About two weeks ago I asked our kick ass student aids Joe and Shannon to start a wiki page outlining ten possible ways to use UMW Blogs. Soon after I went in and re-arranged, added, edited, etc. Last week DTLT’s newest ITS star for the Social Sciences, Michael Willits (who now gets a link back because he has finally announced he is moving off TypePad to WordPress 
), gave some feedback on the list in the wiki page.
So, given that the list won’t ever really be done, and in the interest of making it available sooner than later you can find the wiki page here, and keep in mind that it is open for anyone to edit. So, if you are inclined to comment, edit, add another example, or re-use the list, please do. I have borrowed liberally from Andre Malan’s post here when doing the course blogs section, and the general idea is based on James Farmer’s 10 ways to use your edublog to teach.
Here is a quick breakdown of the ten uses:
* 1 Ten ways to use UMW Blogs
o 1.1 Personal Blogging
o 1.2 Courses
+ 1.2.1 A Group Blog
+ 1.2.2 A Ghost Blog
+ 1.2.3 An Aggregated Course Blog
o 1.3 E-Portfolios
o 1.4 Websites
o 1.5 News
o 1.6 Collaboration
o 1.7 Publications
o 1.8 Multimedia
o 1.9 Creating New Web Applications
o 1.10 Presentations
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I’m glad, I think this list, while incomplete, gives a good idea of how much mileage you can get out of such a system. What may appeal to the administration more than that, is how so many of these options aren;t attached to vendor specific contracts, infrastructure, etc. You are investing in people, and giving the university community a tool that can benefit thousands of users while playing nice with services and tools they would and do use in the “real world.”
I’d love to know how it goes.