why I’m so proud of UCalgaryBlogs.ca
I wasn’t convinced that we needed a “campus blogging platform” here at UCalgary. I’d tried to set up one before, at weblogs.ucalgary.ca , and watched it basically wither on the vine for 3 years. Little activity, except in small bursts when used in a class. Almost no individual involvement or ownership. Not interesting or relevant to anyone.
I’d decided that a “campus blogging platform” was the wrong tack. Why not just send people to other services that provide the software, for free. Services like wordpress.com or edublogs.org or blogger.com or typepad.com etc… They all provide the functionality, hosting, and support, without any intervention by a “campus”.
And then, in conversations with people whom I deeply respect, it was pointed out that there are, in fact, good reasons for having the publishing platform managed by the University.
- community – if everyone has access to the same tool(s) they can build on each other’s work more easily
- support – again, if people are using a common set of tool(s) it’s much easier and more effective for us to provide support and strategies for integrating those tools into the activities of teaching and learning
- ownership – if the platform is hosted by the University, we can guarantee that no corporate entity is going to take it over and change the rules of the game. The license can’t change. The fees can’t go up. Ads can’t find their way onto the blogs…
- safety – this one is twofold -
- we need to be able to provide private blogs, where students and faculty can publish content to be seen only to a given audience. This is harder (if not impossible) on services hosted by other organizations.
- non-US servers. This sounds odd, but if we’re going to be compelling our students to publish anything, we can’t force them to use services hosted in the States, due to implications of DMCA and Patriot Acts. We need to provide a service that’s hosted in Canada, and since there really isn’t a big blogging service hosted up here, we need to host our own on campus.
So, taking those into consideration, it became obvious that we needed a great blogging platform to be available on campus. And that weblogs.ucalgary.ca wasn’t it. Following in the footsteps of several others, I grabbed a copy of WordPress Multiuser, and installed it on our IT-hosted virtual machine server. I registered ucalgaryblogs.ca – I wanted to use a non ucalgary.ca domain name to avoid issues relating to “quality” of content, as well as “branding” of the website. People need to be able to write anything, and not have the constraints of having to live within the official UCalgary design template.
We set up DNS wildcarding, so people could have their own blog subdomains such as dlnorman.ucalgaryblogs.ca and installed the Domains plugin so people could also use the service for their own custom domains.
And then, I slowly started telling people about it. I didn’t expect much to happen, as it was a stealth project. But, pretty much every person that got their hands on it said it was exactly what they needed. They wanted their students to be free to publish, in their own spaces, without the limitations of Blackboard’s discussion board.
Faculty appeared to be getting on board, and judging from the activity, students were getting into it as well – at least they weren’t rebelling too loudly.
For a portion of Friday afternoon last week, students published 76 blog posts within one hour. We’ve now got 127 users in the system, publishing to 79 blogs (73 of which are public).
That doesn’t sound like much, but for a stealth project with no budget, we’ve been able to help over 100 people publish content, with over 1000 blog posts published so far, since the service started getting use in September. That ain’t half bad 
Would you mind detailing a bit more about how you set it up to be only visible to a certain audience? That sounds like a salient difference between any of the major services and the way you’ve done it.
I’d also be curious if you know how to moderate posts. Sort of a classblogmeister way to do things but on a stronger platform (wpmu).
Thanks..
Chris Craft
@Chris – the privacy stuff uses More Privacy Options from WPMUDev.org – I wrote up a BRIEF description.
I don’t do any post moderation, and I don’t believe any of the faculty members do either. None of the users can truly blog anonymously, so if they write something inappropriate there are repercussions other than unpublishing a post. Hasn’t been a problem yet.
But, any blog can be set up such that students are set as “Contributors” rather than “Authors” – so their posts need to be approved before they’re published. And profs can be set as “Administrators” so they can unpublish posts as well. But, again, I don’t think these features are used on any of our blogs.
D’Arcy,
UCalgary Blogs is impressive, and I love the fact that 73 of the 79 are public. It speaks directly to the idea of this space being their’s, and a pride of ownership and responsibility that I think is absent in forums. I love what you’ve done, and this idea of openness that is represented immediately in this communal space suggests that a move towards sharing with these Web 2.0 tools is not so much premised on a pre-determined ideological impetus, but a push for developing the best framework for sharing resources and publishing easily on the web for an entire intellectual community. In many ways openness comes as a serendipitous extension of such a framework, illustrating the point that the architecture of most Course Management Systems (and university websites more generally) are designed around a vision of controlling an image and locking down ideas rather than sharing and opening them up to the world at large.
Openness is as much a function of design as it is of any set of beliefs. One might truly desire to be open, but have no means through the web-based publishing tools provided by their campus’ IT department to truly enable the kind of access requisite for allowing others to both find and re-purpose their work and ideas easily–kind of like what Emmanuel Wallerstein says about the impossibility of being a communist in world system controlled and dominated by capital.
D’Arcy,
Awesome work! Thanks for sharing this whole process with us. We are just about ready to open our WPMU server up for business with 350 middle school students for electronic portfolios as well as the teaching staff on that campus. I hope ours is as successful as yours is. Keep on sharing your work with us. Appreciate it bunches. I’ll be blogging ours as soon as we put it out in the public eye.
I think the reasons you give for having a hosted service are really interesting. At the moment I am guilty of rather pushing the ‘use external services’ line, which is mainly a reaction to the restrictions one finds with centrally hosted systems. But, as you point out, there are sometimes valid reasons for hosting services. We don’t want to take this too far (I was in a meeting where people were advocating only using YouTube videos if we could take a copy and host it internally – why???), but it serves as a useful reminder to us ‘decentralisers’ that there are levels of decentralisation.
Anyway, I love it when a stealth project succeeds, well done.
@Martin and @D’Arcy,
Another nice aspect of this model is that if people are doing their own thing in their own space and they are happy with it, you can use FeedWordPress or one of the other feeding plugins to pull their work into course sites or the site more generally. So, this model may be campus specific using WordPress, but it doesn’t exclude people using external services. That for me is key, and we have a prof here using Drupal for all his course sites, and he just adds his Drupal feeds to the tags.umwblogs.org blog, and his students work becomes searchable in the UMW Blogs database, and the permalinks bring the person back to the Drupal install. EDUGLU?