All entries for Friday 18 June 2004

June 18, 2004

Defining/limiting the purpose of an entry

I spent all night worrying about BlogBuilder again. I'm thinking about what we can do to make it more likely that people will accept it as a place to write about their academic work and their PDP (personal development process), as well as an entirely private location for recording and reflection. I'm also concerned that they might see it as being only a tool for public communication, or even as only being for people who like to show off (like me), in which case its use will be limited.

The messages that we give in our marketing of the system will effect this. Also of importance will be the effects of the BlogBuilder homepage aggregator, which tends to skew the use of the system. But I think we may be able to do something to the interface to make it much more obvious that it can be used in ways other than for public communication.

The idea is that instead of poeople creating a new entry of a generic type, they choose from entry types that have a specific purpose. That makes the idea that blogging can be used for different purposes much more obvious and ever present for the user. This is how it would work…

When selecting 'create new entry' the user must choose a type of entry from the following options:

Public entry (the default)
Personal note (totally private)
For my friends only (using the friends group they have set up)
For my tutor (some difficulties here)
For my lecturer (they would then need to specify the lecturer)
For my course
For my department

Note that some of these requirements have been raised in talks to course teams who are thinking about using blogging, as well as by the PDP team. For example, the Dept of Public Health and Social Policy are keen to use it but want to be sure that privacy settings are easy to use and targeted carefully. There may be others option that we need to provide.

Just to reiterate, although it would be possible for uses to set privacy options using the current approach, I think we need to make it easier for them, and more obvious that they can target their blogging at specific groups. That targeting needs to be much more prominent.


Robert O'Toole : 18 Jun 2004 08:12 |  Comments (9) |  Report a problem