BLOGSAVVY

I don’t usually do this but I thought that Blogsavvy readers might be interested in a more educationally focussed and in-depth article that I’ve put together at incorporated subversion regarding how WordPress (and more specifically WPMU) could form the basis of the next generation of Learning Management Systems as Personal Learning Environments.

Blackboard beware… we’re coming after you ;)

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

Well in an official-esque announcement sense I now pronounce learnerblogs.org and uniblogs.org open for business.

Basically these are sites in a similar vein to edublogs.org in that they are seeking to provide free blogs, but this time for K12 school students and university / college students.

learnerblogs.org is basically born of demand. So many teachers wanted to use edublogs.org as a place for their students to set up blogs that it basically seems to be needed and let’s face it, if you’re not tech savvy then Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga etc. don’t really cut the mustard for what you want for your school kids doing blogging. So, my aim for this is to make it work as well as possible -specifically- for school students in educational contexts…. feedback / requests / comments / thoughts very welcome here!

uniblogs.org seems like a natural complement (and also a pretty funky name) and I have to admit that I’m a bit excited by the potential with this one. Things like global categories could do amazing things in terms of getting people blogging about particular disciplines together, and then there’s the social aspect… huge I reckon. So again, a slightly different focus to learnerblogs or edublogs (which both have a kinda ‘independence’ about them) and one that I’m looking forward to toying with.

Now, what I need [read: am begging down on my knees] people to do is to share these with other teachers, university student groups and the ol’ listservs, you know it makes sense ;)

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

I’m no stranger to trying to set up freely available online services for people to use… I’m also no stranger to watching as a couple of people drag their feet in, have a look around and quietly disappear. As a well respected edublogger once suggested to me, we’re often guilty of designing a nightclub for what is really a pubfull of people, and while a pubfull can be great fun in a pub… in a nightclub it feels worryingly quiet.

edublogs.org, however, seems to have bucked the trend. At the time of writing this there are 125 blogs there that weren’t there 3 days ago, and the rate is still picking up…

So what exactly is happening here… well, I’d put it down to three key factors:

First up this is a very specific project… it’s not trying to please or service anyone outside of education and it’s even not trying to get students in on the act. It’s just for people involved in providing, researching, writing about or working in education.

Secondly I guess I’ve built a pretty good base in the last three year in this community through incorporated subversion and incsub and that always helps :o)

But perhaps most importantly, this is a really quality product that people actually want. Let people set up Drupal blogs all day (they won’t BTW), roll out Blojsom or a range of other services and you’ll only get a limited response… but getting WordPress 1.6 at a domain like http://steve.edublogs.org with a commitment to ongoing free hosting (no commercial model to fail :o) is pretty worthwhile!

Typepad et al must be a bit concerned… it’s a shame but I think that the idea of people being able to freely blog using quality tools is important for more than just blogging as we know it, it’s the development of a universal digital ID and free ownership of that which is what makes this a *really* good thing.

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

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.

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.