Weblogs@UPEI

I got a email from Mark at the University of Prince Edward Island in Canada. They are offering weblogs to their school community. Read on! Thanks Mark!

Link: Weblogs@UPEI.

I want to draw your attention to http://weblogs.upei.ca a new service we provide at the University of Prince Edward Island which offers anyone in the campus community the means to create a meaningful web presence and to engage in rich online discussion.

What's interesting about this project is that, unlike other University blogging projects, we're NOT targeting or limiting enrolment in the service to one pilot group. ANYONE with a valid UPEI email addresss is eligible for the free service including students, instructors, and administrators.

Our strategy has been to NOT take a targeted, theoretical, or strategic approach to launching the service. At its conception there was no catering or bias, in features, functionality, or promotion, toward students, or instructors, or groups particularly –just individuals. We’ve tried to follow the model given by the Internet itself – provide a service that enables the most micro-atomic elements and let them organize themselves. So we offer the service to anyone and everyone (in the University community) and let the emergent properties of the community manifest themselves naturally. The manifestation of group forming, discussions, and behaviour, is our cue to stoke the the emergent community with tailored resources and support. In this way the early adopters self-identify and we concentrate our efforts in developing the service on those who, at first, will be most receptive. We feel this organic approach is much more efficient and in keeping with the spirit of blogging than say a forced or targeted rollout. It also helps to destroy the barriers that exist between faculties and to overcome the separation of roles you find, traditionally, on campus. And it helps to spread the virus by infecting the influencers first. Those influencers become a de facto extension of the development team and help to create a network effect faster. They are most likely to the best candidates to demonstrate the wide-ranging uses of blogging and often are the most dedicated and committed.

The service has been a success right from the start. As of the first of November, only 8 weeks after we got started, we've had over 200 join the community. And the service is being used for more than just individual blogs. Groups from around the University have set up accounts and many new groups have emerged, natively, as a result of the new connections weblogging and rich online discussion naturally generates. Some instructors have made the service an integral part of their course delivery strategy.

Our services are powered by Drupal, a tool which we found to be easy to use and stable. A diverse group of students, known as the BEAT program, get academic credit for developing and marketing the service. In this way they've taken an applied, integrated approach to learning which fosters skills and takes advantage of new tools. Creating this kind of systematic capacity within the University was essential for launching Weblogs@UPEI and nurturing it to this stage. Check out the BEAT program at http://beat.upei.ca.

Our future plans are to mine Drupal for all it has to offer our community and to continue to support the individuals and groups who emegre with manifest ideas, and manifest drive and determination. We only hope that we can keep up!

Anyway, keep up the good work. Thanks again for providing it!

Regards,

Mark Hemphill

Asst. Prof, University of Prince Edward Island

Program director BEAT (http://beat.upei.ca

Comments

[D'Arcy Norman]

We just launched a similar project (inspired strongly by UPEI's initiative) at the University of Calgary. It's brand spanking new (we just turned it on last week) so there aren't many people using it yet. Same principles apply - anyone with a valid U of C login can just login and start creating content.

http://weblogs.ucalgary.ca