A: Since 28-Aug-2010 I’ve been blogging using the service developed by my employer.

I’ve written about the value of teachers and students using the blogED service to display their work and start conversations, and this has motivated some of my students, and created discussion about appropriate online comments and privacy concerns.

However, for my personal use I’ve decided to try other providers, and after considering wordpress, my ISP, and some other choices, I’m going with blogger, mainly because it links into Google+.

The catalyst for this change was that the blogED service archives all blogs during the December-January vacation, and unless I have prior written consent from my principal, I can’t create or edit any posts.

When I emailed the IT helpdesk about this a senior support analyst advised why this was necessary:

The “No blog creation” option is business decision. The reason is that during the summer holidays the student rollover process is executed to include the new year students. As the process was completed last week the provisioning for all staff/students/groups to blogED has commenced this week. Until this process is complete, however, the new students/groups won’t be available to the staff to add to blogs.

I understand there are also (legal) privacy issues, where school staff are not allowed to communicate with the students during this school holiday period. We have, however, escalated the issue for you.

• Email 11-Jan-2012 9:51AM
• name withheld as analyst did not respond to invitation to discuss this issue on corporate micro-blogging service

BlogED must be a complex machine, trying to authenticate staff and students and allow permission rights. So to avoid that hassle, I’ll start using blogger.

I guess I’ll also transfer old posts here and back-date them. Apologies that I won’t be able to republish comments, but I might include them at the bottom of the posts.