Summary (TL:DR)

• ScotEduBlogs is a site with aggregates Scottish Educational Blogs. This allows one to keep up with many blogs in one place.
• ScotEduBlogs is being redeveloped, simplified and streamlined, repositioning to be a hub of educators blogs (which reflects its original use).
• I’d appreciate anyone interested looking at the new site, http://scotedublogs.org (temporary url) and letting me know what you think or adding your blog if appropriate.

History

Way back at the beginning of time, well about 2005, there was a first(?) flourishing of blogging in Scottish education lead by Ewan Macintosh.

This lead to a wiki being developed, scotedublogs where folk could add their blogs, organised by Local Authority.

It became popular and this lead to the need for something better than just following links, so after some discussion here Robert Jones, helped by Pete Liddle and cheered on by myself created ScotEduBlogs, a site that aggregated and disseminated blog posts from around the ScotEduBlogosphere.

The site has been very successful in pulling together about 400 blogs for the last few years.

SEB as was was first hosted by Robert and later with sponsorship from LTS and the SQA got its own server. As of 2010 the site is sponsored by the SQA.

Over the last couple of years the site has not developed much, the SQA asked for a professional stream to try and highlight the professional posts from the ones from schools, classes and pupils and we (Robert) implemented this with a pro page.

Robert and I discussed, for time to time, making changes but we never settled on a direction, and recently site did not get many of the new Scottish educator blogs added. The site has stagnated a wee bit over the last year or two, there are a couple of problems displaying content that we did not address (mostly media embeds).

Another problem was that SEB had trouble with glow blog feeds, I am not sure how that is going to work out long term as the future of glow blogs is not too clear but personally I feel it would be great if Scottish educators had a good blogging system to use for their professional development.

Development plans

Recently I had some ideas for redeveloping the site, discussing them with Robert. This lead to a bit of thinking about how much work was involved and the fact that Robert would bear the burden of the development. Given that he now has more professional and personal commitments I suggested simplifying the site and moving it to wordpress using FeedWordPress as the aggregator. Robert is happy with this.

This is going to lead to some changes, particularly in the focus of the site. The site was originally setup when there were few pupil or class blogs in Scotland, now with eportfolios there are thousands, too many to aggregate without a lot more resources than we have. The way glow blogs server their RSS was not compatible with the site. It is compatible with the new one. I am starting out with the subset of blogs already in SEB that are tagged as professional. You can see a list of Contributing blogs.

The next steps would be to add in school and class blogs. Individual pupil blogs could be added to a list, filterable if possible but not aggregated.

I’ve started the process at http://scotedublogs.org and would appreciate any thoughts and feedback.

Hopefully this will lead firstly to some extra professional blogs being added. You can Add Your blog now, Hopefully too it will become a more streamlined and useful, from the professional/cpd point of view, site.

The look and feel of the site is basic at the moment, again I am open to suggestions for how to take this forward.

The idea at present is to run http://scotedublogs.org in parallel with http://scotedublogs.org.uk for a month or so and if there are no problems and the new site seems useful we will switch to the new system.