As editor of Auricle you would expect me to be quite a fan of blogs, and I am; but their personal publishing heritage tends to get the in the way of scaling up their widespread use in education. For example, what if an article has multiple authors? What if we want every student and faculty member to have a blog (x,000s) automatically. What if the author want to choose who can view his/her articles, e.g. friends, project groups, tutors? Using these criteria most blog engines fall at the first hurdle. Why? Let's consider one scenario.
We've been looking for a Weblog engine which can cope with multiple authors and manage multiple blogs. We like the open source WordPress and want to use it, but it looks like we are going to have to jump through multiple installation hoops to support more than one weblog. So how can we give each student and faculty member a weblog on this basis? … it just won't scale. Due credit to the WordPress developers who are working on the issue, but even if a future version of WordPress allows for multiple blogs, when we start dealing with large numbers of blogs, we've got to look at the approach taken by the blog hosting companies, e.g. Blogger.com. They automate the process. Type in few basic details and voila! you have a blog. It seems to me that we need some scripting capabilities, API's exposed or perhaps even Web services???
Blogger et al do a sterling job but I wouldn't want to build a dependency on their free service into, say, a higher education programme where there has to be a guaranteed quality of service, i.e. a free service can be withdrawn at any time. Ok, Blogger.com probably wouldn't do it but they could do it.
The University of Warwick's eLab team have got it! They are showing the rest of us the way with their BlogBuilder tool to drive their Warwick Blogs service.
Warwick's eLab has also tackled the thorny question of who decides who can view a weblog posting?
“When you write an entry on your blog, you can control who can see it and who can comment on it. This control is achieved through creating groups of peole who you can then allow to see or comment on various entries. There are several preset groups such as 'Anyone', 'Staff', 'Students', 'Staff/Students' and 'Just me', and one group ready and waiting for you to add people to it which is called 'Friends', but you can also create your own groups.”
On a more general front I really like Warwick's approach. Whilst many HEIs seem to be convinced that the future of e-learning in their institution is inextricably linked to binding themselves to a single enterprise level proprietary VLE, Warwick's ELab Tools and Services IMHO shows us there is another more flexible and adaptable way. That doesn't mean they don't use VLEs, it's just that they have deliberately eschewed the emerging 'monoculture' I've waxed lyrical about elsewhere.
Other notable examples of such an approach include the University of Washington's Catalyst Tools.
Now the 'Catch 22' in the Warwick and perhaps the Washington examples is the tools were designed with a single institutional perspective in mind. Consequently, even if the developing institutions were willing to do so, decoupling them from the underlying technical infrastructures, e.g. may not be so easy or economic. Nevertheless, if such tools were made generally available to the wider community the benefits would be immense. We can but hope that, ultimately, the Technical Framework and Tools Strand, of the JISC's wider E-Learning Programme and associated eTools activities leads to the development of libraries of higher level tools and applications similar to the Warwick and Washington examples.
But I digress. Back to blogs!
Another interesting example of mass blog provision appears to be the University of Minnesota's UThink Blogs at the University Libraries. They appear to have Movable Type as their underlying blog engine and have several hundred blogs in existence. I wonder, however, how easy generating multiple blogs is using this system, how much code/script replication there is, and how much manual intervention is required?
We've considered how we could automate the creation of WordPress blogs but we still come back to the issue of multiple installs and replicated files because the basic architecture is still single blog oriented.
Our impression is that there's a lot of blogging engines out there which do a sterling job, but try and find a customizable engine which can auto-generate blogs and the options appear seriously limited. Of course we might be looking in the wrong place:)
The only possible candidate I could find was ScriptMe.com's SmE Blog Host so if anyone else knows of any we would be happy to know about them.
