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In recent weeks there has been a lot of discussion about how to create cross pollination among the faculty fellows. This week's big accomplishment for our groups has been to arrange a joint summit with Chris Long's group. The Fellows are also scheduled to be on a panel for the Summer Camp, but I hope there are more opportunities.
When we compared notes on projects, it definitely seemed like there was a lot of overlap. Allan asked what we thought the common theme was, and on further reflection, I think it's that we all are working towards a common vision of the Internet being a place where anyone, anywhere can contribute to the knowledge of the community (and I count brisk discussion as an important part of that).
Ellysa Cahoy has been focusing on new information literacy - which not only allow students to filter the enourmous amount of content out there but hopefully will allow them to make intelligent contributions. Carla Zembal-Saul has been focusing on student portfolios, which is an important skill to allow us to organize and share what we are learning with the world. Chris Long has been focusing on how the Internet can enable discussions of the type practiced by Socrates...but with a potentially much larger stage. And Stuart Selber has been focusing on how technical writers need to prepare for a world where users may be providing "official instruction" on a product.
I think there's been lots of interesting discussion going on and it's giving a lot of us a rare opportunity to think about how our jobs really can impact Penn State and the larger world. As I said, I hope there are more opportunities for cross pollination out there for us and the Learning Design community. These instructors have a lot to teach us.
If you want to sample what we are thinking, I would recommend Mary Janzen's last blog entry on technical writing. As always, I find it very interesting reading.
Truthfully, we're still brainstorming, but we've had some fascinating conversations about different aspects of Web 2.0 and higher education. Stuart is formulating his taxonomy of online documentation modes, but this week we began to touch on what the implications would be for future practitioners in technical writing/editing. This will have many practical implications for those of us trying to both provide training and leverage resources/knowledge we know is out there in the community.
Another track we want to explore is how the Fellows can interact with each other. The Faculty Fellow team leaders are seeing lots of overlap in the topics, and Stuart himself said that one of his goals was to meet the other instructors. I'm realizing that a major benefit we can provide for our cutting edge faculty is a place where they can meet others with similar interests.
Penn State has been moving at a stately pace towards innovation, but, for the truly cutting-edge instructor, the experience out front may be a little isolating.
We just had our kick-off meeting yesterday, and it was very interesting. Stuart is interested in analyzing how instruction is constructed with new Web 2.0 tools. Stuart's proposal notes that, depending on your tool set, "instruction" can range from static documents to documents with comments or voting or fully participatory wikis.
For me, the interesting question is determining the social factors behind creating joint documentation. Anyone involved with recent efforts at community building know that it's easier to provide the tools than for people to accept them.
I'll be curious to see where this heads, so stay tuned.
I just wanted to take a quick moment and introduce myself to people visiting our TLT Fellows site. I'm Cole Camplese, director of ETS. It is my responsibility to help keep us moving in a positive direction and to help discover great projects for us to be working on. I'll be working with Carla this thinking about how to extend the work we accomplished last year around the notion of social ePortfolios. I think we'll have some interesting things to share as we go forward. Look for posts from the team as work on new ideas this summer.

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