Blogs @ NTU

Blogs @ NTU

One Platform, Many Possibilities

What is blogs@NTU?

blogs@NTU is a service by OIKLS to provide a campus-wide blogging and publishing platform for the Nanyang Technological University community.

Blogs can be used for a multitude of purposes – disseminate and showcase your research, provide engaging learning opportunities, promote programmes or events, interact with a global community, and countless other possibilities.

Faculty, students and administrative staff can request for a blog to support their teaching, research, marketing or community-building activities.

By leveraging on the popular WordPress platform, it is easy for a user to start a blog. The library provides support to bring users up to speed with the latest blog features and trends in social media. Obviously for novices to blogging, this service could help them cut down learning time in building their blogs so that they can focus on what they want to achieve through a blog.

As the open source blogging platform continues to evolve over time, librarians can advise bloggers on the latest relevant feature that can enhance their blogs. Furthermore, librarians have skills in organising information which can help bloggers to structure their content better or even provide links to connect to content provided by the library.

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About blogs@NTU

Many libraries use blogs as a communication medium for outreach activities. Though NTU Libraries uses blogs in a similar way, we also focus on a different approach; that of providing a service that helps our users in their work, particularly faculty in using blogs in their teaching and research activities. Just as librarians find blogs attractive as an easy and quick medium in our communication work with users, faculty, researchers and students are also interested in using blogs in their own sphere of activities

Course & Teaching Blogs

Course blogs are used in classroom teaching and engagement with students. We have collaborated with faculty in developing blogs that supplement course instruction, managing student discussion and class contributions and also in providing a platform for an academic school to collect, store and showcase students’ works. [View Listing]

Academic & Research Blogs

An important part of academic work is the communication and sharing of research ideas and interests. Besides scholarly publications, faculty’s research output may include photographs, artwork, scholarly bibliographies, teaching videos and conference presentations. They may also be involved in organising exhibitions, performances and conferences. This is particularly prevalent with scholars in media, art and humanities fields. Some faculty have created personal websites to capture and showcase their work for wider exposure and dissemination. Others set up websites proactively to crowdsource participants for their research.
Instead of spending a lot of time and effort to set up websites personally, faculty could rely on our librarians to help them so that they can focus on their content. As such platforms add new features and capabilities regularly, our librarians who keep pace with such developments are able to provide better solutions, advice and alternatives to meet faculty needs. Collaborations with faculty in this area have been fruitful and are increasing as the completed projects showed the value of the library’s contributions. [View Listing]

Administrative Blogs

As the preferred communication channels for young people are social media tools, it is not surprising that schools and departments have been setting up blogs and Facebook sites to market their programmes and activities to potential students. In the case of blogs, schools and departments have to budget for the initial setup and yearly maintenance costs. Very often, these externally hosted blogs may not be easily identified as originating from NTU because their URLs do not have any direct association with the university. These issues are conveniently taken care of by blogs@NTU as the cost is absorbed by the Library and the blog URLs take the form http://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/name-of-blog. Together with the design and technical support offered by the Library, the blogs@NTU service has become popular with school managers and programme directors.
Some departments have a more “internal focus” to engage with our 34,000 student population and create a vibrant campus. Sharing of campus news, videos and events through blogs@NTU, departmental websites and LCD display screens placed around the campus are excellent ways to engage with the students. [View Listing]

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