Blogs in Moodle 1.6

This article is to revisit my earlier post on the new features in Moodle.

Now that I have had more of an opportunity to play with the blogging feature I am not so impressed.

To access another person’s blog you either need to have the “myMoodle” interface setup on your site or you need to navigate to someone’s profile (including your own).

You do not have the ability to comment on the blog, I believe the idea is that a forum is set up for this purpose, however I do not feel this would be the most productive way to respond. After all a comment can be quite short, whereas we tend to insist forum posts are longer (promote discussion).

One benefit is the use of tags, this feature works well and allows you to filter the blogs according to the terms you are interested in.

I believe RSS feeds are possible, however to date I have not worked out how to achieve this (I haven’t tried that hard). If it is not intuitive then I believe it is a tool that will not be used.

If the argument is that a forum is a better platform for discussion then that is fine, however I believe they are missing a key point in blogs - freedom of direction.

In a forum you need to keep to the forum topic, whilst in a blog you can change the direction as new thoughts and ideas are established.

One of my visions was to have the students setup blogs that the rest of the class had RSS feeds for within their myMoodle interface. This would allow students to see at a glance the direction others were taking with their projects before moving into a moodle course.

At this stage to achieve this outcome I would need to have the students setup an external blog and add the RSS feeds. I believe that this would also be a more rewarding way of working at this stage.

If I have overlooked something all feedback is warmly welcomed.