The purpose of the CU Blog Service is to provide a supported blogging service to Cornell faculty, staff, and students. Faculty and staff members may request and administer new blogs. Students and people outside of Cornell may contribute to blogs, once given permission by the blog administrator.
CU Blogs is a free service of Cornell Information Technologies.
If you are considering using Cornell Blogs for academic purposes the following information will be helpful in understanding the law and policy around the protection of students' education records as well as copyright for both you as the faculty member and for the students.
Faculty own the copyright of original content entered into Confluence or the Cornell Blog Service according to Cornell University Copyright Policy, unless other contracts or agreements have been arranged specifically between the faculty member and the university (for example under a Faculty Innovation in Teaching Project, http://innovation.cornell.edu). Please note that students own the copyright of the content they contribute to these sites as well, unless they are working in their capacity as a Cornell employee or other holder of a university appointment.
Moreover, both faculty and students are advised to use these wiki and blog resources responsibly by observing all laws and university policy that are incorporated into the Codes of Conduct and Academic Integrity. Some specific aspects of law and policy that might be well to remember are prohibitions against copyright infringement, plagiarism, harassment or interference with the underlying technical code of software. For more information visit the CIT site on Digital Literacy, http://digitalliteracy.cornell.edu/.
Faculty should be aware that the content students enter into Cornell Blogs constitutes an education record and that FERPA regulations apply. Those regulations require that the content be protected from disclosure without student consent. Disclosure in this context includes posting student content openly on the Internet. University authentication (Kerberos sign-in) that is automatic to accessing these sites provides technical protection of education records. Faculty who intend to have students post original work openly on the Internet (for example, language classes where students' posts invite Internet user participation) may do so with the students' permission or by providing an opt out option for individual students.
All blogs have a blog upload space size limit of 1 GB with a 19 MB single file upload limit.
If a blog is inactive for more than two years, we will remove it from the system.
The CU Blogs Service is a hosted service. As such, we do not control the maintenance windows, upgrades and other software services. In the event that we are notified of any changes to the system by the vendor we will be sure to let users know in as timely a manner as possible.
The service is currently hosted by Edublogs, which is based on the Wordpress MU software. Basic user support is provided by Cornell Information Technologies (CIT) and the Cornell University Library (CUL). For more support information see Resources.
If you are interested in finding out about alternatives for those students who do not wish to have their blog made accessible to the public, or have questions, please email cublogs@cornell.edu.
