UCISA WLF / UKOLN Workshop: Beyond Email - Annotation of the Case Study 2 Page

Will the materials from this be available on the site, some of the quotes, def's and stats are really useful

The materials are available on Derek's blog http://www.bath.ac.uk/dacs/cdntl/pMachine/morriblog.php in this entry http://www.bath.ac.uk/dacs/cdntl/pMachine/morriblog_more.php?id=351_0_4_0_M. The HTML version of the presentation is at http://www.bath.ac.uk/e-learning/Download/weblogs.htm

Now that they are available they will be linked to from the event websites at UKOLN and UCISA. AlisonPope (UCISA)

I found this a really useful session. I have a question, though.. To what extent is all this blog functionality (RSS feeds, archiving, searching etc etc) available in traditional VLE packages.

It probably depends on what you are looking for. I have come across examples of being able to display RSS feeds within WebCT and Blackboard (http://www.reusability.org/blogs/brian/archives/000083.html and http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan/archives/000031.html) respectively. But it looks like this is being done by the users, not the suppliers. It looks like Moodle has some wiki stuff available (http://moodle.org/download/modules/), but I haven't seen anything on blogs or RSS.

I would argue this is one of the problems with the vle as a monolithic package - they become slow in terms of development. To look at an example or how easy it is to add RSS to a discussion forum (so you know when new messages are posted), take a look at phpBB, and the modification that adds RSS functionality (http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=144548) - this really shouldn't be difficult to do.

I also think that a blog would be a perfect way of integrating an easy publication tool into a VLE - and we have had a request from an academic here to look at this. Projects such as the one at Warwick (http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/, and Uthink at the University of Minnesota (http://blog.lib.umn.edu/) show the popularity of the blog as a publishing tool.

Finally, just because I think it is cool, I thought I'd mention the integration of blogs into the Information Environment. Again at UThink, they have integrated the OpenURL concept into the blogging environment ( http://blog.lib.umn.edu/radh0003/research/).