Three BC Universities have just received funding to use open source software to develop weblog and wiki services for higher education.

They intend to create policy recommendations, tutorials, templates, and multimedia resources that can be used by higher level education institutions in adopting and using wikis and blogs by students and faculty. I think it's a great idea, especially since they are not tied to any one service.

It was really great to see that Drupal was on the list of ideas. All of their proposals and tutorials will be Creative Commons, so it could be the beginning of creating more cohesive communities at Universities by using blogs. I think it's great! I'm looking forward to see what elements will go forward and how it will be adopted.

I have already seen one class using blogs at Simon Fraser University, my alma mater. The class was in the Communications department, and the teacher, Richard Smith, used his blog not just to disseminate class information, but to go over the class material as it relates to current news and ideas.

The class also involved an assignment for students to create their own topic-specific blogs as a part of their semester project; each topic was related to social software in some way. For example, I followed one student blog on SMS.

Richard's blog also included his commentary on the posts of his students, which I found really interesting. Not only did this help the students reflect on what they've written, as you would perhaps get in the commentary on any assignment, but now other students can post their comments too and the whole class becomes aware of material outside their own isolated projects. Not to mention, people like me outside of the school who followed their material and sometimes referenced it in posts. The class was therefore far from isolated, and their assignments far from private.

This type of interaction with the learning material through weblogs is how I'd like to see part of the proposal aimed. I don't think the use of blogs is limited to classes in the field of communications, as we can clearly see by the myriad of blog niches we have now.

Link via Jarche Consulting