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Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Aug
9
(2008)
I currently run two separate blogging services on campus, and think both actually have their place and so continue to maintain and manage both a community blogging service running on Drupal, and a more individual blogging space running on WordPress Multiuser.
weblogs.ucalgary.ca is the Drupal-powered community blogging system. It’s got the organic groups module enabled, with access control configured, meaning people can easily login using their campus LDAP credentials, create groups, and publish content knowing that only members of the specified group(s) can see it.
I first set the service up three and a half years ago, and in that time it’s seen activity by 1060 users, publishing 1599 posts. That’s a whopping 1.5 posts per person. Not a lot of high end activity, and a lot of tire-kicking (and possibly content deletion) going on.
The second service, ucalgaryblogs.ca, is less than a year old, and has received almost no marketing or promotion. Only a handful of people even know it exists (mostly readers of my blog). I just snuck a copy of WPMU onto a server, configured it to host subdomains aplenty, and let it sit there.
Why haven’t I started pimping the heck out of it, in the hopes of fostering something insanely awesome like Jim did at University of Mary Washington?
I’m not convinced that the Institution needs to host a blogging platform anymore.
WordPress.com, edublogs.org, and any of a number of other blogging services are doing extremely well, for free, without requiring any of my time to maintain any software.
The reasons I keep coming back to needing a campus-hosted blogging platform are:
- integration – potential integration with other services, explicitly campus-wide logins so people don’t need Yet Another Account to remember. This may not be a big deal. It’s not hard to remember a new username/login, and if you forget, it’s easy to get a reminder.
- trust – if it’s on a campus server, there may be a higher level of trust and/or confidence that the service will be there, that it will not change terms of usage, and that it won’t get sold to another third party that may not align with the needs of the users. This one could also go the other way – it’s possible that students may trust an off-campus service more than they would trust one offered by The Man.
- authority – having a campus-related URL may be beneficial, especially for people trying to build an online identity – but this could also go the other way, because it backfires for people who may be leaving the campus community and would then have to pack up their stuff and move to a new URL after ditching any googlejuice they’ve generated.
With that said, none of the high profile blog projects on campus (the President’s blog, CIO’s blog, solar challenge team, etc…) use either of the services I provide. Maybe that’s a sign that they’re really not necessary?
D\’Arcy,
Your list of reasons her to have a campus blogging platform is really interesting to me, especially since our on-campus blogging platform actually accomplished none of the objects. We externally host UMW Blogs, we have a .org domain, and it doesn\’t provide anything like a single sign-on with other campus services. In fact, I think the lack of all these elements works to its advantage. But given this, why not just Blogger, edublogs or WordPress.com? Well, I think all those service are fine, and do the trick, in fact, we have set up UMW Blogs so that folks can just drop off their RSS feed and share the goodness with the community, or just a specific class.
Yet, I still believe there is a reason—at lasest for the time being because I agree with your impulse in this post— for a specific installation that frames the work of a academic community. Once we say get you own (and we never say don;t get your own) we in further fragment and already fragmented space. What we are experimenting around with UWM Blogs is creating a community that bleeds into the online realm. A space where people can get a sense of the academic mind and life of UMW.
This wouldn\’t necessarily be harder if everyone used external blogging service, but the ability for instructional technologist like me to work with faculty to design an experience with RSS, untold plugins, theme customization, etc. would be infinitely harder if not impossible. Our shop has been dedicated to experimentation and innovation, and part of that has come out of close working relationships with faculty to re-imagine how they use these tools. Such a model becomes more difficult when they are locked behind a third party service that doesn\’t allow you to play with feeds, themes, and plugins as you may want to.
I really don\’t know how long this experiment will last, UMW Blogs has a whole lot of activity, and more and more everyday we are thinking about it as an enterprise system, which deeply excites and concerns me simultaneously. That said, we have a few faculty using external blogs for their own blogging etc, but UMW Blogs is not so much a blogging platform as it is a space to publish in all sorts of interesting and new ways. It\’s a space where faculty say I want to try this and this, and we try it, and if it works, we figure out how they can do it on their own.
