OK, we’ll be blogging in the IKT og lÊring or ICT and learning segment I’m teaching. How could we not? We start today, and this time we’ll be using WordPress.com‘s hosted blogs, rather than Blogspot – that way I’ll get the ease of a hosted system students can “own” after the course (good pedagogy for them to own their blogs and also I don’t have to worry about post-course comment spam) and I get trackbacks and so on. (Was it Martin who suggested this at Blogtalk?) Here’s the course blog I just set up, which will in time link to the student blogs they’ll be setting up today.
ICT, by the way, is European for Information and Communication Technology. I have no idea why the abbreviation is only in use in the EU – I suppose funding bodies describe the internet and things as ICT so everyone else follows suit so they’re eligible for funding.
M-H
It’s often called ICT in Australia too, especially in education circles. We have a committee at my university called the “ICT in Teaching and Learning Committee”.
Ali
I’m using the wordpress.com hosted blogs for my teaching this year. Only problem is that the system doesn’t like hotmail adresses so a number of my students aren’t getting signed up properly. Don’t know if this will be a problem for you, but something to be aware of.
Ali
Jill
I hadn’t realised it was ICT in Australia too – or maybe I had but hadn’t noticed or something… And WordPress and bloggign worked just fine, except their server’s rather slow. But it seems to be going well. We had fun!
Stephanie
I have done the same thing, Jill. Every semester we have a beginning blog course of some sort in the lab and this last time I switched from Blogger to WP hosted. Seems like a great alternative!
Ali, have you had any problems with gmail? I usually have 3 or 4 gmail accounts ready for those who can not access their email from the lab. No problems so far, but you never know…
Jill
I hadn’t thought of creating special gmail accounts – one of our students had his msn email refused, and so used a different address. The students who used uib.no address had to wait a few extra minutes while the UiB spamfilter’s greylist considered whether to let the email through, but apart from that all went well.
b¯rge
This is great!
I don’t know who else has suggested it (obviously), but at least I too suggested wordpress.com way back when you blogged about using Blogger.
Jill
Maybe a lot of people suggested it and I finally acted on it 😉