Getting Personal (part 1): When blogs are more than blogs

Every year the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) release a report on the emerging trends and technologies that may in some way shape higher education in the near future. Centers like ours often use this report as a guide when considering future strategies for adopting new technologies and planning for providing services for technologies that might be coming down the road. The full report, called the Horizon Report, is available as a PDF, or completely online. Tim Bounds also has an excellent summary and overview of the report over at the Duke Student Affairs blog.

In a series of posts called ‘Getting Personal,’ I’m going to attempt to explore and unpack one of the six core concepts in the report – the ‘Personal Web.’ The Horizon Report introduces this idea as follows:

Fifteen years after the first commercial web pages began to appear, the amount of content available on the web is staggering. Sifting through the sheer volume of material — good or bad, useful or otherwise — is a daunting task. It is even difficult to keep track of the media posted by a single person, or by oneself. On the other hand, adding to the mix is easier than ever before, thanks to easy-to-use publishing tools for every type and size of media. To cope with the problem, computer users are assembling collections of tools, widgets, and services that make it easy to develop and organize dynamic online content. Armed with tools for tagging, aggregating, updating, and keeping track of content, today’s learners create and navigate a web that is increasingly tailored to their own needs and interests: this is the personal web.” (Horizon Report)

For this first post, I’m specifically interested in addressing these “easy-to-use publishing tools.” Perhaps this is the best example of what a ‘blog’ really is. For many of us, we tend to think of blogs as a web-based journaling device, or maybe as a way to keep an online diary of the daily adventures of our cat. Others have come to recognize the power of easy self-publishing, and we now, as a culture, are much more aware of folks who are ‘bloggers.’ No doubt the term ‘blogger’ carries several political and cultural connotations in recent years that has perhaps cast even some negative views on the idea of a blog itself. But the blog, the tool itself, is really a powerful tool for bringing text, photos, video and other multimedia together into a form that feels more presentable and ‘published’ than simply the sum of those parts alone.

In a recent presentation at the annual EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative conference, Jim Groom (UMW), Alan Levine (NMC), and Cole Camplese (PSU) explored the idea that the blog could be much more than just “a blog.” All three gentlemen co-created a blog just for the presentation, and gave each piece of their presentation via the same blog (in lieu of yet another PowerPoint): Eli2009.wordpress.com.

Alan Levine spoke mostly about the concept of ‘blogging.’ Put simply, he suggests that blogging is the act of web publishing, that “it is more than software.” Alan’s presentation also pointed to a recent NMC survey about blogs and blogging at member universities that reflects an even split between universities that support and host a blogging service (as UMW and PSU do…more on that following), those that refer users to external services (such as Blogger or WordPress), and those that rely on a similar tool within their own CMS (in Duke’s case, we have a ‘blog’ tool available within Blackboard, which is a nice, easy to use tool, but only scratches the surface of this concept of using a blog as a ‘personal web’).

Cole Camplese discussed Penn State’s adoption of the popular MoveableType blogging platform. In the Penn State model, each student has their own blog that lives behind the university’s single sign on authentication. What this does is not just allow students to journal or write reflections, but it creates a space wherein students can choose to have an “open publishing platform – not just a blog service.” Students end up using their blogs as “powerful personal content management environments,” basically publishing everything they do (personal and academic) to their blogs. If students need to provide an artifact (say a paper they’ve recently written for a course) they can create a ‘tag’ for that course, and let the department or instructor pull a feed of that particular set of info from their blog. Camplese explains:

“Stacks of papers can become a thing of the past as students move their content into integrated online spaces that are fully searchable and belong to them. Some departments have worked to identify and clearly articulate the program outcomes so as students create work (evidence) they tag it with the program outcome statement so it is easily aggregated together.” (Click here for more of Cole’s presentation)

Jim Groom (see his guest blog post for CIT here) discussed UMW’s use of the WordPress platform for a variety of purposes beyond simple blogging, including using  blogs for lab notebooks, audio databases, art exhibits, etc. For more examples see 10 Ways to use UMW Blogs. His main focus in the presentation, however, was on the ability of these tools to share and syndicate content via RSS feeds. Much in the same way Camplese and Penn State use blogs as an open publishing platform, Groom sees WordPress (and other blog tools) as a “web-based publishing platform is that with the right technology it quickly becomes a powerful, open, and lightweight syndication hub.”

Groom continues:

“What this basically means is that every author on UMW Blogs is able to create their own space in seconds, and then quickly and easily syndicate it out to a series of other sites. You can think of the course blogs as an aggregation of specifically tagged feeds from student blogs that populate a course space, but still allow students to keep control over their own work which they own, and can export and take with them as they see fit. Kind of an aggregation of individualized digital notebooks, portfolios, or what have you that can be transferred between spaces quickly and easily, allowing a wide-range of publishing and mobile possibilities.” (click here for more of Jim Groom’s presentation)

1 thought on “Getting Personal (part 1): When blogs are more than blogs

  1. Jim

    Shawn,

    This is an impressive write-up, thanks for making sense of this whole thing for me. It was nice meeting you in Orlando, and I hope to see you again very soon, maybe even on your home turf 🙂

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