On October 6, 2009 I was part of a presentation on the Blogs at Penn State web publishing platform at the CIC CIO Tech Forum at Michigan State University. I presented with Brad Kozlek and Erin Long.
Our approach was this (and in this order):
- Brad presented on the Blog platform in general. He gave a broad overview of the platform, including the tracked history of it's rollout and user data to show how it's growing adoption among Penn State faculty, staff and students.
- Erin demonstrated examples of instructional uses of the platform in English 202C (technical writing class) where students are using the platform to publish their assignments on the web, create their resumes and develop broader reaching e-portfolios that contain showcases of their work throughout their academic career at Penn State.
- My presentation shifted gears and showed how the Blogs at Penn State was used as e-learning authoring tool to develop a Biology 12 lab as an open courseware deliverable.
Being that the conferences audience was mainly IT folk, I wasn't sure I'd get much interest in a presentation more geared for instructional designers or e-learning developers. In fact, to being my part of the presentation, I asked the group (about 17 people) if anyone had any experience putting instructional material online. Three people fully raised their hands and one put their hand up kind of half-way. 3 out of 17 was sure better than a big fat ZERO! So, I had myself some people who may indeed be interested in my portion of the presentation. That was important as I was nervous about presenting to a group uninterested in the topic.
My presentation is here:
Results?
Overall, the entire presentation went well. I think the concept of the broad overview followed by two very different learning applications from it made sense to our audience. Brad was immediately approached by some folks from the University of Illinois who seemed to be very interested in this platform. In fact, his discussions with these people began after the presentation and went through dinner that evening. I consider that a measurable result.
FYI- no one has contacted me about authoring e-learning content in an open web publishing platform. For now, I'll chalk it up to the audience and not the presenter as an ego massaging measure.
Brad Kozlek published all 3 of our presentations together if you are interested in seeing the entire presentation.
Leave a comment