Here’s a quick suggestion for LIS faculty teaching social software courses–or for some other reason encouraging or requiring your students to create blogs.
Nothing wrong with doing that. And I see that more of them are creating subtitles instead of accepting the default (e.g., “Just another WordPress blog” for WordPress blogs).
Also nothing wrong with asking or telling them to take the next step: Add the blog to the LISWiki blog list. Gives them a little experience in wiki editing and makes the blog more visible. As with other important multilibrary wikis, LISWiki uses MediaWiki, with that wacky MediaWiki markup notation…which I’ve grown to know, but will probably never grow to love.
Here’s the suggestion:
Tell the people who decide to abandon the blog after the course that they should clean up after themselves: That is, remove the blog from the LISWiki blog list…or at least mark it “no longer being updated.”
Some of them will delete the blogs entirely. If they were purely experimental or created because they had no choice, that may be reasonable–but in that case they should particularly remove the LISWiki listing.
Right now, the LISWiki list of individual weblogs is the closest thing we have to a (reasonably) comprehensive live liblog list. (I think the LISZEN list is longer, but it’s really cluttered up with dead blogs.) It’s nice to keep it that way.
