Will’s Similiblog

I’ve been developing a community blogging platform for my institution, a postgraduate college of ~500 students. We’ve been successfully employing Moodle as a learning management system built around individual course offerings, but wish to extend the functionality of this with a platform to support integration of learning across course offerings, permitting student journaling, community discussion, and lodging of ‘learning artifacts’ both for individuals and for sharing within the learning community.

We’re constrained by cost (budget = $0 plus or minus a few bucks); by having a population of students somewhat older than the demographic to which web-savvyness comes by default; and by having a faculty with only a few potential early-adopters of digital technology.

My vision for this platform, includes:

• a journaling/blogging component, permitting public student journaling, with the option of private journaling;
• the ability to create sub-groups orbital to the full community;
• some form of portfolio development for students, with the possibility of archiving both private and public ‘learning artifacts’
• the expressed desire of constituents to restrict access to our institutional/learning community

I’ll detail in upcoming posts the construction of our site, which is now in beta-user testing status, and readying for limited launch at the start of spring term in April.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 3:56 pm and is filed under site_development.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.