Blogs at University of Wales, Newport

Blogs at University of Wales, Newport Michael Webb Head of IT and Media Services University of Wales, Newport The work is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 licence. The University of Wales, Newport logo most not be modified in any way.

Presentation Overview
Part 1) An overview of our blogging service
What facilities we have
How they are used
How they are managed
Part 2) How we got there
How we established the need
How we chose the product
How we launched it

Part 1
An overview
of our blogging service
What facilities we have
How they are used
How they are managed

About University of Wales, Newport
Located in South Wales
( Here we are on Google Maps )
Around 6000 students (about half part-time), plus 3000 franchise students
Smallish IT depart (25 staff) supporting all University IT.

Our Blogging Service
Part of myCommunity
Part of myLearning Essential - our ‘VLE’,
Provides:
Blogs for everyone
Forums
Photo Galleries
Launched Sept 2006
‘ Build it and they will come’ approach

MyCommunity Demo
Publicly accessible at:
http://mycommunity.newport.ac.uk
Quick demo of how it works…

How our blogs are used
Used for a variety of purposes:
To initiate discussion
Disseminating information
Comment on the University
Share subject specific thoughts and ideas
Teaching and Learning project – reflective practice
Fun!
Examples to follow in a moment.

1% rule
If you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it (or ‘lurk’).
(see http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participation_inequality )

Overview of usage stats
80 -130 blogs (depending how you count them!)
500+ blog postings
350 blog comments
350 + authors across myCommunity
Approx 250,000 post views

Blog uses: Initiating discussion
Staff getting feedback from students
Future of our Computer Suites
Students getting feedback from students
Advice on indoor photography
General debate
Why don’t young people get involved in Charity Work?

Disseminating Information
Staff using blogs to communicate with potential students
HSS Fresher’s blogs
Students advertising events
eg Big Ask Live

Comment on the University
Less than you might imagine at the moment!
Students Union
Wireless networking is rubbish…!

Subject specific thoughts and ideas
Students – blogging about their work
Indiewood project
Subject area blogs…
Note from the Cupboard …
Feedback from outside the University

Reflective Practice
Possibly most exciting use of myCommunity!
Around 60 education students blogging their teaching practice experience
Blogs restricted to the group plus lecturers
Unique way of:
a) Working as a group remotely
b) Reflecting on their experiences

Management Issues
Currently low management overhead
Students (and staff!) using the service in a very responsible way
Checked regularly by IT/Learning Technology group but currently no formal moderation.
Only had to ‘censor’ one posting so far.

Part 2
How we got there…
How we established the need
How we chose the product

How we got there…
Part of a strategy to support the overall student experience
More on strategy side at:
http://www.slideshare.net/lisbk/developing-a-web-20-strategy

myLearning Essentials…
myLearning Essentials is our own learning environment
(we don’t use Blackboard/Web CT etc)
Why?
Focus should be what your organisation wants to achieve.
Easy to build your own learning environment from existing/bespoke components
MyCommunity and the blogs are part of this approach…

2004: Time to update the IT Strategy…
University's Strategic Aim No.1 :
“ To provide the highest quality student experience possible as the highest priority for the University of Wales, Newport”
Question : “What is the greatest contribution IT can make to the Student Experience?”

What makes a good student experience?
Good computing facilities?
Reliable service?
Friendly support?
Good VLE?
… ?
What else?

Time to step back and take a wider view
Blogs starting to get media coverage
eBay and iTunes entering mainstream
Early adoptors and evangelists starting to promote educational use of Web 2.0 technology
eg “What Can Internet Technologies Offer” - Brian Kelly – UCISA Conference 2004

Our conclusion
Emerging (Web 2.0) technologies could play an important role in supporting the University’s main strategic aim.
i.e. contribute to the overall student experience, not just improve teaching (although hopefully it would do that as well!)

Updating the IT Strategy
Two important statements made:
We will support existing (or emerging) Web 2.0 technologies such as Blogs, Wikis etc
Caveats relate to resourcing rather than technical issues
2) We are going to become an adaptive, agile service, and quickly support new technologies.
Funding for innovation included in the IT strategy .

Turning the strategy into action
We needed to learn more.
Our approach:
Use the technology!
Find out what your future students may want
Find out what the students are doing
Ask the students what they want

Using the technology: What did we find out?
Release our inner ‘digital native’…
We set up our own Blogs, Wiki and Jabber services, and used them to discuss the technologies – it worked!

What are our future students doing?
School children being are introduced to blogging when they are as young as 7 or 8 years old…
… see www.think.com as a great example

What are our current students doing?
Our students use Web 2.0 applications eg. www.bebo.com
to form social networks relating to the University.
Join it! (although it may make you feel old!)

What are our current students are doing (2) ?
Student are using freely available web applications to create their own communities.
Some presented the University in a good light, others maybe didn’t

Summary of the things we learnt (1)
Students are already using Web 2.0 technologies, both to support their courses and for socials reasons.
We can no longer control the University’s web presence, even if we wanted to.
Providing these sorts of services is not without risks
The risks don’t all go away if we ignore these technologies.

Summary of the things we learnt (2)
We can change the communication channels:
University  Student (mLE 1.0)
Student  University (mLE 1.0 1.1)
Student  Student (mLE 1.0 1.1)
Staff/Student  Staff/Student (mLE 1.0 2.0)
Staff/Student  The World (mLE 1.0 2.0)
This is exciting from a student experience perspective!
The world is changing rapidly and we really do need to change too if our services aren’t going to be boring and irrelevant!

How to decide how to do it…
Use the technology yourselves!
Get some of your users, technical people and decision makes to use it too!
Only then will you be in position to set some criteria

Our Criteria
Good multi-user functionality
Easy to use
Support for multi-media
Good RSS support
Easy to customise
Big Question: Did we need to provide our own service to achieve that???

Good multi-user functionality
Would be possible to manage with our limited resources
Need some sort of security model
We didn’t want all blogs to be public (eg reflective practice project)
Need some sort of aggregation/hub facility
Otherwise blogs would be isolated – who would read them?

Easy to use…
Good user support
Minimal barriers…
No (or minimal) sign-up process
No extra passwords…
Easy for ‘non-techie’ people to get started

Good RSS Support
A requirement of reflective practise.
Need a good mechanism whereby academics can be alerted to postings from a group of students

Conclusion
We needed to host the service ourselves
smallest barrier to use
security model,
Automatic generation of RSS lists (OPML)
Therefore needed to evaluate available software…

Options
We trialled various products…
Community Server
b2Evolution
WordPress MU
DasBlog
…
We chose Community Server
Best match to criteria at the time (WordPress MU looks like a serious contender now)

Community Server
Free basic version
Runs on Windows/SQL Server
Fairly small cost for extra authentication features we needed
Source code available (we’ve made minor modifications)
See http://communityserver.org

Implementing MyCommunity
Fairly rapid deployment.
Open development – we let people use it as we were developing it! Good feedback that way…
CSS/skinning mean could easily be integrated to myLearning Essentials
Accepting the world of perpetual beta…it’s perfectly acceptable to gradually improve services

Launching myCommunity
“ Build it and they will come”
Formally launched Sept 2006
We just made it available without any publicity…
Does this sort of thing work better if people discover themselves?
Didn’t want to ‘over-hype’
Once we had sufficient content publicised and debated more.
That brings us up to date!

Questions/Discussion
Contact details:
[email_address]
http://mycommunity.newport.ac.uk/blogs/michael

Blogs at University of Wales, Newport

by michaeldwebb

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Blogs at University of Wales, Newport Presentation Transcript