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
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[Skip to the latest comment]Having spoken to James, one of our test student bloggers yesterday. He also agrees that the privacy options need to be clearer. We came up with the idea of having a separate “privacy” link next to the “edit” link on each entry that poped up all the privacy options in its own little window.
Once we get a drop down menu of some kind for creating entries, it would be really easy to add a link for each kind of group with the default permissions setup for you…good plan.
18 Jun 2004, 08:19
Robert O'Toole
A privacy option on the entry would also be good.
I think that what we need to do is see privacy (or rather targetting of entries) as being really at the heart of the system, not as just one of the settings for an entry.
We may also want to link the For My Tutor option to the MyPDP category.
18 Jun 2004, 08:29
Robert O'Toole
And perhaps some means of creating one of these templates for any arbitrary group. For example, we have heard of cases in which each student is working in a small team. Entries should be accessible to their team only.
18 Jun 2004, 08:42
Hannah
Its an interesting point about the marketing needing to reflect the blog as a private location. I’ll try and work up a design that reflects that
18 Jun 2004, 09:07
Robert O'Toole
Thanks Hannah. I think if we emphasise too much that blogs can be used in a publc way we will find it difficult to get people to use them for private or academic purposes.
18 Jun 2004, 09:13
I haven’t noticed any academics involved in this trial; I suspect it would help. Ditto PhD students, who have a lot to gain from blogging, both academically, and in a PDP sense also.
18 Jun 2004, 10:32
Robert O'Toole
Thanks for that suggestion.
The aim of this entry is just to raise a question concerning the design of the blogbuilder system to encourage certain types of blogging. It’s not to discuss our motivations for this, or the wider project. However, I will say a few words to put it into context.
We are working with academics on this, although the nature of their involvement is different due to time constraints. They will be taking part more fully in a series of pilot projects currently being planned.
As far as students are concerned, we have been dealing first of all with undergraduates as there is a fully established project for improving PDP and skills provisions for them. Similar but seperate work is now being done for postgrads, partly in response to changing requirements from the funding bodies.
I can’t really go into detail about this here, as they are projects that belong to the teams in the University concerned with student development provisions, with whom we work closely.
18 Jun 2004, 11:40
I’ve made some privacy improvements in the area of private entries and making it easier to make entries for any group.
See here
18 Jun 2004, 13:35
Robert O'Toole
Kieran, that’s great.
18 Jun 2004, 13:55
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