Cole Camplese, Director of Education Technology Services at Penn State, had a very interesting post today about how the Blogs at PSU platform has grown since its launch 18 months ago.

Since the start of this year’s fall semester, the platform has seen 3,700 new users; 3,500 new blogs; 16,360 new posts; and 5,840 new comments. That’s pretty impressive. But the growth will probably become even more dramatic over the next year as professors increasingly recognize the potential of the Blogs at PSU platform.

We have seen more professors requesting assignments be turned in via student blogs. Moreover, a bunch of the colleges here have started getting their students to post resumes and other information on their blog, using it as a general content management system.

As Cole says,

What is emerging is that people are getting the fact that blogs are powerful personal content management environments. Because of the way one can instantly post, tag, search, and edit students can organize materials in an online space like never before.

It’s really interesting stuff, and we support the initiative 100%. We want to get everyone interested in blogs– most of all, in Onward State!

(You Penn State wonks out there can feast your eyes on this Google Spreadsheet full of interesting stats about the platform.)

[Graph taken from Cole’s blog. It’s really nice, isn’t it?]