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Seeking advice on internal blogs

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One of my goals for the coming year is to implement a new internal blog for the McGill Libraries, a space that will make it easy for news and information to be shared within and between the different branches and units that make up the Library.

We currently have a staff blog that is running on a WordPress installation administered by central IT. The blog is private, meaning that you have to login and be authenticate as a member of the Library staff to be able to access the blog.

The requirement to keep the information private makes it harder to share the information and get it out to everyone who needs to see it. RSS is essentially useless, since you can’t authenticate with popular newsreaders such as Google Reader. Yes, there is a proposed workaround with Internet Explorer and Outlook that on paper seems to allow you to subscribe to an RSS feed that requires authentication, but in my experience, the setup process is very cumbersome and doesn’t really work anyway.

To get around this, every Monday I manually compose and send out an email digest of new posts to the staff blog. Here again, the need for privacy gets in the way. I always include direct links to articles in my email message. However, when a user clicks on the link they are prompted to login, at which point they are taken to the home page and not the blog post they were interested in.

Before I start to dig into this problem, I though I would ask for advice/pointers from other folks who have tackled this problem to narrow down my field of research. Have you implemented internal blogs and how have you addressed the RSS/authentication issue?

MOOCs: Why now?

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This is a question that came to mind while I was at CNI last month, and I think it is a very important one. There are a lot of players getting involved in the promotion and development of MOOCs in higher education, and not all of them have the improvement of teaching and learning as their primary objective. Understanding the various agendas and motivations is critical if we are to take advantage of the attention and funding being directed toward these kinds of initiatives.

So: Why now?

Distance education isn’t new.

The Internet isn’t new.

The Web isn’t new.

E-learning isn’t new.

Open learning isn’t new.

This is a time of extreme financial crisis for most institutions of higher education, so there should be no crazy money available for ego projects.

And yet, we have major universities investing millions of dollars in initiatives to make their teaching and learning experience, supposedly one of their key value offerings, available to anyone for free.

Why now?

I have some ideas to potential answers to this question, but for now I think I will just let this question stand as-is.

I don’t think there is a simple answer to this question, nor do I believe that the answers are the same at every university.

I do feel very strongly, though, that anyone who cares at all about the teaching and learning that goes on in higher education needs to think about this question in their own context. They need to not only pay attention to what is happening at their college or university, but get involved in the discussions and decision-making that is happening.

Don’t get me wrong: I believe there is a tremendous amount of potential in MOOCs to do good in the world, and this renewed, wide-spread interest in teaching and learning has if anything the potential to provide the impetus for a much-needed review and revision of how teaching and learning takes place in higher education.

However, we owe it to ourselves and to our institutions to question the fundamentals of these initiatives and make sure that the priorities are in line with our goals and values.