Warwick University Does Blogs

I’ve just discovered that Warwick Uni is doing blogs in a big way. They’re giving all students and staff a hosted blog, and are even grouping them by department and course. They currently have 2008 registered blogs, which seems like a good takeup rate, and 8749 blog entries. Its all powered by a ‘Blogbuilder’ backend, which they seem to have developed in-house.

Their FAQ lists some reasons why Warwick is providing blogs, summarised here:

• To create communities of interest.
• To encourage creativity and development of writing skills.
• To support ‘personal development planning’, something that all universities are apparently supposed to do.
• To help with job-hunting (employers like blogs).
• To provide a record of thoughts and events over the years spent at uni.
• To publish coursework on (great that they acknowledge this and don’t discourage it for fears of plagairism).
• To allow anyone to publish a website easily with technical skills.

All pretty good reasons I think, and it’d be good if the model (and the sofware?) could be taken up by other unis…