WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
It’s all very well us educators having blogs and communicating with one another, building upon each others work and collaborating on projects, but what about students? I think that the two main reasons why student blogs aren’t part of the everyday life of school are a) technical - most teachers are afraid of the technology, and b) fears over student misuse of them. I decided to go ahead and start my Year 10 History classes blogging - but which blogging platform to choose? 
(click to enlarge)
After looking at the options it boiled down to two options: Wordpress MU (multi-user) or Elgg Spaces. The former has to be hosted and configured on your own webspace, whereas the latter is a hosted, albeit more limited, solution. At the time I was going to go ahead, the free version of Elgg Spaces was limited to 50 users - any more than that carried a hefty $200/month charge. Once I’d started blogging with one of my classes I received an email from the Elgg team saying that they had recanted and made the whole thing free… but ad-supported.
I didn’t want blogs with adverts on, and having it hosted on my webspace would hopefully give students an extra reason to think twice before they posted anything they shouldn’t. I went ahead, therefore, with installing Wordpress MU. It was fairly straightforward, especially if you’ve ever installed the normal version of Wordpress. I’m not going to go through the process - suffice to say that if you don’t know what a MySQL database is or how to create one, learnerblogs.org, Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Elgg Spaces, etc. are going to be more up your street.
Once I’d installed Wordpress MU at learning.mrbelshaw.co.uk/blogs I needed some plugins to add functionality and some themes so my students could personalise their blogs. To this end, I found wpmudev.org for plugins and themes.wordpress.net for themes (also try this site, although it’s less visual…) The most important thing to do was protect the blogs from comment spam. I therefore installed Spam Karma 2 for WPMU immediately which has worked well so far. I had a couple of problems with the themes I chose: one of them didn’t work at all which mean that a couple of students were stranded without being able to access their blogs, and one theme seemed to disable the RSS feed, which is my way of tracking what students have written (through my Bloglines account).
The only other source of problems was the students themselves! Whilst most of them took to it like a fish to water, some - quite unbelievably, in my opinion for 14/15 year-olds - didn’t have an email address! I helped them sign up with a basic Hotmail address and then guided them through the simple process of signing up for a blog. Some students pressed the forward/back buttons in their browsers, which led to problems. Overall, however, there’s nothing that can’t be fixed from my interface as administrator! 
I’d be happy to write a teachers’ guide to using Wordpress MU if anyone’s interested…
Popularity: 10% [?]
Yes, I will appreciate very much a guide about wordpress mu.
I think this is fantastic! I look forward to updates with your students blogs.
I’d lov
Well done again Doug. We have also gone for wordpress multi
user in East Lothian as the backbone for our
exc-el site. I came across exactly the same problem as you in that student didn’t
have email addresses. Now I set up the accounts for each class before they arrive
and configure there password so it is the same as their school log on password.
My students have found these plugin’s really good fun!
Now Reading:
http://robm.me.uk/projects/plugins/wordpress/now-reading/
Flickr Spinner: http://headzoo.com/flickrspinnr
Have a great weekend, Ollie
Also might be worth speaking to David Gilmore http://exc-el.org.uk/blogs/david I
think he’s also working on a WPMU edu-guide?
Thanks Ollie, I've left a comment on David's blog - hopefully he'll get back to me. The plugins you mention look interesting, although the first one isn't entirely relevant to what I'm doing and the second one looks broken on its own site!
I think it's important for students to have email addresses in this day and age. I don't mind spending the time getting them up-to-speed, really - and they feel that they're blogging properly, with ownership of their blog, etc.
Just to note:
"Once I’d started blogging with one of my classes I received an email
from the Elgg team saying that they had recanted and made the whole
thing free… but ad-supported."
We also notified potential users that they can pay $99 per year to remove the adverts. This is pretty good for a site with unlimited users and disk space.
It is also possible to download Elgg as it is released GPL - if interested, people can get the source code from http://elgg.org.
Also, Elgg is not a blogging platform such as WordPress MU - it is a social networking platform, so a decision on which tool to use should depend on what you wish to achieve with the software.
We're currently in the process of setting up Elgg locally, having the students currently using Elgg.net. As you've just set up WordPress MU, it's probably not something you're thinking of doing.
One advantage you might have with WordPress, which is something I'd not thought of prior to using Elgg.net (it was Blogger last year), is that due to the way that groups work in Elgg, it's only posts that are labelled as "public" that get into the RSS feed.
One of the reasons for moving from Blogger to Elgg (decided before Blogspot introduced Blogspot beta) was the greater control students have over who is reading their posts, and also the ease of setting up community blogs.
However, I have discovered that Bloglines is now more or less useless, as they often set posts either to Elgg's default (logged in users), or they restrict it further to just the group. (For all I know, they may have further restrictions - that prevent me seeing their posts!) The only RSS feeds that I get therefore are the public ones.
I've got quite a few friends that aren't on the course, so though I can use the "Friend's blog" feature to see who's updated their blog, I get to see all my friends. (Several people have requested that a community blog's friends are its members, which would get over that problem!)
To me, though, what I have lost by not having an easy way to collate new posts is more than compensated for with the features in Elgg. (The fact that it's a small cohort of 8 makes a difference. I might change my mind if I had more students)
Dave, I’m certainly not disparaging Elgg - in fact I use it for my Ed.D. blog . However, $99 is a lot when I’m not sure how well it’ll work and when it would have to come out of my own pocket. Also, I did try installing Elgg but I found it very difficult compared to Wordpress MU, which was very straightforward…
Emma, the point you make about RSS feeds is a very good one. I monitor my Year 7’s use of Imbee through the report I get at the end of each day, but to monitor the blogs of my more ‘grown up’ students I use Bloglines and the RSS feeds from their blogs. This would be rendered useless, as you say, with Elgg.
Hey Doug.
This sounds like a great idea. I"m planning on installing WPMU after Christmas to move some of my subject pages away from moodle and given each one it's own blog. I hadn't considered giving the blogs to students, but now you've got me curious. What kind of taks do you give them to complete on their blogs?
Also, any kind of teachers guide would be brilliant!
Dave
ps - for some reason this comment box seems to be crashing Safari. I've posted this from Firefix, but try it yourself and see if you get any problems.
I found that the lads were much more motivated with the idea of doing their homework on a blog than on paper. The girls are intrinsically motivated anyway, so are likely to do it anyway. Some girls did complain that they’d rather do their homework in their books, but I’ve asked them to give it a try with a promise that we’ll review the situation in a few weeks time…
What kind of things am I going to set them? Mainly research and mini-essays, I should imagine. I will set them other types of homeworks, but I’m just trying to get them more motivated to become independent learners at the moment!
Don’t use Safari, use Bon Echo - Firefox 2.0 optmised for various Macs…
"However, $99 is a lot when I’m not sure how well it’ll work"
I am really surprised to hear this.
For
unlimited users, unlimited storage spaces, the ability to control
exactly who can access your environment, brand up your space etc etc we feel this is great value.
A small typical example we have:
200 students - this equals 40 cents per student for the whole year with unlimited storage.
A more typical example is 2000 students:
This comes to 4 cents per student for a whole year with unlimited storage.
"Also,
I did try installing Elgg but I found it very difficult compared to
Wordpress MU" - we have never heard this before and we would be interested in know what your problems were. When installing Elgg you only have to fill in 4 values. If you
could share with us the issues you encountered this would be most helpful to make Elgg even easier to install.
I think you dismissed Elgg too soon Doug. Elgg IS free AND very easy to install to your own server - the process compares very well to MU - which is no mean feat! Given the age of WP and its very easy install.
You have much experience of WP installs - that is what I think you should say.