Team Blog!

Ed Felton has posted a brief “Lessons Learned” from blogging last semester. I tend to do individual blogs because my classes are too big, but I’m going to try a course blog this summer and maybe in the fall (I have not yet decided).

One of the things he did was distribute weekly due dates across the week so that the blog always had fresh material. That is one of those “why didn’t I think of that” ideas, that I am looking forward to implementing.

The problem with a course blog is that when it’s over, it’s generally over, and people don’t have a personal investment in the blog. One solution to this would be to do an RSS-driven course blog, driven by posts to folks individual blogs. I like this as a general solution, but I’m not exactly sure about a couple of things.

1. Do I collect all the postings by contributors, or only those with a particular tag? The latter seems to make more sense, but then their own blogs need to be on our system.

2. Where do all the comments go? Do they end up distributed between the course blog and the individual blogs?

I have only a few days to figure this out, since we will be blogging for the summer session, starting in a few days.

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2 Comments

  1. Posted 5/19/2005 at 2:36 pm | Permalink

    At SSAW Mark Hemphill described the UPEI system which, I believe, runs off some seriously tweeked-out Drupal.

    They built the blogs before courses started to use them… anyway, the way they handle an individual course blog is by pulling in tagged posts from individual blogs, as you’d like to do. However, the already all on a single architecture.

    I’d love to know how you figure this out…

  2. Posted 6/7/2005 at 3:03 pm | Permalink

    Alex, as Joe mentioned we are also trying to do this. Students use their personal blog for whatever they like…but we use basic classification to create spaces for them to post to thus creating separation (unique url, look, links, feed) for groups and courses (and topics). We’re always trying to make the blog more of a truly personal tool. So one problem is that students don’t necessarily want their academic entries mixed among their personal entries (for their friends to see when they visit or whatever). In Drupal a new node type is all that is needed, I think.

    Since this is more of an aggregation strategy than a course blog, indeed the comments are indeed attached to the underlying posts. I hope this helps.

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