Can be about blogs in general or blogs for teaching and learning.
Blogs and VLEs – do they really fit together?
I stumbled across an interesting debate on whether it’s best to encourage the use of established blog sites such as blogger.com rather than try and create course-centric blogs within the institution (and the VLE). This question was one that was already going on in my head, as to how blogs can work as part of a course – after the novelty wears off, is there enough of a community to maintain such an isolated course only ‘blogosphere’? Also, does it really have time to mature sufficiently in the concentrated time-span of a term length course?
Any thoughts?
Kris.
Edupress
Has anyone come across this? Edupress is a wordpress variant specifically for educators
“EduPress is WordPress for educators. That means it’s first and foremost a blog but an extremely flexible one which can be made into a fully featured multimedia extravaganza of a website! Like WordPress, EduPress is free and open-source, meaning it can be shared and modified however you wish. Check out the features below and see how you can use EduPress effectively in your teaching:
Automatic hyperlinking
Integrated audio player
Easy podcasting capabilities
Easy-to-use admin interface
Option to make whole or parts of blog password-protected
Comment spam protection
Compatibility with mobile devices
Contact form
Email encoder to prevent spamming
Header images related to education
‘Asides’ category to show mini-posts on sidebar (e.g. for homework)
Printable posts ”
It looks very nice. I wonder if the anti spam email encoding will work for some of our projects.
You can find it here. Edupress
EdTechPost: 'Blog Uses in Education' Drag and Drop Exercise
A drag-and-drop version of the matrix of blog uses. Possibly useful for a workshop (with PCs): EdTechPost: ‘Blog Uses in Education’ Drag and Drop Exercise
Warwick blogs and e-tools
This is the Warwick stuff I was talking about:
This is the Warwick blogs page, where you can see the thousands of student blogs that exist.
This is an individual departmental section (Theatre studies) where the blogs seem to be quite focussed on academic subjects.
This publicity is how they got so many blogs going.
Warwick produced an in-house ‘BlogBuilder’ tool to do this. It is one of a range of web tools that they have produced and integrated with single sign-on.
Steve
Programme for HigheredBlogCon
The Programme for HigheredBlogCon is now available. Worth a look.
Matt
HigheredBlogCon
Welcome to HigherEd BlogCon 2006, an all-online event highlighting innovative uses of blogs, wikis, RSS, audio and video podcasts, and other digital tools in academia.
Moving from here to the conference wiki it appears that one of the proposed pesentations comes from Elizabeth Townsend Gard, a Visiting Research Fellow and Lecturer at the LSE! Anybody know her?
What’s the big deal with blogs, podcasting and RSS?
New Blackboard Blog… which includes: Blackboard What’s the big deal with blogs, podcasting and RSS?
Doesn’t say much actually but writely.com pops up again… I keep seeing it…
Perhaps more interesting is this in the first posting to the blog
The time is ripe to seriously consider how open source and packaged software can co-exist and benefit each other.
e-benchmarking! » Guide
On the e-benching blog mentioned by Steve in today’s team meeting is an interestinge-bEnchmarking! » guide from Derek Morrison on using blogs. It’s aimed at those involved in the benchmarking blogs but an interesting read – a good summary of the poros and cons of blogs
Elgg Update (version 0.4)
ELGG have upgraded to version 0.4 today. There is a new (mediawiki) Elgg Information portal and a new company: Curverider offering hosting, training etc
This what’s new according their Press Release
With version 0.4, podcasting is as easy as pushing a button. An advanced templating engine uses CSS
standards to allow the user full control over the look and feel of their digital assets. Users can link to
content on the Web as easily as writing a note, and search for related information – as well as people
working on the same topics they are – simply by clicking a link. Information can be drawn into a user’s
profile using the power of RSS. Shared calendars can list classes, promote events or let users keep
track of their appointments. Files, reflections, podcasts, blog posts and profile information can all be
shared with as many or as few people as the owner desires.
Matt
Anyone for Moolgg?
EdTechPost: ELGG vs. Moodle – defusing a false dichotomy
Excerpts from above link:
I’ve had a few people come up to me at conferences recently and ask me to compare ELGG and Moodle, and choose between them as if they were somehow mutually exclusive. Indeed, even within the Moodle community itself there seems to be a bit of dismissiveness about what ELGG does, and the notion that with just a couple of twists of code Moddle can easily replicate its functionality.
… what is exciting for me is that Terry and Athabasca are putting together a large, production environment in which Moodle and ELGG will seemingly co-exist quite nicely, thank you very much, and take care of different problems.