I got to your blog from Jim’s. Problem with Jim’s blog is that I start off with good intentions (eg find WPMU plugins) and end up spending an unconscionable amount of time reading all the other 70s stuff.
But I will endeavour to keep my focus on the task in hand and get this going.

Happy to tell help in anyway I can. I actually wan’t involved in setting up that course blog, but I can tell you how it’s running.

Basically it’s making use of a few key plugins.

The first is a WPMU plugin called Sitewide Tags which we actually have activated across the entire site. This plugin allows us to set up an aggregating blog at tags.umwblogs.org into which every post on the site is automatically fed. What’s cool is that with the posts come their associated tags. We’re then able to generate a feed based on any single tag — in this case “bioinformatics.”

Finally, on the course site we use this fantastic plugin called FeedWordpress which can be configured to syndicate content from an RSS feed and republish it in another WP blog. It’s a very powerful plugin, and we use it quite a bit for all sorts of purposes on UMW Blogs.

In this case, we simply feed the bioinformatics feed from the sitewide tags blog into FeedWordpress and voila, we’ve got course syndication. All the students have to do is remember to tag their posts appropriately.

If you’re interested in more of this, I suggest you jump over to my colleague Jim Groom’s blog (if you haven’t alrady) at bavatuesdays.com. Jim is the glue behind UMW Blogs — he gets all the credit for making what I described above possible. And on his blog you’ll find tons of info about using WPMU for a University publishing platform. You’ll have to wade through his reviews of 70 toys, B movies, and the occasional “artistic” video post, but I promise its worth it.

Thanks
Mark