Starting an On-Campus Blogging Service
Everybody seems to be blogging. A Wikipedia entry tells us that the blogosphere currently has about 7 million blogs. There are even blogs devoted to blogging in educational settings . For the past year or so we have been informally supporting faculty and staff blogs. Up until now there have been fewer than a dozen faculty and staff who have campus hosted blogs, and they have been self-sufficient for the most part.
In June we hosted an Institute on Teaching Strategies where faculty discussed their most challenging courses and to how to develop strategies to effectively teach today’s students. Our guest facilitators presented some philosophical underpinnings of various technologies that can be effectively used in learning environments to encourage student participation. These technologies included blogs, wikis and visual technologies, and several faculty are eager to begin using blogs in their courses.
At Cortland, eLearning initiatives are managed by a team of librarians, instructional designers, and electronic imaging and Web specialists in the library. They receive lots of behind-the-scenes support from Administrative and Academic computing technologists. I’m usually included in the planning since I administer budgets and am usually a good “canary” to fly into any e-mine. The planning has begun and there are many decisions to be made.
Here are some of the questions we’re dealing with early on:
What about faculty who want their blogs to be limited to enrolled students? We’ve decided that those blogs should be embedded in our course management system, Blackboard’s WebCT but we will encourage faculty to have open blogs.
Should the blogs be hosted on or off site? Until it becomes unwieldy we will host blogs on campus using Wordpress. Read an interesting discussion on the topic.
Should there be a disclaimer about the content of blogs? We’re relying on our network use policy.
Should all campus blogs have a standard template? We’re currently undecided.
What about student blogs? We currently allow students to create their own web pages, so why not blogs?
Who will support the blog service? Currently two librarians, our Coordinator of Instruction and our Web Services Librarian provide front line service with technical support from our University Database Administrator.
We expect to deal with many more issues as the service is used and expands.
We’ve been having some debates as to whether we want to use the words “open blog” and “closed blog”. A blog is a “web log”, which implies it’s out there on the web and therefore accessible. Thus, a “closed blog” might be a contradiction.
I think putting blogs on the Web should be the default. Students need to know how to present themselves in a responsible manner, and keeping everything under wraps doesn’t do that. Only if there were a genuine concern about confidentiality of topics would I put a blog in WebCT.
Comment by danharms — July 20, 2007 @ 3:39 pm