As for adding students to one blog as authors and feeding their entries out… it is viable, but there is an increased overhead of the professor adding them to the blog (and they would have to register before the professor did that). I think in order for faculty in general (I know there are awesome people like Jon who are on the cutting edge) to see the power of and to adopt blogging as a course platform it has to be super simply.

I agree with you here, at the same time the Add Sidebar Users makes this simple, and I found it makes life easier for professors who want a group blog and for students who may only want to get usernames and not blogs. That is the rub, when you open up a system like this, there are a number of ways of going at it, and having the ability to meet as many of them easily makes your life simpler.

Will you allow students just to get username on the system so they don’t have the overhead of a blog if they don’t want it? Feeding out from a group blog by tag should be simple if necessary, but I imagine that there may be students who are not too concerned, for whatever reason.

As to this comment “after I have finished the “add-to-bdp” widget I will look into getting tags out (because then I’m almost up to speed with the Drupal guys),” well, that just makes me warm inside. This is amazing work you are doing Andre, and the writing it up and dialoging about is something I have wanted to do for a long while. You just don;t get people who want to blog about designing such a system and thinking about the technical architecture, which I find exciting. And unfortunately for me, Drupal is just so damn ugly I can;t bare to be in it for extended periods of time.

It would then be easy to aggregate all of the course blogs into a mega-course-feed (because each BDP output creates its own feed). I’m not sure yet about extracting tags and categories from a BDP feed… it doesn’t do it by default, but after I have finished the “add-to-bdp” widget I will look into getting tags out (because then I’m almost up to speed with the Drupal guys).

As for adding students to one blog as authors and feeding their entries out… it is viable, but there is an increased overhead of the professor adding them to the blog (and they would have to register before the professor did that). I think in order for faculty in general (I know there are awesome people like Jon who are on the cutting edge) to see the power of and to adopt blogging as a course platform it has to be super simply.

As for going the other way, I think it is much more likely that a student’s blogging platform will be able to feed something out by category or tag than to be able to take a feed in and republish it in their own blog (think of how long it has taken us to find something reliable).

Going in the opposite way, it would be easy for a student to author on a course blog (let’s say the professor wants all of his or her students to write in one blog) and then tag theit work with a unique tag (like andremalan) which they can then grab the feed for and bring back into their own site. The functionality there is key, and it requires students and faculty to think a bit harder about how RSS is working here, and why it may be useful and easy all at once.

Much of this is what the Drupal edglu example D’Arcy and Bill featured works well, and may be an additional space in the UBC cloud. But one of the things I like about what you are thinking about with this widget is it’s simplicity. Go to the course page, add the appropriate feed, and bam you’re gone. It is really a cinch, and the self-service element works quite nicely to reduce all overhead.

BTW, Andre, the Jon commenting up above has been the professor at UBC who has been experimenting and pushing this stuff most aggressively. If we can make him happy, we will really have something.

I remember last year at NV when you were talking about the fact that students should host their own stuff wherever they wanted — I was initially like what?! How could that happen? What would the implications be? How could we manage such a thing? It’s impossible.

But in the end, that is the application D’Arcy and Brian (and more recently Bill and I) have been thinking through and imagining. And much of it premised on your work with Brian, so kudos.

So for all the talk about university blogging systems, which if they are good can be extremely valuable, the real point is just how you make it welcoming to any and all feeds.

This is why I let my students use any blogging platform they want (so long as it supports RSS). The blog is theirs.

But this is also why I’m among those who most anxiously is waiting for an aggregation system that is functional and stable!

Point being, to start defining ownership more generally with publishing might lead you down some strange paths if you frame it as such. Think of it as a students own work they control, but allow others to share, not as a compulsion, but as an enlightened notion of what it means to think, teach, and learn.