Blog but beware

One of the VLE training courses that I run here at the college, Moodle Web 2.0, introduces those features that are part of the standard build such as Chat, Forums, Glossaries, Blogs and RSS.



With regard to the Blog feature and the way in which we have it installed, I always emphasise the need to post a blog as 'Publish to yourself (as Draft)'.




The reason for this is two fold. For one, given the removal of the Journal facility in Moodle it is good to still have an easy means by which students can record their progress, thoughts and findings etc. Second, publishing to anyone on this site is literally that. A problem developed recently following some postings from a particular student. To begin with it turned out that tracking down the blog was not as easy I first thought. I discovered somewhat belatedly, that by simply not having the blog block running in a course, will restrict the use to only those courses and students where blogs are enabled. Beware, because if you look at the user profile screen, Blog is an active tab, allowing anyone to post.



The answer really is not to simply rely upon site defaults, but to make use of the various options available in Administration > Security > Site policies. From the available options you should be able to find one that allows you to manage blog posts. Blogs are a really useful resource, its really a matter of fine tuning.

If you have had any similar experiences with the use of blogs then please feel free to comments.