Open University bloggers

Following on from my previous post, I thought I would compile a list of current bloggers at the OU. Actually Tony Hirst had (as always) already done it, so the list below is mainly his. I've restricted it to blogs that have some life in them (a low threshold this one - one post this year is enough to qualify) and are by people working at the OU, ie not students (there is much more activity on the student front).

A couple of things strike me about the list: a) considering the size of the OU, it's not exactly big is it? b) most bloggers seem to be in the ed tech, programming, open learn side of things. My worry about this is that non ed techie people think that blogging isn't something relevant to them, and as they suspected all along, it's a nerd thing. I wonder how this list compares across other universities and what the differentiating factors might be? For instance does a top-down blogging initiative have any affect? Does the presence of one or two big name bloggers cause a trickle down? Does the institution's general attitude to technology influence uptake (for example, my guess would be that MIT has a stronger blog presence)?

Here is the list, I'd be happy to hear of any more:

Tony Hirst - http://ouseful.info

John Naughton - http://memex.naughtons.org/

Ray Corrigan - http://b2fxxx.blogspot.com/

Marc Eisenstadt http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/marc/

James Aczel http://h809.blogspot.com/

Doug Clow http://dougclow.wordpress.com

Patrick McAndrew - http://ochre.wordpress.com

Errm, me - http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/

Laura Dewis and Stuart Brown - http://conclave.open.ac.uk/openair

Alex Little - http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/alex

Steve Godwin - http://openlearn.blogspot.com/index.html

Niall Sclater - http://sclater.com/blog/

Juliette White - http://www.jvvw.com/index.php

Graphics blog - http://blogs.open.ac.uk/LTS/csn47/

Guy Carberry http://conclave.open.ac.uk/guycarberry/

Library - http://libraryissues.blogspot.com/index.html

Mikele Pasin - http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/mikele/blog

Peter Scott - http://sixfields.open.ac.uk/peterblog/index.html

Andrew Brasher - http://conclave.open.ac.uk/brasherblog/

Comments

[Tony Hirst]

There are quite a few internal blogs too - most of the VLE strands have a blog associated with them, for example, but they are all (last time I looked) hidden behind the firewall (some may even require VPN, but you'd have to check that).

For people who read blogs through a web client that does not support authentication, this means the blogs are, from the user point of view, just websites. i.e. unsubscribable to so not worth bothering calling a blog ;-); and unlikely to be visited often, if at all...

(Which I guess implies I see blogs as public things...hmmmm....maybe i need to find an authenticating online feed reader...)

At least one course team I know of (T3, err,something) is experimenting with course team blog, but they're still all a bit wary of appearing in public without an editor, so it's behind the firewall and I can't publicly tell you the URL - though if you read the ICT phoenix confs (internal speak there - sorry) you should find it...

tony

PS just giving a list of links as html is all a bit clunky isn't it?

Where's the blogroll/OPML feed?! ;-) Or at least pointwise/by blog susbscription link?

PPS I notice http://ouseful.info doesn't get any links in the post at all...