I am preparing my closing plenary for the upcoming Educause Mid-Atlantic conference to be held in Baltimore, MD and thought I’d share something I’ve been diving into related to the Blogs at Penn State. My colleague, Brad Kozlek oversees much of what happens with that service and one of the things I ask him to do is to maintain data on the use of the service. He updated our shared google spreadsheet for me today so I could share some of it all at the event later this week.

There are a couple of things I am noticing and am very proud of … one is that the service is really being used and it is being used in so many novel and interesting ways. I’ll try to share some of those during my talk. The other thing we are discovering is that over time it appears that people are becoming more active users … that means they don’t just make a blog and bail. That has important implications — more on that in a future post and at a talk Bart Pursel and I will give at ELI — and those implications include rising GPAs for those who are sticking with writing. Amazing stuff. For now I just thought I’d share the numbers …

My favorite Twitter conversation in days was a result of sharing this …