Blogs in an Institutional Setting

Blogs offer considerable potential and so it is natural to ask: How to incorporate blogs in the institutional setting, particularly with existing e-learning systems? Should the institution offer a blog to all its staff and students? Very few universities offer blogs as a general service, one of the most well known being 'Warwick Blogs', provided by Warwick University [14]. This is a completely home-grown and heavily customised e-learning system built around blogs and integrated with local directory services, so is currently not an option for other institutions.

So should other educational establishments follow Warwick's example? It is not easy to give a general answer, but a few observations can be made. First, if blogs require some degree of privacy, especially within particular groups, then public hosting services are unlikely to be suitable, not least because the institution has no control - the extreme scenario being that a hosting service goes offline. Given the simplicity of blogs, it might be tempting to think that blog hosting is easy. While it may be straightforward for a small deployment, in a particular department, scaling up across an institution presents a far greater challenge.

If providing an institutional blog, one question that ought to be considered is: How many blogs are appropriate for an individual? Do people prefer to maintain just one blog in which they can store all their reflections, relating to work and study, or would they prefer to keep separate blogs depending upon the context? The judicious use of categories might enable a single blog to fulfil these roles, but there is added complexity as personal circumstances (including their learning contexts) change over time. As blogging continues to grow in popularity, it becomes increasingly likely that schoolchildren will have blog accounts on public services before moving to Further and Higher Education. Just as it might be the case that there need to be compelling reasons why students ought to drop their Hotmail accounts in favour of the university system, so they will need to have spelt out the value of having university blogs. As time spent at a particular university is normally only a few years, there is another issue about what happens on departure?

Trends are difficult to predict, but there will quite likely be a need to import and export the content easily in some standards-compliant way, because in contrast to the transience of e-mail, blogs provide a consolidated personal record that can be referenced in the future. Hence they need to be portable.