Weblogs for Business and Education

Weblogs in education

I've been doing a bit more searching for information about how weblogs can be used in education. My goal is to convince someone at UW to hire me for the summer to start a university weblog project. Hey, Harvard and Stanford have one, maybe UW will consider it. UW is supposed to be all being a leader in technological innovation. From reading IST's direction and strategy for UW.

"UW should"

"Be a leader in an increasingly networked world and encourage the development and use of new connectivity, to the extent that UW becomes known as "Canada's Connected Campus."

"Identify strategies, pilot projects, and initiatives that foster an environment with a focus on both connectivity and on developing and enhancing access to electronic learning material."

I think that a weblog project would fit under these two strategies very nicely. It really seems to me like blogging in education could take off very soon. Today I ran across James Farmer's blog which mentions Edublogs and yesterday my brother pointed me to Webloggg-ed. And from RMIT this is an long research paper titled Blogs: personal e-Learning spaces .

Publishing the static site

This is a static version of the weblog I created as part my CS480 assignement 2 presentation. I created the site on my personal computer using Moveable Type. However, the public sever on which my pubic site is hosted doesn't yet have the correct perl modules installed. Therefore I decided to simply copy the files over from my computer to the host. This means you cannot comment on posts at this time.

My report discusses how weblogs can be used as a business tool. Please read the report as it follows the more formal guildlines found for the web page marking scheme. The weblog format has a more informal feel which I feel is actually one of its benefits. For reading of the weblog I suggest that you start with the first post and proceed in cronological order. There is a list of the entries on the left navigation bar.

RSS and News Aggregation

I've seen RSS stand for Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary and Really Simple Syndication. Bascially RSS is a way to syndicate and publish web content in a format that is can be easily aggregated by applications like Feedreader and other news readers. The State of Utah has a very good tutorial that describes RSS and its uses, along with an expaination how to create, validate, parse, publish, and syndicate your own RSS content.

Blogging at Harvard

Bloggin Comes to Harvard: Harvard has hired Dave Winer to help the students and faculty create weblogs. Dave is the author of Scripting News and founder of to UserLand Software (makers of weblog software, Radio). The idea is that weblogs can be used to unite different parts of Harard community by increasing information flow.

I have been wanting something similar at Waterloo for a while. I feel that a University is a perfect example of a place where a weblogging community could florish.

Weblogs could be used by teachers to create course website that can easily even by profs with little tech knowledge. As was stated in a newsgroup post by Kevin F. Johnston, Blackboard tries to do too much. Documents (such as Word, PDF, PS, etc) can easily be linked to from a simple website. While securtiy may be an issue, it is possible to put simple password security around files. Weblogs provide a good structure for content, making it easy for a prof to post announcements or links to information she feels would interest students. Sure newsgroups can be and are used by some profs. However it is easy for a prof's comments to be drowned in a ton of comments by students. Weblogs also allow for more personal expression from a prof and allows for a much richer user interface than a newsgroup.

Weblogs could also be used by clubs and other university organizations to provide up-to-date information to students. There is a lot of stuff that happens on-campus that few people know about, and currenly getting informed is not easy. The use of weblogs along with RSS and news aggregators could make it easier for students to be informed. More on RSS and news aggregators later.

Google buys Pyra

Lots of news is going around about Google buying out Pyra (maker of Blogger). I think Dave makes some good points about the deal. "Google didn't buy their content, because Pyra doesn't own it, the users do. They didn't buy access to the content because they already had it." However he notes that Google is well positioned to enter the corportate weblogging scene. Google already offers the Google Search Appliance as a solution for business intranet search. Integrate Blogger with that and you have a very marketable solution for business weblogging.

Groove's weblog policy

Groove Networks is a company that "provides desktop collaboration software that accelerates business activity...". It was started by Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes. Ray encourages employees to have weblogs and a company weblog policy has been created. I feel creating such a policy is important for a company that encourages weblogs. There have been stories of people losing jobs over personal weblogs or websites. While these cases may seem extreme, it is good for an organization to clearly document what is acceptable content for public or even internal weblogs.

more weblog articles

More articles about weblogs as business and knowledge management tools.

Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research This is about how weblogs can be used by researchers and academics as form of personal knowledge management.

Using Blogs in Business This is actually chapter 8 of the book We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs. It has extensive informtion about various ways businesses can uses weblogs.

articles on weblogs

Here is a list of articles related to weblogs in business.

Flash: Blogging Goes Corporate (Wired): This article disusses Macromedias use of weblogs for product support and promotion. "The firm needed a way to quickly respond to questions developers might have as they use the new products.... Macromedia had five of its 'community managers' create their own weblogs..."

Are You Blogging Yet? (InfomationWeek): This article discusses weblogging as a tool for knowledge management. "What's more, and this is key, there's built-in motivation for people to participate in blogging: They get credit for their ideas. A blog is essentially a repository of a person's intellectual capital--a record of their thoughts, observations, contributions."

Web logging can serve many roles (The Seattle Times): "Great potential exists for intra-blogs, or Web logs on internal company networks. Blogs could permit a more free-flowing and informal exchange of private information than the standard internal Web site."

Blogs refine enterprise focus (InfoWeek): "Building on the success of Weblogs for personal Web publishing, enterprises are starting to tap into blogs to streamline specific business processes such as intelligence gathering or to augment traditional content-and knowledge-management technologies."

Blogging for Dollars (Business 2.0): "Blogging is attractive as a vehicle for personal expression because it's an easy way to capture, comment on, and keep abreast of interesting tidbits of information. The same characteristic makes blogging well-suited to businesses that want to track information about products and markets, or distribute information to employees and customers."

first post

This weblog is being made for my cs480 course. I did a report entitled: "Weblogs as a Business Tool". This site will contain various links and information related to how businesses can use weblogs.