The University of Mary Washington (UMW) has been getting attention for their proactive approach to using blogs (often in innovative and unexpected ways) for all sorts of academic ends, including the delivery of course materials, student projects, etc. I contacted Jim Groom, an Instructional Technology Specialist at UMW, to find out more about the efforts that he and others have undertaken in order to make blogs an effective part the UMW technology culture. Through a series of email discussions, we decided that this post should actually come from the source. I provided the questions as a basic starting point, but I’m sure you’ll find Jim’s responses, as well as the many examples and links he provides, both useful and insightful. [Shawn]
Q: Tell us about UMW Blogs. When did it start? What was the decision process?
UMW Blogs is quite simply a web-based publishing platform for the Mary Washington academic community. The distinction between a blog and a more loosely defined publishing platform is actually important because while some people on UMW Blogs use it for what is commonly thought of as blogging, many more use it for a wide range of purposes that often don’t quite match the underlining logic of a blog (see Ten ways to use UMW Blogs for examples). So to call it a series of blogs in many ways doesn’t capture the more complex reality, it’s more akin to a dynamic online publishing space for students, staff, and faculty alike.
The official birth date of UMW Blogs is August 27th, 2007, but unlike Athena it didn’t just jump from the head of Zeus one day. It came out of numerous iteration cycles with a variety of free and open source applications. It was born out of a culture of experimentation at UMW more generally, and the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) specifically. Our “sandbox” approach to exploring educational technologies embraced the best tools already freely available on the web (which were not necessarily limited to open source solutions) for sharing videos, images, bookmarks, and documents such as YouTube, Flickr, and delicious, and Writely (which is now Google Docs).
I think the driving logic behind the experiment was to imagine what takes place in the classroom at a university as not removed from what is happening already on the wide open web more generally, but rather in constant dialogue with the conversations and resources that already exist out on the web. The move towards ‘openness’ (the networked approach of thinking and sharing openly on the web) with these Web 2.0 tools at UMW was not so much premised on a pre-determined ideological impetus, but a push for developing the best framework for sharing resources and publishing easily on the web for an entire intellectual community. In many ways openness comes as a serendipitous extension of such a framework, illustrating the point that the architecture of most Course Management Systems (and university websites more generally) are built upon a vision of controlling an image and locking down ideas rather than sharing and opening them up to the world at large. Openness is as much a function of design as it is of any set of beliefs. One might truly desire to be open, but have no means through the web-based publishing tools provided by their campus’s IT department to truly enable the kind of access requisite for allowing others to both find and re-purpose their work and ideas easily.
One of the things we really like about UMW Blogs is it allows people throughout the community to take ownership of their own work, they control their space to some great extent. For example, they can use their blogs for personal reflection, to frame an eportfolio (here’s a nice student example), they can delete their 
own work at will, and export their data on the fly and re-import it to their own space, or a commercial blogging system like Blogger or WordPress.com. Moreover, this “syndicated framework” we are using allows instructors and students who are using external applications to easily add their RSS feeds to UMW Blogs so that their work can become part of the searchable and discoverable flow of data. [CIT note – for more on Really Simple Syndication see CIT's page on RSS aggregators or watch RSS in Plain English] That is the key, don’t try and create a space that locks anyone in to one university tool, rather build a system that can, to quote Whitman, “contain multitudes.” This idea of empowering the community with their own tools for framing the work they do during their time at UMW epitomizes DTLT’s approach to instructional technologies. One practice that has highlighted the importance of managing and developing your voice online has been UMW Blogs’s ability to pull together all the individual threads from individual blogs into a larger, syndicated (or is it syncopated?) chorus of learning on campus. UMW Blogs has brought us closer to that vision than we have been heretofore, but there is still a ways to go. Nonetheless, after three years of one-off WordPress blogs and MediaWiki installations, the move towards a larger, integrated campus-wide publishing platform was as much a necessity as it was an experiment.
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