The Old Betchablog

This post, as you may have noticed, is not written by me. Well, actually it IS written by me, but it’s coming from a completely different online persona in the form of a second contributing blog account. Yes, I’m finally dabbling with the multiuser aspect of WordPress, whereby a single blog can have multiple contributors. From what I can see, it seems straightforward enough.

Why would you need to multiuser blog? Educationally, I can see plenty of potential for having a single blog (set up by, say, the teacher) with multiple contributors (say, the kids) This could be a good arrangement for classroom blogging because it means you only have a single site to manage, not 30 of them! My previous foray into classroom blogging – found here – was set up in a way that had me create the main blog page and then the kids all created their own blog pages and then we all cross linked to each others stuff. Of course, this meant there were lots of blogs to look at, comment on and monitor. In the case of my class this arrangement worked really quite well, but there may be other situations when a shared blog is a much better way to go. It depends on what you plan to do with it I suppose.

My only concern with a multiuser blog would be what I call the “river of information”… a situation where the information flows past you in a continuous stream of stuff, relentlessly pushing new content down the page. In a situation where many new posts were being added very regularly, this could become hard to manage mentally, as unless you checked it all the time you would be likely to miss things. Of course, this is where RSS comes into play by providing an effective mechanism for pushing the content to you rather than having you have to go hunting for it. Still, I think there are situations where a single, multiuser blog is a better option than a series of multiple, single-user blogs.

Anyway, at least I know how to set one up now.