Tomorrow is the third annual Learning Design Summer Camp, bringing together designers, technologists, faculty and other interesting Penn Staters for a day of interesting discussion in the IST Cybertorium.  A few of us here in the Institute have been examining what we call “Penn State’s Technology Ecosystem“, specifically focusing on Undergraduate Education.  Tomorrow at 1:00, I’ll be presenting in room 106 on our initial findings.

In a nutshell, we took data from two Penn State technology platforms: Wikispaces and Blogs@PSU.  This data was then combined with institutional data from Penn State’s data warehouse.  Some of the questions I’ll be exploring during the session tomorrow afternoon include:

• What are the profiles of students that tend to use this technology?
• What faculty are using these platforms? How are they using them?
• Where are we, as a university, in terms of adoption?
• What Colleges/Departments are already using these platforms in a pedagogically-sound way? (with examples)
• What sort of impact are these platforms having on student performance?

After the presentation, I will put the finishing touches on a document outlining our initial findings and post a link here on where  you can download a copy of the report.  Already, we’re seeing some very interesting trends with the use of both platforms across the university with a positive impact on student performance!