Using Blogs and Wikis (Georgetown TLISI)

(They need to offer coffee, not healthy juice.)
Greetings, all. I will try to live blog from my session on blogging. How redundant is that. This session is on facilitating group interaction, an issue with have with interns, alumni out of work in need of community, each other (this blog isn't so widely used), and maybe even faculty.

They use open source WordPress, hosted at the university through Georgetown Digital Commons, providing privacy options public blogs can't. Get to that site and it has a host of options plus advice on best practices. Wiki software is the same as Wikipedia, plus they are adding Wikispaces because it's more user-friendly. RSS is the glue. (I'm the only one who knows what RSS is in the group.)

NETVIBES uses rss feeds to pull a bunch of blogs together.

What affects interaction? Presence of authority.

(Actually, the room of about 23 mostly faculty, some are overwhelmed and half haven't used blogs at all. But they're interested! They want to know the difference between Blackboard and blogs and I offer my experience with my class. Discussion boards are linear when you want that, and blogs are easier to get to with less clicking, and more free flowing.)

Wikis, you continually edit as a group. (Maybe we should have one of those rather than a blog? Maybe CTE should have one with a section on internships and a section on merit advising. Maybe that's what AUPedia is.) You need structure and roles to get it started with different pages for each task. To set one up at GT, it goes through Digitalcommons, though they are working on letting people set their own up. (Hmm, not talking much about wikis.)

Back to blogs, the second presenter has an RSS stream of the community's blogs into a side bar. Her blog has list of students, links to their blogs, RSS feed, and uses it as away to keep in touch in the research process.

Yahoo pipes bring things together. Not quite sure what this can do. Hmm, session went awry. Here's a tutorial for that.