BAM

1 What is BAM
2 How has it been used
3 How does it work
4 How to resources
5 Other resources
6 More information

What is BAM

BAM stands for Blog Aggregation Management.

BAM is a collection of Perl scripts integrated into CQU's institutional systems which aggregates a collection of RSS feeds (usually from blogs used by individual students) and provides a management interface that can be used by CQU staff to view and mark student posts. The results are able to be imported directly into CQU's student administration systems.

An original assumption in the design of BAM was that it would be used mostly as a mechanism to support the use of individual student reflective journals.

This page offers a basic description of how BAM operates.

How has it been used

BAM was first used in T2, 2006 in the CQU course COIS20025, Systems Development Overview and has been used every term since then for that course. The course COIS12073, Enterprise Systems used BAM in T2, 2007. As of late 2008 BAM has been used by 1000+ CQU students in 13 different course offerings.

BAM has also been used in the course EDED11448, Creating Futuring to aggregate and create the student portfolios and weblogs.

How does it work

BAM is configured for a particular course.

This usually involves providing the course code, assignment title and the list of questions the students will respond to on their blogs. The questions are optional. But if provided BAM will attempt to automatically allocate student blog posts to specific questions based on the content. This helps staff track and observe which students have answered which questions. The questions also provide some scaffolding.

Students create their blog on some external blog provider (Wordpress is the current recommended service).

To learn about what a blog is take a look at the Blogs in Plain English video. The assumption is that a blog owned by the student provides a sense of ownership. A private place for them to post their thoughts.

Students register their blog with BAM by logging into a page and copying in the URL of their blog.

Having each student own a blog could make it very difficult for teaching staff to track what is going on. BAM brings these blogs together and provides a management interface for staff.

This is done by students logging into a standard web page using their CQU student credentials for their course. The web page asks the student to enter the URL of the blog they have just created. The script url is http://webfuse.cqu.edu.au/wf/object/BamRegister?COURSE=coursecode&PERIOD=period&YEAR=year&A_TITLE=a_title where the words on the right hand side of the equals signs are replaced by the appropriate CQU values (e.g. COIS20025 T2 2006 Item_1).

Students now forget about BAM and use their blog.
BAM regularly (every couple of hours) will mirror each students blog

BAM uses the RSS feed generated by each students blog to keep a copy of all content on a CQU computer. For more information about RSS take a look at the RSS in Plain English video

BAM will examine the content of the posts and if they match a question allocate that post to the question

Academic staff use the BAM management interface to view and possibly mark their students blogs

The BAM Manage link is available from StaffMyCQU.

At the end of term the blog results are integrated into CQU's results processing system.

How to resources

A very brief collection of "how tos" associated with BAM.

Before you look at these "how tos" please look at the following videos

The local "how tos" include:

How to read BAM feeds from a news reader

BAM's interface is primarily to mark student contributions. If you want to participate more with the students and their blogs it's best to use a news reader.

Other resources

There are a collection of other BAM resources, including:

The initial BAM project page.

Which contains a range of information about the rationale and original design for BAM. Includes a couple of presentations on BAM including slides and audio.

An article published in late 2006 which describes the original use of BAM.
A section of ELI's Guide to Blogging described the initial use of BAM.
Example descriptions of assignments using BAM that have been provided to students in courses that using BAM: COIS12073 and COIS20025 (you may see some similarity).