Living, Learning, Cyberspace: A Program-Wide Blogging Initiative for Virginia Tech's Honors Residential College

How can the intimate, engaged experience of small-group learning be a template for a large research university? Virginia Tech's answer: a blogging platform that enables students and professors throughout the campus to narrate, curate, and share their learning locally and globally. As a proof of concept, a pilot program is under way with 300 students in the new Honors Residential College. The goal: foster individual engagement as well as a distributed conversation across entire programs and, potentially, beyond the walls of the university. This session will feature perspectives and voices of participants from each major project constituency: administrative, student, and faculty.

Learning Objectives:
*Learn how intimate, small, face-to-face classes can benefit from a blended learning model and how such models can influence an entire campus
*Be able to catalyze new institutional partnerships by hearing stories of both intentional and serendipitous partnerships
*Be prepared to discuss the benefits of outsourcing enterprise-wide cloud affordances and to anticipate some of the difficulties they may encounter
*Engage with issues such as FERPA, intellectual property, and both quantitative and qualitative assessment of student web publishing
*Discover inexpensive, easy-to-use Web 2.0 resources to foster robust learning communities