BLOGSAVVY

Well, finally the completely obvious thing to do dawned on me.

WPMU + edublogs.org = Free education blogs for anyone who darn well wants them.

And that’s about it really.

WPMU at edublogs.org provides anyone who wants it with a free version of the latest (checkout 1.6!) version of WordPress.

First up you’ll get the domain http://yourdomain.edublogs.org

Then you’ll get 10MB (initially) of completely free upload space… plus unlimited MySQL (i.e. posts) space.

And with the new version of WPMU you also get to choose any one of a number of bloody great WordPress Themes (just contact me if you want a particular one pre-installed). In a few weeks you’ll be able to edit them too!

Until the time that some philanthropic educational organisation comes and takes this over (that’s an invitation BTW!) this will be entirely supported by incsub and donations. No ads, no fees, no business model…. ahhh makes me smile :o)

So if you know any teachers, students, researchers, writers or ANYONE interested in education… let them know that they can start their edublog at edublogs.org.

This is gonna be fun!

Find expert WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) development and consulting at Incsub.

I don’t usually post annotated links here at Blogsavvy but this is well worth it.

Whatever you think about advertising, making money through blogging or ‘problogging’ as a whole… doesn’t matter. 31 days to building a better blog will see Darren Rowse:

“Starting Monday I’m going to turn up the ‘Blog Tips’ volume to 11 and am going to attempt to vomit onto you everything I know about how to make your blog better” [Problogger]

And whether you’re a mum-at-home. business, education, professional, citizen journalist or ‘what I had for tea last night’ blogger… you’re not going to want to miss these!

Find expert WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) development and consulting at Incsub.

Following on from how NOT to use blogs in education this post attempts to summarise this paper and add a few extra angles onto how you can use blogs effectively in education and invites your additional hints, tips, criticisms & wotnot.

You must incorporate blogs as key, task driven, elements of your course - This may sound obvious but simply providing blogs to learners and saying ‘Hey, use them however you want’ is an absolute guarantee of failure as all but 1 or 2 people will take you up on it. Significantly here that I’m not saying assessment… you can provide non-assessable but socially motivating tasks, as long as they form part of class activities (i.e. competition for best designed blog with each participant presenting for 3 minutes) but they don’t have to be parts of assessment, and talking of assessment…

You should use assessment tasks that incorporate subversion - One of the worst things you can do is mandate posting on particular topics with particularly rigid frequency… you’ll over-assess & kill off exactly what blogs are good for: personal expression & exploration. By all means say that you’re expecting a post a week… or ever more, but let people approach this in ways that fit them and set tasks that allow for deviation and subversion. Never, ever, mention number of words!

You should use blogs for what they are good for - Blogs are by no means the answer to everything, they are very strong alternative communication tools but if you want to build quizzes, run polls, have near-synchronous conversation, do listserv-y kind of discussion or strictly manage just about anything then you’ll probably want to look at another tool. Use blogs to assist people to publish work, represent themselves online, interact with their peers as part of an organic community and manage their own digital content and identity.

Use proven and effective blogging tools - When you decide to set off on your blogging journey don’t, please don’t, do it with some ‘tacked on solution’ to a large and established Learning Management System. Blogs are just as complex as any other form of software and you want to get the tools off people who know what they’re doing. You probably wouldn’t pick up an office suite from Macromedia, would you… Look at all the options and chose a proven path, there are lots of them.

Find expert WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) development and consulting at Incsub.

Serious call to attention… if you’re interested in the development of WordPress MultiUser and would like to put in your requests for site-wide admin functionality then this is the place to do it!

Here’s the RSS feed for the WPMU forum too… it’s excellent stuff and I’d encourage pretty much anyone interested in the multi-user blogging scene to add this to their subscriptions.

Find expert WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) development and consulting at Incsub.

Update: You can now find part II, how you SHOULD use blogs in education, here.

I thought I’d summarise a paper (Blogs @ Anywhere: High fidelity online communication) that I’m hoping to have accepted for ASCILITE 2005 here in two posts offering quick summaries of how I think you should & shouldn’t try to use blogs in education. If you’re into depth then you might prefer the paper, otherwise read on:

Never never approach blogs as discussion boards, listservs or learning management systems: Almost invariably the first thing people do when encountering new technologies is to try and get it to do what the technologies they are used to do and this is no exception when it comes to blogs.

Group blogs are a bad idea and don’t work: Sure there’s a place for collaborative/ group blogs but that place is not in education. Blogs work well for individuals… they are tools of centred communication and pretty far removed from community management systems like Drupal. Just don’t go there!

Don’t try and force blogging into something else: Blogging suits highly customisable, individual, owned and fiercely flexible tools like WordPress. You can try and fit blogs into other systems such as Moodle, Drupal or Tiki but you’re not going to do well because the entire centralised philosophy of these systems is utterly opposed to that of successful blogging platforms

Ignore RSS at your peril: Probably the biggest mistake that adopters tend to make is to ignore RSS or just through it a casting glance. The problem is that these people aren’t bloggers and just don’t understand. Without RSS blogs would pretty much just be extensions of geocities pages. Your learners are NEVER going to surf each others sites everyday and the majority of them won’t even go to that funky web-based aggregator you set-up.

Any more really bad ideas you could add?

Find expert WordPress and WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) development and consulting at Incsub.