Here at University of Mary Washington we've been maintaining an installation of WordPress MultiUser, called UMWBlogs for several months. We now have about 800 registered blogs from students and faculty for their teaching and learning.

To an extent, this looks like a great community of learners. But, they're all still individual blogs, and as such suffer from all the island-like qualities of any other set of blogs. There's no way, for example, to find all the blogs belonging to faculty in a particular department, nor is there a way (beyond hoping that blogrolls are present and accurate) to find blogs that are related, say, by class or topic.

And so my mission is to produce a "directory" of the blogs in UMWBlogs.

But wait! There's more! Some of our student and faculty bloggers needed plugins, themes, or customizations not available in our WPMU installation, and so they have independent WP installations on other servers. Some faculty also have blogs outside umwblogs. There are a few Drupal installations floating around being used for teaching and learning. It would also be nice for the directory to include things like some of our Omeka installation being used in a digital history class. Surely the online teaching and learning landscape will continue to change, and we'll want to be able to handle that as time goes by. That leaves me, unfortunately, needed to not be too dependent on particular plugins for the various applications.

The project starts with RDFizing as much information about what students and faculty are doing with online spaces, and turning that into a queryable resource (openness of the query is yet to be determined). I'll be using ARC2 to start trying to gather and organize the data.