In a course when you have the blog menu you get the link "add an entry about this course" and when you post an entry there you get the tick box "associations - blog about (course name)" If you untick that box then it is a sitewide post; if you leave it, it is just for that course.
Mary, thanks.
Tried that, didn't work. Version Moodle 2.0.1+ (Build: 20110204)
I have a student account in a course, and Blog menu in the course, create blog post, tick and get it associated the course, and it says that at the bottom of the post "associated" , but anyone can see it.
I created a brand new user, just in case it was a roles, or shared course thing - and they could see all the blog posts.
Mary I have just checked this out on 2.0.2
See below: associated with course AND visible to the whole site.
What do you think? Is this a feature or a bug?
-Derek
Yes- I checked it myself - feature or bug depends on whether you want it or not I guess I suppose, pedantically, it is associated with a course so in the course blogs of that course it's available along with other course blog posts - but it isn't viewable only in that course - and I would prefer what you want, personally.
You got my drift.
I'm going to put something in the trracker. Lets say there are 400 engineering students (which there are) is it a good idea to flood the site with engineering stuff? Not for privacy reason, but for other sensible reasons.
But I may be wrong. It might be quite manageable.
Some alternative, optional blog systems that other people have written for Moodle let you add a blog to a course (just like you can add a forum). Our own 'OU blog' is one such.
This creates a blog which [depending on configuration] only people on that course are allowed to see. You can also use groups in a similar way, and create blogs - 'learning journals'. which only a student and teachers can see.
'OU blog' is available for Moodle 1.9.x now and we are sort of heading toward having a beta version available for 2.0 soonish. (Fully tested version will not be until September.)
If you are desperate for this facility and can't get standard blog to work (imo it is pretty useless at doing course-related stuff, I think a clear distinction between 'personal blog for whatever' and 'course blog for course stuff' is key), investigating a non-standard blog plugin might be a useful approach.
If you don't want to do that - well, in standard Moodle you can also just use forum to do basically the same sort of communication, even if it isn't called a blog!
--sam
Thank's for your comments Sam.
The world has changed for me, and I am now working with pretty well stock standard Moodle Partner hosted sites. Even getting standard contrib modules in is a big ask.
It's the categories in the blog I want. Anyone who says 'Blogs' and 'forums' are the same has not really taught a big class. With blogs functionality I can see "All posts by FRED" (To figure out where Fred is going) and "All posts on TOPIC X" (To check up on current topic). You just cannot sort by topic or person easily in a forum.
The 5 levels of interaction IMO needed are:
Sure, forums do #3. But there is no way to isolate "All posts on topic X" easily without a work around.
For us I think it is back to blogger. But I will create a tracker request.
Spontaneously good suggestion with these 5 levels and that the student can choose which when posting.
Final comment for now. I was looking at the tracker, and found MDL-25347 which requests the ability to limit blogs to courses.
There is this capability:
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Capabilities/moodle/blog:associatecourse
-Derek
Hi Derek and Sam,
thanks for taking care of this issue.
Working with children in primary schools who write lots of learning journals and want comments from their teacher and classmates, we really hoped that the new blog in 2.0 would do all this - restrict the visibility of a blog to a course and its participants or to an assignment, database, resource, etc., but allow comments. (And make a difference to a forum discussion, because it is more personal and ongoing.) But unfortunately this does not work perfectly.
Yes, I can see all the blog entries which belong to a certain course, and when the blog is on the page of a certain assignment, I can see the related posts. Fine.
But it is very easy to find links to just "Blogs". The first stop for it is the navigation block. I found the following solution: restrict the navigation to "categories and courses" and make the block invisible on site level, because from there every authenticated user can go to every blog. But this limits the navigation.
Hmmh, maybe somebody has a better idea?
Going on with testing blog-restriction:
This is not the solution (restricting the navigation block).
After writing a blog-post and saving it, I am directed to a page with the result of my writing. In the breadcrumb bar I can see "Blogs", clicking it, I am right away where I do not want to be: seeing every blogpost on the site!
