PSU Overview and Our Use Cases
PSU Basics
- More than 90,000 students
- More than 22,000 World Campus enrollments
- About 20,000 full and part time faculty and staff
- 24 locations across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
Our MT powered blog platform is managed and run by our core ITS organization and was designed to potentially serve our entire user population. We built it upon existing infrastructure, including integration with our Web-Access authentication system so students could move in and out of their blog dashboards with a single sign on and that content be published as static html pages into Penn State Personal Webspace (PASS). What this means is that we utilize the 5 GB of space that everyone gets without worrying about ownership of content, the opportunity for users to have access to their assets, or the need to create new policies to govern blogs. Faculty, staff, and students operate in a self service mode, going to the Blogs at Penn State site to log in and create their blogs.
Blogs at Penn State Back Story
We launched our "blogging" service about 18 months ago after discussions about affordances of a system like this. Our argument to administration revolved around creating an environment that was an open publishing platform -- not just a blog service. When we stopped talking about blogs they began to understand the power.
The growth has been strong overall, with us now serving over 10,000 users -- about 4,500 of them are very active users.
The big stories being the use of blogs for:
- Courses
- ePortfolios
- Faculty pages
- eLearning design, development, and delivery
- Biology 12: And the Design Document
- IST 110
- Unit websites
- Podcasting
- Penn State Voices
- Project sites -- Faculty Fellows
We are promoting the idea that faculty shouldn't require a separate course blog for each course they teach, opting instead to talking to students about how one overall space is more powerful. One overall space can be used across a career by effectively employing categories and, more importantly, tags to keep things organized across their academic and personal lives. This is ultimately the direction we are taking this -- a Learning Life Stream. In this way students are collecting evidence of learning and their overall experiences in one searchable archive.
What is emerging is that people are getting the fact that blogs are powerful personal content management environments. Because of the way one can instantly post, tag, search, and edit, students can organize materials in an online space like never before.
ePortfolios
In two different Colleges (the Schreyer Honors College and the College of Education's Teacher Education Program) Stacks of papers will become a thing of the past as students move their content into integrated online spaces that are fully searchable and belong to them. In these Colleges they have worked to identify and clearly articulate the program outcomes so as students create work (evidence) they use tags to mark posts as related to specific program outcome statement so it is easily aggregated together. When the time is right our Pack it Up tool allows program assessors to create a fully functional archive and move it into a program assessment environment.
Some Portfolio Examples
- Amy's Portfolio
- http://www.personal.psu.edu/awb5000/blogs/andreas_portfolio/
- http://www.personal.psu.edu/hst5004/blogs/helenes_portfolio/
- http://www.personal.psu.edu/pjh5020/blogs/paiges_portfolio/
Technical Issues
In our implementation, we deal with a number of technical issues:
- We need the following hooks added to system:
- Local file system access sanitation:local file read, write, including template linked to static files, asset control, publish to file (page and entry), or "include file=" template tag.
- Path sanitation for blog/entry/page creation and publishing
- Authentication model for openID does not work well with WebAccess
- Dashboard
- Comments
- Private Content Support
- Integrate MT permission table with .htaccess to control published blog read access.
- Prevent private contents from appearing in unauthorized searches.
- MT doesn't really protect private contents. MultiBlog simply changes the default inclusion. Users can still explicitly assign blog ID to access any blog. We had to filter search parameters and template parameters.
- Search cache can be retrieved by anyone.
- Needed to hack DBI driver to do an efficient SQL hack. (MT's ObjectDriver does not allow specifying Inner Join On field). Perhaps MT can provide a hook before SQL is sent out?
- Content TAGs in private blog should not appear in global cloud
Session 2: Discussion of MT-TP Migration Concept
Easily move student blogs to typepad after they leave. transfer content form psu blog to typepad blog. This should be an automated process with simple user interface for the student.
Ideally this would include:
- TP on par with MT 4
- entries
- pages
- comments
- tags w/ tag cloud
- files (images inline, linked images, linked pdfs, word, etc)
- change intrablog links (links to other entries, pages, files. Keep internal reference consistence)
- typepad blog will have option to have static front page
- blog will have header image (? - is this important)
- typepad blog will have primary page navigation (like the horizontal navbar) - some pages will be in primary nav, others will not (we currently use @topnav tag on pages to distinguish)
- PSU Blog will set up redirect from a student's psu space to the typepad space for six months after graduation.
Session 3: Next Steps
Licensing confusion continues to be an issue. Let's find time to discuss how we better plan our costs as we go forward.
We need to evaluate how these would work with our unique set up:
- MT Enterprise
- MT Community
- TypePad Connect for our Horizontal Conversation concept
What are the best way for PSU developers to contribute to open source community. We have our own issues based around large multi-user setup:
- Self provisioning of blogs (verification of paths, auto user creation, more flexible auto blog creation) (The App and interface is not designed as a self-service multi user environment)
- Security issues related to ACLs on filesystem
- MT accounts for commenting does not work smoothly with webaccess.
- Protected blogging
- Use ldap groups for reading and writing blogs.
