Blogs

Blogs Wishlist

Its great to have blogs on Moodle, but we should expect more of Moodle's blogs. Let's make a wishlist.

How do I link to a specific Blog entry ?

The so called blogosphere bores out of the inter-linking between blog entries, but right now you don't know how to link to a concrete blog entry. Blog entries should have a link to refer themselves. We can only link user's blogs to categories.

Blog entry resume

A view of the blogs entries that gives only 3-5 lines of the blog entry, so a reader can view a lot of entries on one site and click on a "continue reading" link or so on.

Block Blog Tools

Some blog tools to view blog entries that wolud be nice to have:

• Last Blog entries.
  • per user
  • per category
  • per course
  • per site
• Blog search
• Most readed, commented voted blog entries ( and vote for blog entry, of course )

Blogs as course activities?

Blogs were touted as replacing the Journal activity, which was a course level activity for reflective writing etc. The blogs system as of v1.6 seems to remove blogs from the context of courses (excluding course-level tags) even though they can be accessed from within the course through the Blogs block. The admininstration of blogs seems to be a rather broad brush - once the settings are specified centrally on the server they can't be modified. A vision for this might be:

• Blog as an Activity in a course
  • Teacher able to set up blog with various parameters and should be able to:
    • Specifiy a timeframe for when blog needs to be posted. How would this work? Suggest a label with posting date and make the date red if it's after the due date/time.
    • Label all posts in response to this activity with certain tags. Implement an RSS feed for each tag to aggregate all blog postings with that tag.
    • Decide whether this particular blog activity is visible to course/group/institution/teacher & pupil only/the wider world. In other words, set default posting permission on the student's blog entry associated with this Activity (should be fun to implement :-). Should this be changeable by the student? Eg if the student wants her posting viewed by the world, then why not?
    • Should this be an assessed activity? If it's really replacing Journal, then almost certainly... Could use a similar system to Forums.
  • Blog posts which come out of this activity should be part of the user's wider personal blog
  • If comments do happen on blogs, then each course-centred blog should be able to accept comments just from teachers, from peers, or from no-one
  • Commenting parameters. A 'Blogging Activity' could ask for 1 posting and 3 comments on other blogs per student. When making a comment on another student's blog entry the student would have to choose a specific comment tag generated from this assignment from a pulldown list. Then an RSS feed for this tag could be aggregated into a single box for quick checking by the Teacher.