Blogs@Baruch
A ReclaimEDU Case Study
In this case study we hear from Christopher Silsby, Project Manager for Blogs@Baruch, based at the Educational Technology Office, who tells the story of:
- Blogs@Baruch‘s founding and early development;
- How the platform has developed over nearly two decades;
- Looking ahead to future developments.
Introduction
Blogs@Baruch is a pioneering platform which supports 10,000 student sites and 63,000 registered users to blog at scale. You might say it’s blogging as an enterprise level service.
We interviewed Christopher Silsby, Project Manager for Blogs@Baruch, based at the Educational Technology Office, who describes Blogs@Baruch thus:
With Blogs@Baruch we take an “education first” way of looking at technology. We work closely with faculty and students to ensure that the tools serve their educational goals, not the other way around.
When Christopher joined Baruch as a Communication Fellow with the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute, he brought not only experience in higher ed tech support but also server administration. From its founding, Blogs@Baruch was not competition with other digital infrastructure such as the Learning Management System (LMS) but a complimentary space for writing and creating aligned with educational goals and values.
Early Development
The first steps establishing Blogs@Baruch were led by Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute Director Mikhail Gershovich and Assistant Director Luke Waltzer, now the Director of the Teaching and Learning Center at the CUNY Graduate Center. They helped set up the first instance of Blogs@Baruch in 2008 with a single WordPress site, used by a single class. This was the so-called “hacking” era of education technology, inspired by an edupunk mentality and the potential of open source technologies for helping students break out of imposed molds. Christopher recalls it thus:
A single class using one site soon grew into a few classes, needing a WordPress MultiSite. Instructors were in charge of their own sites, and admins were hand-creating every account. A great use case for Blogs@Baruch in these early years was the Freshman seminar class. This class for every first-year student used a shared curriculum, but each instructor had freedom to teach in their own way. Each class had their own digital space, and then all of these “child” blogs were syndicated into one “mother” blog. It became part of the first year Baruch experience for years, and other classes, especially ones designated as “writing intensive” or "Communication Across the Curriculum," started to use it, too.
Blogs@Baruch was built on the following core beliefs:
- College students should write regularly in all disciplines and in a variety of formats and genres
- Faculty should have available support for their efforts to create avenues for student communication
- Open-source technology has an important role to play in the future of higher education, and colleges will gain much from experimenting with a wide-range of open-source technology solutions
- Community users of centrally-administered software should share both the burden and excitement of innovating with technology. While a strong support network is necessary, a do it yourself ethos should be prominent
- WordPress is a powerful, flexible, and easy to use blogging system that can be effectively customized to fulfill a wide range of the communication needs of the college community
Quickly, Blogs@Baruch became almost too popular. Centers, classes, and clubs started using it for their websites and as the service grew in popularity its demands on support and hosting started straining the existing technology.
As the service outgrew what could be accommodated on the initial webserver, different solutions were adopted to keep the community up and running, including switching to a sharded database (a process which proved successful for a period, but ultimately was laboriously reversed by Christopher with help from a blog post by Reclaim’s Co-Founder Tim Owens), and also the eventual move to a specialist hosting service (first Reclaim Cloud and then ReclaimEDU, where the site is hosted today).
Current practice
Over nearly two decades, Blogs@Baruch has established itself as a much-loved and vital part of the student experience at Baruch. It has not only grown into a stalwart of the teaching and learning infrastructure, the team has also adapted and evolved it to reflect the fast moving web students navigate today. Christopher expands on a key issue:
Students being able to publish their own thoughts, their own writing on Blogs@Baruch has become a fundamental part of their experience and yet we recognise that working on the open web is not always the most appropriate option. We have developed plug-ins that offer more flexibility, giving faculty and students choice over how openly they work and who to share their work with: whether it’s openly on the web or just in that one classroom.
Christopher and his colleague are able to tweak and customize the platform using open source tools and plug-ins in response to the changing needs of the community.
As the service continues to evolve, it doesn’t just serve the current student population, but becomes a history of its community, too, retaining sites created by generations of classes. Whether it is a discussion board, course conversations, or a website, students develop digital capabilities as they create and maintain their own space on Blogs@Baruch, from simple text to rich multimedia content. Together they experiment and learn to write and create on the web.
Looking ahead
What I really like is that even if something goes down, DNS failover keeps services online by automatically pointing traffic to the server(s) in good health. There is no longer a single point of failure. With more and more enterprise attention on the platform, it’s great to see it thrive on modern infrastructure.
Having reliable support and hosting enables Christopher to focus on maintaining both the important legacy of student sites from previous years as well as the needs of current cohorts. Modern privacy options continue to empower the Baruch community to create their own sites, make their own choices, and reflect what they want their classes to look like.
Nearly two decades on, the potential to empower people in their use of technology and their identity on the web, remains paramount. Blogs@Baruch continues to empower users as they experiment, develop digital capabilities, and forge digital identities with each other and the wider community and show just what is possible when open source technologies turn into community-driven enterprise services.
Quick Explainer
Blogs@Baruch is built on WordPress and BuddyPress, and is used for course weblogs, student journals and publications, curriculum development, administrative communication, and faculty development.
Blogs@Baruch uses ReclaimEDU hosting from Reclaim Hosting.
Thank you to all the CUNY staff who contributed to this case study, especially Christopher Silsby, Project Manager for Blogs@Baruch, based at the Educational Technology Office at Baruch College.
The case study interview was led by Reclaim’s Co-Founder, Jim Groom, and the case study was written by Dr Maren Deepwell, consultant at Reclaim Hosting.The Center for Teaching and Learning supports teaching excellence at Baruch College by facilitating a collaborative learning community in which faculty can explore student-centered pedagogies and develop and refine effective approaches to support deep and lasting learning for their students. Visit https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/ctl/ to learn more.
The Educational Technology Office supports Baruch faculty in developing engaging learning environments that enhance creativity, critical thinking, and human connection through thoughtfully integrated technology.
