Institutional Knowledge

A huge thanks to Andrej Ciho for posting his HOWTO CAS-ify Wordpress MU. This could be a big help for us, and many other institutions that are using CAS.

Welcome to Institutional Knowledge’s new home. We’re in the process of consolidating our services and sites into a more logical configuration. Thus, our old home at http://fozzy.csuchico.edu/wordpress/ is now http://blogs.csuchico.edu/ik/. In the future, you can use our Feedburn’d RSS/Atom feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/InstitutionalKnowledge.

After a cursury exploration of MovableType 3.3 Beta it appears that there will not be any major complications making the upgrade from MT 3.2 with the current blogs we’re hosting on seaborn.

Here’s list of new features/improvements/bug fixes that should benefit us on current or future projects with MT.

• MT Upgrade can accommodate plugins
• Entry editing buttons in Safari
• MT Upgrade supports plugins
• Delete archive files for unpublished entries/categories
• SysAdmin password reset mechanism
• Blog-level entry editing screen now defaults to basic (minimal fields)
• Streamlined configuration
• Seemless support for multiple domains
• Entries with no title default to dumb basenames
• Support for HTTPS SiteURLs
• Increased font-size for entry editing textarea
• Enhanced template rebuild performance
• No longer requires unique blog names
• Improved file upload screen
• Weblogs can be created with relative SiteURLs

I attended Kristin Johnson’s staff workshop entitled, “The Blah, Blah, Blah About Blogs: Practical Applications of Blogging for Higher Education”. Being fairly familiar with blogs already, I was curious to hear how much others on campus knew about blogs. Also, having just finished the Ambient Findability, where the author described librarians as divided on the usefulness of blogs in our information society, I was interested what type of librarians we have at CSU, Chico. (In a word: forward thinking)

Kristin’s presentation was a good overview for the audience who was mostly comprised of faculty. She showed some examples of how bloggers were using the blog tool in their classroom. In addition, she pointed out a bunch of existing blogs on campus (more for the directory). There seems to be a ground swell of blogging from the library staff. It would be great if they could combine all those resources into one blog source (beta) that was officially blessed by the campus.

One of the big points that everyone kept coming back to was the problem of signal vs. noise and how do we increase information literacy so we, as consumers of information from the web, know how to weed out the useful nuggets from the mounds of junk out there.

Here’s the presentation notes which includes links to some good blogging references. She is also presenting at this years HigherEd BlogCon, check out her presentation notes which will be made available with a screencast next week.

Technorati Tags: blogs, csuchico, HigherEdBlogCon

Seems like U. Michigan has a setup to allow people to create their own Movable Type blogs. Nice… What blog service would be complete without it’s own blog?