Where to host. I've been talking to university people who know much more than I do about the tech side of weblog hosting, and the issue of the best place for students to have their school weblogs came up. The simple summary of the conversations is this:

The poshest part of a university site is behind expensive protective barriers on expensive equipment and is meant to represent the institution at its most formal. Student work, or any rough process rather than polished product work, raises problems here. Also, weblogs should last longer than a semester, but it's not currently the university's job to host outside of a course.

Hosting by commercial or free providers solves those problems but raises others, since there is less control over the security of students' work, less control over its environment, but no problem with process work and no difficulty carrying on after the semester.

One friend in the IT business said, however, that there may come a time when a university expects to support a second, less formal space for hosting process work, and that this space will be defined differently than the university's dress formal website. Here the rough process work of weblogs and wikis can go on, presumably, with less concern about appearances.

That's the theory I like best, but as we know from the spirit of the big closed classroom management tools, though, that openness may be too dangerous for a campus to face any time soon. I guess I'll learn more about this as we host student blogs on campus for the first time this fall. [0 & P]