BAM – Blog Aggregation Management

The Blog Aggregation Management (BAM) project developed and supported a system that helped teaching staff in the use of web logs in learning and teaching. The initial focus is on an approach where each individual student uses their own blog as a reflective journal. The first use of BAM in 2006 and some small discussion of recent work is included in a 2009 paper

Other descriptions of the project are currently available in:

What BAM is not

BAM does not implement a blog engine. It is expected that students will use any one of the numerous free hosted blog services available on the web.

What BAM does

BAM provides a simple, effective management interface that integrates with existing university systems with these external blog services in order to allow staff to track, view and assess student use of the blogs.

Current status

Currently BAM is based on Webfuse an information system to support e-learning at CQUniversity. Webfuse, in its current guise, will cease to exist come early 2010 as CQUni adopts Moodle as its LMS. A proposal is currently being worked on to integrate BAM like services into Moodle. If successful, it is hoped this would be available by early 2010 as an open source component for integration into Moodle.

Since development in mid-2006 BAM has been used:

  • In 26 different course offerings of 7 different courses.
  • By 2050+ students.
  • And 16000+ blog posts.

Additional history and reflection is available on my blog.

Presentations

This first presentation was given in early 2006 and outlines some of the early thoughts, rationale and design decisions behind BAM’s initial use. Important: use the controller at the bottom to start the video at 3 minutes 50 seconds into the video. The early part shows some set up of the on-campus presentation.

This one took place about half way through the term in which BAM was used for the first time. About 3/4 months after the above presentation. Important: use the controller at the bottom to start the video at 3 minutes 30 seconds into the video. The early part shows some set up of the on-campus presentation.

11 Responses to “BAM – Blog Aggregation Management”

  1. Blogs in E-Learning: BAM, Moodle and a taxonomy of educational aggregation projects? « The Weblog of (a) David Jones Says:
    February 24, 2009 at 9:24 pm

    [...] Blog Aggregation Management (BAM) Project is a 3 year old project to extend some of the ideas (especially small pieces loosely joined) behind [...]

  2. Down with the cookie-cutter LMS: the Edupunk ideology and why integrated systems might go away « The Weblog of (a) David Jones Says:
    February 25, 2009 at 8:46 am

    [...] an e-learning course using existing online services. I’ve been involved in two such projects: BAM and Web 2.0 course [...]

  3. Minute papers - encouraging relection? « The Weblog of (a) David Jones Says:
    February 27, 2009 at 9:20 am

    [...] papers – encouraging relection? Part of the rationale for developing and using BAM had its origins in this unpublished paper (Jones, 2005). A part of the paper talks about minute [...]

  4. Some potential updates to BAM - a step towards breaking the LMS/CMS orthodoxy « The Weblog of (a) David Jones Says:
    March 2, 2009 at 3:40 pm

    [...] to BAM – a step towards breaking the LMS/CMS orthodoxy The initial design and use of the Blog Aggregation Management (BAM) system was, in part, designed to try out approaches that leverage the protean nature of information [...]

  5. The protean nature of modern technology - another limitation of most views of e-learning « The Weblog of (a) David Jones Says:
    March 6, 2009 at 8:54 am

    [...] protean possibilities of the Webfuse model. The first experiment with these possibilities was the Blog Aggregation (BAM) Project. The second was the “web 2.0 course site” [...]

  6. Getting feeds out of BAM - the first steps « The Weblog of (a) David Jones Says:
    March 10, 2009 at 3:37 pm

    [...] feeds out of BAM – the first steps The Blog Aggregation Management (BAM) project is an attempt to be a bit more Web 2.0/SaaS in the implementation of e-learning within a [...]

  7. Cooked course feeds - An approach to bringing the PLEs@CQUni, BAM and Indicators projects together? « The Weblog of (a) David Jones Says:
    March 11, 2009 at 9:13 am

    [...] The Blog Aggregation Management (BAM) project now generates an OPML feed unique for each individual staff member to track their students’ [...]

  8. First official BAM paper done « The Weblog of (a) David Jones Says:
    April 30, 2009 at 9:22 am

    [...] official BAM paper done BAM – Blog Aggregation Management is a project I started in early 2006 to play around with two sets of [...]

  9. Diagnosing and recording a problem with BAM « The Weblog of (a) David Jones Says:
    May 19, 2009 at 1:14 pm

    [...] recording a problem with BAM Trying out a new approach to documentation of coding changes to BAM – i.e. writing it up in a [...]

  10. The teaching/research nexus – an example? « The Weblog of (a) David Jones Says:
    June 5, 2009 at 9:47 am

    [...] taught courses on information systems development. For that particular course offering I developed the BAM project/tool as a way to encourage students to keep reflective journals using their own individual blog. The [...]

  11. Integrating BAM into Moodle – Can it be done? « The Weblog of (a) David Jones Says:
    July 9, 2009 at 3:14 pm

    [...] BAM into Moodle – Can it be done? Blog Aggregation Management (BAM) is a little project of mine that’s been going since 2006. It’s an example of, [...]

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