This year we are encouraging faculty in the College of the Liberal Arts who are teaching First Year Seminars to consider integrating social media technology into their courses to engage students around learning objectives central to their academic success.

At three points during the Fall 2010 semester, we will be feeding case studies and vignettes to the Penn State Rock Ethics Institute blog intended to encourage a conversation about the Penn State Principles and academic integrity. Hopefully, students will comment directly on the blog, adding to a College-wide conversation on ethical issues relevant to undergraduate education.

We also plan on holding two information sessions for freshmen to learn more about the opportunities and resources available to them as students in the College of the Liberal Arts.
One presentation will cover call enrichment activities like internships, education abroad, undergraduate research, and involvement in student and community organizations. The other session will (tentatively) cover advising and university resources (learning centers, CAPS, disability services, etc.)

For those faculty interested in thinking more broadly about how to integrate technology into their course, we are planning a First Year Seminar Summer workshop. The workshop will introduce ways to incorporate such social media technologies as blogging, podcasting, wikis, twitter, and YouTube into the First Year Seminar experience.  FYS faculty interested in this workshop should contact me at: longc@psu.edu. (Or you can direct message twitter me @LAUSDeanLong).

In the spirit of the dialogue these initiatives are designed to cultivate, I thought I might conclude with a specific question to all faculty and students who have read this post to this point:

Can you think of specific examples of how social media technology could be used in a First-Year seminar to deepen the educational experience of students and faculty?