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?

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.

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.

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.

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