• enabling reflections – blogging is a great way to allow in-depth reflection on a topic, increasing student retention and engagement.
• enabling conversations – blogs can be easily aggregated into a single source, essentially allowing conversations to occur around a single topic or course.
• student ownership of content – ANGEL supports discussion forums, chat and other forms of communication that can work in certain situations but ultimately do not give students ownership of their content. That carefully composed discussion forum posting or drop box submission that took a lot of thought and effort to create is essentially lost when the semester/term is over unless the student takes special effort to retain it.
• portfolio – related to ownership of content, the concept of blog as portfolio has powerful implications. The Penn State Blog platform can be used to support so much more than just blogging; essentially a student can easily set up a whole Web site with a collection of artifacts (pictures, stories, etc.) related to him or herself. The portfolio can represent not only the students’ learning in the program but can include any learning or experiences that take place outside of the formal learning environment. Such an e-portfolio is a strong indicator to a potential employer of the depth of a person’s strengths and experiences.

The two sessions I went to related to blogging were entitled: Engaging Students with Program Learning Outcomes and ENGL 202C on the Blogs at Penn State Platform. I learned of real-life examples that support my thinking above. The Engaging Students session had students that were using their blogs in the context of a program experience and not just for isolated classwork. They were doing all the things I mentioned above for portfolio, but were also using them for reflections and conversations. The ENGL 202C students were able to share their writing with the class in a much more meaningful and engaging way.

I also attended a session on the future of textbooks in the digital age and a hands-on session on Adobe Connect. The textbook session gave a lot of food for thought about what’s in store for textbooks and what copyright means in the digital world. The Adobe Connect session gave me more hands-on practice with Connect and informed me of the detailed help page PSU has in place for the product – I intend to use this as a reference and source of ideas as I revise our own (World Campus) instructions for Elluminate Live.

Finally, the two keynotes with David Wiley and danah boyd were fantastic. All in all a tiring day but very well worth my time and as usual, gave me plenty of takeaways and food for thought.