I really don't know why the VLE development has included this blog. It's not very good at all and the university already use other blog tools which are far, far better and can be configured as public-facing or only available behind SAMS. Most "in-house" blogs are Wordpress - http://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/R13-40/ - and far nicer to use.
I'm reflecting on this now (and not arriving at anything that most other folk have already said) because I'm putting together some stuff for the BBC. It's about Web 2.0 and is aimed at teachers so I'm collating a quick list of freely available tools within certain groups - "blogs" is clearly one of those groups.
Comments
Comments are back!
Just a test, but it seems a fix is in place now.
Hilary
References in Moodle blog posts
This may be of no interest, but just in case. The TELSTAR project has been looking at how References integrate into the OU's learning environment.
What we've mainly been looking at is how references can be inserted into learning materials, styled automatically in the OU Harvard style, and adding functionality like automatically adding links to online resources (where possible) and enabling students to take a copy of a reference to their own personal environment. We've also developed a new Moodle module called 'MyReferences' to help students (or staff if they want) manage their references and create bibliographies in the OU Harvard (and other) styles.
Having done this work, we have recently moved to looking at how someone (student or staff) could 'share' a reference with others - for example, if you wanted to say 'I found this really useful', or have a discussion about a particular article/website/book etc.
If you share a reference in a Moodle blog post (for example) using the functionality we've developed, we automatically add in links (again where possible) and also add 'export' options, so you can take a copy of a reference to your personal environment (either MyReferences, or a package such as Zotero or EndNote etc.)
To get to the point (sorry) - the thing that using a Moodle blog gives us in this case is control over how we process the reference - by using what Moodle calls a 'filter' we can pick up the existence of the reference, and process it before we display to the user - adding the additional functionality.
Whether this is compelling I don't know, but it is perhaps an example of where we can add value within the Moodle environment - this was much cheaper to develop than (for example) trying to do this in Wordpress, as we were reusing existing code that we'd already developed for the original functionality.
It's a bit hard to describe how it looks in words, but I think the result is nice. If any of the use of blogs/wikis etc might include posting references I'd be happy to show you what we have done and would be very interested to get your feedback on it.