Institutional Web Management Workshop 2005: University Blogging

This is an area of real interest to me. Obviously I’m interested in blogs in general (hence this blog of course), but also we’ve had requests from a very few academics (2 or 3) via our Educational Development Centre to support some blogging software.

I actually went as far as installing Moveable Type last week on a test box – although haven’t had time to play with this at all yet.

So – to the talk…

This is about the decision of University of Warwick to provide all students with blogs.

The first question being – Why?
Well – they’ve always provided the ability for students to have personal web pages on Warwick space. So it isn’t so revolutionary to introduce a system to support this. However, previously publishing on the web has been something only a few, technically able, students could do, and all the pages are unconnected.

So – they were looking for something that lowered the barriers on self-publication on the web – it should be easy – something that any student could do.

They also wanted to encourage creativity and also to foster a community.

Interestingly, they also saw a link to PDP (Personal Development Planning). Not that blogging would be a complete solution, but possibly a channel through which students can reflect on their personal development.

The speaker is suggesting that ‘you would be nuts’ to invest in blogging if you haven’t already solved the corporate/departmental publishing problems. This seems like a conflation of two problems. I can see why you want to sort the coporate/departmental publishing – but this doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t want to solve the ‘personal’ publishing problem.

Of course – Warwick felt they had already solved the ‘CMS’ – i.e. corporate publishing – problem – and had, in fact, already built they’re CMS from scratch – so they were confident that they could move on to the ‘personal’ publishing model.

Interestingly Warwick decided to build their own blogging s/w. The argument being put forward was that the commerical packages out there weren’t scalable – although the UThink project at the University of Minnesota uses Moveable Type to do this – so I’m not convinced by this.

However, some of the other arguments make more sense – they could build something with sophisticated publishing models (publish to people on my course, publish to people in my hall etc.)

However, overall, the decision to build seems like a real luxury to me. I know we definitely couldn’t do this at my institution – we just don’t have the staff resource to do this. I also think that there are ongoing support problems (as is common with University systems). [this section had factual inaccuracies – see comments – which have now been removed] It would be interesting to know […] if the key developers left they would have problems supporting the product?

Interestingly the design for the interface was done with paper diagrams – low cost development. They would put together layouts – get students to look at them, shuffle them round – and video them doing it – and use this to then develop the final interface.

Marketing the blogs was a challenge – but interestingly this seems to have been done ‘in house’ rather than actually using marketing expertise (not entirely sure about this, may have misunderstood). Anyway – there were slogans and posters (including one in Chinese), and fridge magnets (apparently very popular).

They went live in Sept 2004 – and now have 3,425 blogs, and 10,890 readers and 86,664 comments – which is interesting – very high compared to the number of posts, blogs and readers. If fact – the speaker has just said that they think that this is a real indication of the success of the initiative – and a very low level of blogs disappearing compared to the web in general.

Also interestingly 47,000 photos – which again is high. This chimes with the use of mine and Damyanti’s personal blog – we put photos on there much more (much much more) than we post any written content – a picture is worth a thousand words perhaps (well, at lot easier to upload a photo than write 1000 words anyway)

Usage shows an increasing trend in readership which is continuing at the moment. A lot of this are external readers – 10,000 page views a day come from people without any obvious connection to Warwick (could be family and friends?)

Just showing some examples now:

blog for a groupwork project (collaborative authorship)

students contemplating what modules to pick – loads of feedback from other students making suggestions

blog for teacher training to record ‘trigger’ information – this is actually a blog formed of posts to individual blogs which have a specific category assigned to them.

Also some challenges to the Acceptable Use Policy. E.g. criticism of the institution, or even individuals within the institution. There is a great deal of support from the institutions management supporting the right of students to express these views.

Also some instances where a possibly racist posting was then commented on by other students which balanced the argument. This all seems fine, but I’m not clear that the decision about this should be a decision that the IT dept makes – just because it is published on the web – if a student was standing on the corner of the street handing out fliers with the same view who would decide whether this was ‘acceptable’ or not – obviously not the IT dept.

Again – we are coming back to the question in my mind – why does the IT dept have anything to do with web publishing except providing the platform?

So finally – what have Warwick learned from this?

Some good student comments here – but my personal favourite:
"It’s Me in paper form – except digital"

It sounds like there is a real community feel from those who use them. Interestingly one saying that the fact they could keep the blog when they graduated was the thing that made them join the graduate society – although it would be interesting to know whether there is any substantial uptake here.

There have obviously been some challenges to the AUP and also some questions in my mind about how much ‘policing’ is going on. For example, the speaker commented on the re-use of copyright material – I can’t see how this can be monitored effectively. Loads of issues around this, but a real question about how much responsibility the university has in these areas – we should really looking at ISP models here to inform how we manage this type of thing.

There was a Guardian article about the Warwick blogging which was quite interesting.