Recently in Projects Category

I've written before about what is going on in the Schreyer Honors College portfolio project. It is a very cool thing to watch. And speaking of watching, today I got an update and a link into the new aggregation view that the Blog team put together. You can see pieces of posts from across the SHC ecosystem all tagged with "PSUHonors" ... BTW, you can do a search from that page for any tag and get a mash up.

Another quick pointer is to an ePortfolio in the teacher education program that uses the templates built for Carla Zembal-Saul's summer Fellowship. This uses a modified tag cloud associated with program outcomes.

Allan Gyorke and the rest of the team have wrapped up the work on the Copyright Perspectives website and videos. The site is really nicely done and the content there provides an excellent set of resources that can be used to help educate students to the details relate to copyright. I like the approach the team took -- not preachy in their tone. I think this could make a big difference.

The videos are great and I am so impressed with how professional each turned out. I decided to ask the team to place each of the three videos in the TLT YouTube space so they can be easily embedded on other sites. The latest video is included below. Thanks to everyone who made this such a successful project.

I thought it would be a good idea to provide a link from this space over to a presentation I did for the all ITS Staff meeting that happened back in January of 2007. This was a Spring 2007 Podcasts at Penn State update ... instead of delivering it in Keynote, I decided to use the PSU Blog tool to do it. I was obviously interested in sharing the information about the podcasting project, but was also excited about showing a few novel uses of a blog. I think it worked fairly well.

I have been working hard with both the teams in ETS and ASET to make this Blogs at Penn State thing a reality. We are getting very close now ... just today our friends in ASET moved the updated MovableType code and templates over to the production environment. With a little luck this time next we'll add our first round of pre-pilot users to the environment for extended testing. By June we hope to have 70 or so testers in here making it all go.

Now that it is getting fairly stable I am spending some time learning the MT platform and undersatnding how to customize my individual blogs. The Feed Widget Manager is very powerful and once you get it figured out it is realtively easy to use. The StyleCatcher tool makes changing themes very easy. This theme, for example, comes from a theme repository located at:

http://www.thestylearchive.com/browse/

All you have to do copy and paste that URL into the MT StyleCatcher and it auto loads all the available themes from that repsoitory. Very cool. I will try to link to useful sites that can help users extend and customize their own blogs. I am also using hte del.icio.us tag psublogging to store anything that seems related. Feel free to add sites to it as well.

But this time it is different. This is the root blog built with the new PSU Blogger Tool. It is obvious that the tool is based on MovableType from Six Apart. This tool was selected for a whole bunch of reasons ... some of them very good. It has a majority of the features faculty, staff, and students will need to make it happen, but it does lack some basic functionality that might end up being a bit of a deal killer downstream. We envision big things for the environment, we'll just have to put it through the paces. Honestly it is a wait and see opportunity.

I'll use this space to provide some thoughts about a whole host of things. I blog "for real" over at my own domain on the Learning and Innovation blog. That is where I put almost all my blogging energy, so if you are really interested in what I have to say I would subscribe to that feed. This will be a place to keep you updated about stuff directly related to PSU. Not sure what kind of frequency I will have here, but I will do my best. For now, welcome!