http://www.syllabus.com/news_issue.asp?
id=155&IssueDate=11/12/2003
Blogs are ‘outside’ the CMS. Should they be? There’s really two questions here. One involves the functionality involved in creating and maintaing a blog, what we typically think of as the blog software itself. Should this remain outside the CMS? No, it’s an obvious candidate for inclusion and you should expect to see it in a CMS near you soon. The second, far more interesting question, one that actually doesn’t seem to be asked in the article, is whether student blog content should remain inside the walled off ‘silos’ as a few have called them, or whether they should be out in the wild like all the rest of the blogs. This is a far thornier issue, and in my experience gets to the heart of some of the resistance to using blogs that I’ve seen so far. – SWL
Scott – Good timing. I just did a faculty brown bag on blogging and this exact issue came up. Do we really want this student work out there for anyone to see and maybe copy for a future semester — or do we lose the real power of blogs by locking them behind a firewall? You know, that connection to the larger world, the building of a network of people within and across fields. I used a chunk of your ideas from the blogging matrix. Thanks for that. My quick page for the brown bag is http://awd.cl.uh.edu/blog/.
Ginger