What is blogs@NTU?
You may have seen, heard about, or even used blogs@NTU during the course of your studies or research – and then wondered what it is really about? Well, blogs@NTU is a service by NTU Library to provide a campus-wide blogging and publishing platform for the Nanyang Technological University community.
So why use blogs@NTU?
Beyond the original usage of blogs for recording and sharing your thoughts, it is easy for a user to start a blog site by leveraging on the popular WordPress platform, which can then be used for a wide range 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 providing guidance on using WordPress and its features, NTU Library helps you to cut down the time needed to build up the blog – letting you focus on what you want to communicate. The librarians also provide advice on organising and structuring information better and connecting with content provided by the library.
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.
How is blogs@NTU used?
As mentioned above, faculty, researchers, students, and administrative staff have used blogs@NTU to build sites with a range of purposes, and generally speaking there are three broad categories, detailed below:
Academic & Research
- Academic profiles can be used to increase your online visibility
- Research sites allow you to showcase the output of your group
- Course blogs lets your students have online interaction with each other
Community & Portfolios
- Community blogs provide a place for students to share their activities
- Graduate blogs lets graduates show their research experience or projects
- Showcases allows a school to display a wide range of their student works
Admin & Outreach
- Admin sites can be used as specialised micro-sites for admin initiatives
- Event sites can be used to host conference information and papers
- Library blog is used to share timely updates or interesting information
