I can't thank Brian enough! Some pictures from the event. Here is the direct link to the podcast as an MP3.
So this is the pilot blog for the PSU Blogger Team ... this is being written in MovableType on an ASET server and being published into my PSU Personal webspace. Think of the possibilities this would give faculty, staff, and students ... I wrote about the idea elsewhere not too long ago ... just a few of the uses:
- Class Blogs: A student or faculty member could create a blog for each class to keep assignments, thoughts, notes, or anything else in. Faculty could use to share content and students could use it store and manage notes and thoughts.
- Blogs: Obviously this could be used to simply keep blogs going.
- ePortfolio Lite: These spaces enable instant publishing so students can store evidence of their intellectual development without messing with code.
- Research Notebooks: TAs could collaborate on research notebooks for projects.
- Podcast Space: One big thing this does is allow us to use personal space to enable student and faculty personal podcasting without worrying about other services.
This is a killer opportunity and one that could really alter the way publishing on the web is seen here at PSU. Nice work!
