Learning Ecosystems

An overview of BIM (video) — by David Jones [via LearningDigitally.org]

A show and tell session around the Moodle plugin BIM. BIM aggregates individual student blogs and provides a management interface for teaching staff for marking and tracking student posts.

From bit.ly/bambim:

What is BIM?

BIM is an activity module for Moodle that provides the functionality required to allow:

• Students to register feeds.
  Be they RSS, ATOM etc and from whatever source – usually a public blog.
• Students to use that feed to respond to questions set by teaching staff.
• Teaching staff to track progress and, if so desired, mark and comment on student contributions.
• Coordinating staff to track and moderate marking by other staff.
• “Import” the marking into the Moodle gradebook.

There is a video of a presentation that gives an overview of BIM, including showing how it works for staff and students.

Earlier versions of BIM have been used mostly to manage individual student reflective blogs as described in (Jones and Luck, 2009; Reaburn, Muldoon and Bookallil, 2009).

The ELI Guide to Blogging talks about BAM, an early version of BIM.

Some additional resources about BIM are also available.