The recent upgrade to Blackboard has introduced a change to the blog and wiki tools that have been available inside Blackboard sites for the past few years.  The old blog and wiki tools were provided by a company called Campus Pack. They have served us well for the past years. However they are not part of the core product, so they do not integrate with some newer features like What’s New and SHUgo, our mobile app.

Blackboard now has a blog and wiki tool available as part of the core VLE.  The blog tool integrates better with the What’s New tool and SHUgo, and are available at no additional cost to the institution. As a result we have decided to transition to the Blackboard blog and wiki tools during the next year.

The new Blackboard tools have a different method of setting up than the past ones.  If you want a blog, journal or wiki for a particular group of students, you now enable that option inside the group itself whereas before you had to set up a blog or wiki and then associate it with a particular group.  The new method should prove faster to set up once you get used to it. If you set up a blog or journal at class level then they are available to each student to contribute to automatically.

Blogs are divided into two categories: blogs and journals.  Blogs are set to be shared with the entire class or group of students.  You can set up a blog so that one individual, one group, or the whole class can contribute posts to it.  Comments can be put on the blog by other people, even if they can’t write posts.

Journals are designed to be private spaces for a particular student or group and the academics on the site. By default posts cannot be seen by others, and they can only be commented on by the individual who writes posts and the staff enrolled on the site.

The integration with SHUgo means that students can now contribute blog and journal posts quickly via their mobile phones.  This should allow students to write blog posts while they are away from access to a computer or the internet. The What’s New tool on the Module Home Page will also show unread blog and journal posts to staff and students, which should help with monitoring writing in blogs.

The new wiki and blog tools lack the option for students to export their contents as HTML.  We have encouraged Blackboard to add this functionality in, but for now copy and paste will be the best way to preserve any content that is desired from those tools.  Now that students have access to past module sites throughout their course lifetime, we predict this will have less effect on students as well.

To use the old Campus Pack blog and wiki tools where they are already set up (e.g. being used with students currently), you do not need to do anything additional.  These will continue to work until July 2012.  However, if you would like to create a wiki or blog using the old tools, you can do so but you must first turn on the tool (how to turn on a tool).  Please do not set up a Campus Pack blog or wiki if you need students to use it past July 2012.