It is a publishing sandbox of the first order, and that is not about just any old blogging service or having 3 million logs or 200,000, it\’s about a university\’s investment in people like Martha Burtis, Jerry Slezak, Patrick Murray-John, Andy Rush, and Michael Willits and even my sorry ass. It is about a group that works with faculty as partners to think through these possibilities, and this could happen with wordpress.com or blogger, but without a grup of people who are interested in the edge and dedicated to hack and re-think, you might as well use blackboard
Sorry D\’Arcy, here are my edited comments, this post was so provocative I\’m going to write a longer post in response because you got me thinking hard, but in the meantime here is my edited response
D’Arcy,
Your list of reasons here to have a campus blogging platform is really interesting to me, especially since our on-campus blogging platform actually accomplished none of these objectives. We externally host UMW Blogs, we have a .org domain, and it doesn’t provide anything like a single sign-on with other campus services. In fact, I think the lack of all these elements works to its advantage. But given this, why not just Blogger, edublogs or WordPress.com? Well, I think all those service are fine, and do the trick. In fact, we have set up UMW Blogs so that folks can just drop off their RSS feed and share the goodness with the community, or just a specific class.
Yet, I still believe there is a reason—at least for the time being because I agree with your impulse in this post— for a specific installation that frames the work of an academic community. Once we say get you own (and we often do already) we run the risk of further fragmenting an already fragmented space. What we are experimenting around with at UMW Blogs is creating an intellectual community that bleeds into the online realm. A space where people can get a sense of the academic mind and life of UMW, as wel as individuals thinking.
This wouldn’t necessarily be harder if everyone used external blogging service, but the ability for instructional technologist like me to work with faculty to design an experience with RSS, untold plugins, theme customization, etc. would be infinitely harder if not impossible. Our shop has been dedicated to experimentation and innovation, and part of that has come out of close working relationships with faculty to re-imagine how they use these tools. Such a model becomes more difficult when they are locked behind a third party service that doesn’t allow you to play with feeds, themes, and plugins as you may want to.
I really don’t know how long this experiment will last, UMW Blogs has a whole lot of activity, and everyday we moe closer to the definition of an enterprise system, which deeply excites and concerns me simultaneously. That said, we have a few faculty using external blogs for their own blogging, etc., but UMW Blogs is not so much a blogging platform as it is a space to publish in all sorts of interesting and new ways. It’s a space where faculty say I want to try this and this, and we try it, and if it works, we figure out how they can do it on their own. And in the end we are, like every other division and department on campus, there to serve the academic m ission –and we do serve we just refuse to serve like chumps!
What we have in UMW Blogs a publishing platform/sandbox of the first order, and that is not about just any old blogging service or having 3 million blogs or even 200,000, it’s about a university’s investment in people like Martha Burtis, Jerry Slezak, Patrick Murray-John, Andy Rush, Michael Willits and even my sorry ass. It is about a group that works with faculty as partners to think through these possibilities, and this could happen with wordpress.com or blogger (and it often has), but without a group of people who are interested in the edge and dedicated to hack and re-think, you might as well use blackboard
For us at UBC one of the key reasons why we are hosting blogs is the US Patriot Act. A professor can\’t legally ask a student to blog at WordPress.com because everything that the student writes will be subject to the Patriot act. If we are going to have blogs as part of course work… then students have to have a local option.
Another reason is that it provides mid-level flexibility. I can install any plugin that I want on my blog because I self-host. Most students and student organizations don\’t want to (or don\’t know how to) self-host. The UBC blogs platform allows them to submit custom themes which we can implement or even allows them to request new plugins (try getting that right at WordPress.com).
Jim, your comments about culture and internal control are well received. It might be possible to generate an active culture on 3rd party services, but likely much harder. It may not be that clear, though, as weblogs.ucalgary.ca is a tightly integrated community that never really developed much of a community around it. I’m looking forward to your blog post
Andre, the Patriot Act is definitely a big factor – and one that doesn’t affect UMW. I’ve never understood the dire scary implications of the patriot act avoidance, though – in Canada, CSIS can already read anything on any server that they want to. Is it just a need to avoid snooping by American G-men? And why is it more severe in BC? I never hear about Patriot Act mitigation in Alberta…
But, if the goal is to just avoid US web hosts, all that is needed is a Canadian service like Edublogs.org, hosted on CanadianWebHosting.com or something similar.
The ability to install plugins (and do cool stuff like the mediawiki integration your team is working on – AWESOME, btw) is a pretty big factor to warrant self-hosting by the Institution.
Hello, D’Arcy,
Some great reflections here, and a lot to digest —
One thought that struck me as I read your initial post where you announced the blogging platform: many of the requests you received are now very achievable with the current version of Drupal —
Cheers,
Bill