BlogU

  • Campus Blogging

    By Joshua Kim September 13, 2009 8:03 pm EDT

    A transformative step that learning technologists can participate in proposing, pushing, guiding, leading, managing and maintaining would be providing a campus-wide blogging platform and institutional aggregation site. Here are some guidelines for what this could look like:

    1. The campus blogging platform should also be one of the largest consumer blogging platforms. Resist the urge to provide a homegrown solution. An important goal is to have our students continue to blog once they leave our campus. They will only do this if the platform is one that does not tie them to an institution and is also one they see being used by other people in their networks. According to a study done by the site Royal Pingdom, the top 3 platforms to consider are: Typepad, Wordpress, and Blogger.

    2. The ideal blogging platform would be advertising-free and contain some subtle branding for your college or university. It seems that our institutions have some leverage here to negotiate favorable terms with one of the largest blogging platform providers that would make providing this lifetime service affordable.

    3. Develop a prominent university/college page that aggregates all the blogs related to your institution. Set the page up so that blogs are categorized in relevant groups: current students, alumni, faculty and staff, and even maybe prospective students. Have this site edited and curated with a central blog that highlights and links to the most interesting posts from the community. Allow ranking of blogs by readership and commentary, pushing the most read and commented blogs to the top. Figure out how to let readers personalize the site by creating their own blog rolls and an easy way that they can launch a new blog and author existing ones. Only de-link blogs from your community that have clearly inappropriate content.

    Negotiating a blogging platform deal and setting up an institutional aggregation site are the easiest parts of this project. What is more difficult, and more important, is making the case that providing your community with these tools is in the interest of all the stakeholders. We need to be able to answer questions about why it is important for our students to have an easy and convenient method to keep a public blog.

    We need to make the case to create a first-year class on blogging for all of our students, one where they would apply writing and communication skills to their personal blogs. We need to figure out how to encourage our campus leaders to utilize this platform to blog regularly, setting examples for the community. And we need to communicate the importance of giving all the members of our community a place to express their views and opinions, even when these views may prove unpopular and uncomfortable.

    Do you know of any campuses that have enacted something like this? Is anyone out there trying to make something like this happen?

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Comments on Campus Blogging

  • Negotiate a deal? Wordpress MU is opensource...
  • Posted by Dubi at UToronto on September 14, 2009 at 5:00am EDT

  • All you need is someone who can install and admin the system and it's ready to go. Jeeze, how difficult is it do to some minimal research before you post?

    Speaking of Wordpress MU, their webpage links to Harvard Law as and example of a university that uses the system to do what you describe, pretty much:
    http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/

  • Campus blogging since 2003
  • Posted by Dennis G. Jerz , Associate Professor of English -- New Media Journalism at Seton Hill University on September 14, 2009 at 5:00am EDT

  • There is, of course, a value in creating a private online space for a specific class, but if we put our best stuff behind the Blackboard firewall, or if the content disappears into the Facebook or Twitter data sink, then we're missing the chance to use the web as a public resource. Thanks for posting these guidelines. I like your thinking, Joshua, and I hope that more faculty and administraors will see the value of social networking technology.

    In the fall of 2003, as a new hire at Seton Hill University (a small liberal arts college near Pittsburgh), I used MovableType to set up blogs.setonhill.edu, offering free, no-advertising blogs to students, faculty, and staff.

    The default template I provide is subtly branded, with a modest logo and link, but students can (and often do) choose a different design. The fact that the blogs live under the setonhill.edu domain gives the student writers clout, and the frequency of posts and the pattern of cross-linking is interpreted favorably by Google (our aggregator has a respectable Google PageRank of 5.10).

    We paid a one-time fee (about $300, I think) for a site license that permits 300 active blogs. Each year, I've opted for an annual tech support package that has saved me hours of troubleshooting time, at a price that's about what we pay the web host.

    Since blogs.setonhill.edu went online, nearly 600 users have created about 25,000 posts, attracting about 40,000 non-spam comments. I have often wished for the time to do the coding necessary to rank blogs by recent activity (in the last 24 hours, in the last week, in the last month, in the last year, and "all time"), but for now a list of recently updated blogs keeps the most active blogs visible.

    Usually every semester, students get comments from the author of a textbook or academic article we've used in class. Students posting their homework on The Scarlet Letter or the Associated Press Stylebook are likely to get some random search engine traffic.

    A former admissions director blogged faithfully for some months before leaving for a different job, and the library, the student paper, our National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, some students involved in our Study Abroad program, all of my journalism and literature students blog on the system, and about a dozen other classes taught by other faculty members have experimented with blogging. Several faculty members have experimented with using a blog as an official professional presence, and one colleague got a book deal out of a collection of essays he posted to his blog while on a trip abroad.

    I don't censor what the students write. Of the 25,000 blog entries on the site, I'd say that only three crossed the line into destructive irresponsibility and offensiveness, and the authors of those posts withdrew almost immediately after posting them. (Those posts are still online, but you'd have to know what to search for in order to find them.)

  • responding to Dennis at Seton Hill
  • Posted by Joshua Kim , Senior Learning Technologist and Adjunct Professor at Dartmouth College on September 14, 2009 at 9:00am EDT

  • Dennis...wow..."nearly 600 users have created about 25,000 posts, attracting about 40,000 non-spam comments" - amazing. I checked out http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ and this site seems like an amazing model for what other institutions could do. I wonder how this model could be scaled to other institutions. You have demonstrated how successful (and affordable) it can be...with amazing learning value. I wonder if http://blogs.setonhill.edu/ is an outlier or if this is where other institutions are moving? I wonder what the impediments and obstacles would be. Thanks for posting this Dennis....you made my morning!

  • PSU example
  • Posted by Jeff Bohrer at UW-Madison on September 14, 2009 at 1:45pm EDT

  • We have watched (with envy) as Penn State has matured their campus blog service: http://blogs.psu.edu/

  • Posted by Dr, Pepper , Academic-in-training on September 14, 2009 at 2:30pm EDT

  • We've got WordPress MU setup on our campus. There's been a push over the past year to get people to use it, but I prefer using WordPress.com (or WordPress on my own server). There is something that I inherently don't trust about setting up my blog on an institution's servers (or brand for instance). I want my content to be portable in case I go to another institution and keeping my own stuff separate seems to be the best solution.

  • PSU example
  • Posted by PSU example on September 14, 2009 at 5:30pm EDT

  • Wow...the PSU example is great..thanks Jeff. I loved the great little movie and the description of the the Academic Blogs

    ACADEMIC BLOGS

    Document your university experiences. Take notes. Connect with classmates, colleagues, professors, and advisers.

  • responding to Dr. Pepper
  • Posted by Joshua Kim on September 14, 2009 at 5:30pm EDT

  • Dr. Pepper....I agree that blogs should be portable....This may be somewhat of a logistic cost - but probably worth the payoff. If the blogging platform can't be portable then at least the college/university blog page should be able to link to the outside blogs in the same way as ones that are provided.

  • Posted by Chris on September 16, 2009 at 1:15pm EDT

  • It seems to me there's an important element missing from this article. Why would a student or faculty member want to use a university blogging platform? There are many excellent, free blogging services out there, so what would motivate them to use a university provided service?

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