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By: a thaumaturgical compendium » Blog Archive » Slow Blog Death

a thaumaturgical compendium » Blog Archive » Slow Blog Death — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 16:18:11 +0000

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By: coturnix

coturnix — Fri, 12 May 2006 13:50:58 +0000

Try Lyceum, a relatively new platform made by Ibiblio. It is basically WordPress for multiusers (which means hundreds of users)

By: jason

jason — Thu, 04 May 2006 10:32:17 +0000

You know me. I’ve been lazy for the past couple of years and have only been using LJ. I did do an install of it on a server at UofT, but the admin backend really didn’t exist. Rochelle did one too, but had more support.

What needs to be done, and we’re starting, is pulling together a group, up here in kanukistan, to develop a pedagogically appropriate blogging tool; one that has hooks into institutional authentication and large CMS. That said, what it needs is to be designed by educator(s!) and have all the affordances that help blogs be to education what blogs were to getting stuff online… so easy you can’t be bothered NOT to do it.

By: Gustav

Gustav — Wed, 03 May 2006 07:51:59 +0000

This semester, I teach a small group of students (5) doing an introductory STS course. We have blogging integrated in the course work – students post progress reports on their projects/papers weekly, do social bookmarking and comment each others blog posts. It works quite good, and I find blogging a good complement to seminars and lectures.

The technical platform we chose was a collective blog – they all write in the same blog. It runs on WordPress that we host ourselves on an old iMac in my office (450 MHz – wouldn’t work for a 400 students class …). Students set up del.icio.us-accounts that are linked from the course blog.

By: admin

admin — Wed, 03 May 2006 02:22:05 +0000

Of course liverjournal has been out all day as well.

By: admin

admin — Wed, 03 May 2006 02:15:48 +0000

I wrote this in a fit of grading when weblogs.com was taking too long to respond. Though in retrospect it may have throttled me for using wget earlier to grab some of the blogs :).

I don’t know. I have a quick screencast showing how to set up on weblogs.com, but the kind of mistake you are suggesting seems to be pretty easy to have students make. (I had the same problem with people signing up for the aggregator every time they posted at first. Argh!)

My guess is that while there are some things that could be improved with most of the UIs in these systems, and features (spell check!!!), what is most needed is better documentation. And that’s something we as a community should really be able to help with.

As for ITC: were I still in WNY, I def. would have gone. But as it is, I’m looking forward to *not* flying cross-state for a while.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Wed, 03 May 2006 01:38:19 +0000

I had a very small class do weblogs Fall ’05 (12 students) and many of them seemed to find it very difficult to use blogger. I thought it’d be easier than wordpress, but they made me think twice. After they created the blog they didn’t get that they sign in, click on the name of their blog and then create posts. instead they kept creating new blogs for each posting assignment. It took forever to get them to seperate “post” and “blog”.

I want to try again with my own classes next year, should I try word press?

Also, are you going to ITC conference at Fredonia? I want to go for at least the one day that they talk about blogging in the classroom. I’m trying to convince mom that the conference is a worthwhile graduation present :)

By: James Farmer

James Farmer — Wed, 03 May 2006 00:54:30 +0000

You’re more than welcome over at edublogs.org… although I think http://uniblogs.org might be a better solution.

Having said that the only real technical diff is that Automattic know what they’re doing :)

By: admin

admin — Wed, 03 May 2006 00:06:46 +0000

Thanks for the comment. The fact is, I think it is pretty straightforward as it stands, and so had trouble with why people had trouble. I’m going to ask Matt, Brenda, & Jessica to come in on this as well, since they kind of held hands in person with some of the students who were having difficulties.

I don’t know that they are “signup” issues so much as “getting started” issues. Going to the home page and filling out the form is not a problem, but they seem to get tripped up from that point. “Now what?” Remember, for a lot of these folks, this is their first experience with a blogging system

Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not sure that the startup issues are unique to wordpress.com, but hopefully the class assistants, or class members, can give you a better idea.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 02 May 2006 23:42:18 +0000

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. We’re working on a few things now to make the service much faster and more reliable.

What do you think we could do to make the signup easier?