Blogs at universities

Stephan Mosel pointed to a new weblog initiative at the University of Minnesota. This project offers a free weblog to every university member. This now makes three places in US that offer central weblog services to every member:

• Harvard University: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/
• Stanford University: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/itss/projects/blog/
• Univeristy of Minnesota: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/

Peter Baumgartner asks why german universities do not seem to get hooked by this trend:

… one can observe a general reluctance to introducing weblogs in education and teaching. From my personal point of view a fundamentally wrong conception of education is the main reason for the absence of weblogs in education. Under the still common assumption knowledge should be transferred by teachers/professors to students. [...] If weblogs are used in education on a large scale, they won’t be just an add-on but they will change radically our way of teaching. But the mentioned “if” is of major importance as the blogosphere will attack the interests of traditional teaching institutions – at least at university or postgraduate level.