I finally put the finishing touches on Penn State’s Education Technology Ecosystem report. This document will likely live on the “SITE Research” section of this website until we move the blog and research page over to departmental webspace later this year. The first draft of the report (what I’m calling version .1) contains information on the usage of the Penn State Blog Platform and Wikispaces, our institutional Wiki install. Check it out and let us know what you think. Big thanks to co-authors Jimmy Xie and Cole Camplese for ideas and assistance with the analysis. Also thanks to Brad and Hubing for the data dumps. This project would not have been possible without collaboration between the Schreyer Institute, Education Technology Services and Emerging Technologies.
One of the highlights of the report includes a cluster analysis of blog users, which returns three classifications:
- Comment dominant users
- Entry dominant users
- Infrequent users
When we dig a bit further, we find that, over time, the entry dominant users’ GPA increases .06 GPA points from the time they start blogging, compared to .01 GPA for infrequent users and .02 GPA for comment dominant users.
The next minor update will add examples of faculty use of wikis and blogs. The next major update will focus on the inclusion of iTunesU data. Thanks to Brian in ETS for the recent export of iTunes data. Once the semester calms down a bit, we’ll be getting that data into a format to mash with the datawarehouse and see what we discover…