About Me

My name is Jeff Swain. I'm an instructional designer in the department of Education Technology Services (ETS) at Penn State. My fancy title is Innovation Consultant.This means I get to play with a lot of new technologies looking for their potential for teaching and learning.

The current focus of my job is threefold: The adoption and diffusion of our course management system, ANGEL. An endeavor that's become a lot more intriguing lately with the news of Blackboard Learning's acquisition of ANGEL. Included along with this is the exploration of social, collaborative, and portable tools and how to incorporate them into our CMS.

My second focus is on an subject I've become greatly interested in the last year, digital portfolios. The idea that you would have a digital "place" that acted as a virtual representation of the self you develop and keep throughout your life have great implications and potential. Plus it ties in with a big area of interest for me, the notion of 21st century literacy. In other words, I explore what it means to be literate in the new millennium and what we, as educators, need to do to address this.

Finally, I am the chairperson of Penn State's  Symposium for Teaching and Learning with Technology. The Symposium is a place for faculty and staff to discuss the ways they use technology to enhance teaching, learning, and research. This is my second year of a two year gig.

My other passion is running. To date I've run three marathons but, that's not why I run. I run because I have this compulsion to run. The need to run is wired into my DNA. It's my place where everything comes together

The opinions expressed here are my own and in no way represent those of my employer, Penn State University.