Internal Blogs

Below are several examples of blogs that exist for internal university communities. They range from overviews of news and events, in general, on campus to those targeted for audiences interested in specific administrative issues (registrarial and deans, for example).

http://eaglewire.blogspot.com/
A daily round-up of Eastern Washington University's newsworthy events and happenings

http://ksulib.typepad.com/news/
Kansas State University Libraries, News and Events

http://deanstudents.blogsome.com/
The Daily Plan-it, Dean of Students Blog, Columbia Journalism School

http://lawregistrar.blogspot.com/index.html
The Moritz Law Registrar Blog, News for students at the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University

http://kb.seattleu.edu/registrar/
Office of the Registrar Knowledge Base, Seattle University

In addition, here’s a great example of how an internal university blog can aid in disaster recovery/networking:

http://diasporaverde.blogspot.com/
Diáspora Verde, an on-line forum for students and faculty of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese of Tulane University who were forced to evacuate the city of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and its devastating aftermath.

During my web travels I also came across the following link. Many of the guidelines for blog services that we discussed in our group meeting are similar to those outlined here. Check it out when you have a chance! Be sure to click on “Continue reading “How do I get a blog?” to see what they recommend for their personal users:

http://blogs.princeton.edu/main/faqs/
Princeton’s guidelines for university-hosted blog services

Blogging Tools

In order to coordinate our efforts, we're keeping a running list of all the various tools that we might consider evaluating for all of our sub-projects (blogs, wikis, podcasts, social bookmarking, web office, web editor, rss) in a single spreadsheet, which can be found at http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pR2uGe5IXkD6nA-fsShY9NQ .

We can keep our unofficial list here, and then move viable candidates to the official list once we feel they are viable candidates.

My off-the-cuff list of tools we should evaluate include:

Drupal http://www.drupal.org

Wordpress http://www.wordpress.org and (multi-user) http://mu.wordpress.org/

Moveable Type http://www.moveabletype.org

Academic Examples

We've set up a tag for use within del.ico.us that allows us to collectively aggregate examples of how higher ed institutions are using blogs within and between their institutions.

The tag is BloggingAcademicExamples . The list can be found at:

http://del.icio.us/tag/BloggingAcademicExamples

From this soup of examples, we'll want to organize the best examples into some sort of page that will also be useful to us as we reach out to various constituents and explain to them how blogs might help them solve their problems and/or reach their objectives.

Requirements

The general requirements for ALL of the web 2.0 applications we are evaluating can be found at https://dokuwiki.wesleyan.edu/doku.php?id=its:web_2.0#requirements . Do we have any questions about these?

Are there additional requirments around blogging software that we want to add?

This is an important list, as it will drive our evaluation process, so we want to make sure we get it right.

Introductions

Since we'll be evaulating blogging software, it makes sense to USE blogging software to organize the work. Our objectives are as follows:

1. Familiarize ourselves with the general requirments that the Wesleyan Web 2.0 project has developed.

2. Add any additional requirements that are Blogging specific.

3. Identify uses cases and examples of how blogging is used in higher ed to help us think about how blogging might fit into the overall technology mix on campus.

4. Identify a short-list of applicatios that we will first present to the larger group, and then evaluate.

5. Pick a university-wide blogging tool for implementation in time for Fall 2007 use.