I'm exploring 
tiki as a system for providing blogs and other resources. It's a lot more complicated than phpwiki, but provides a lot more control over the layout of the page, with modules and trackers. It can also do polls and quizzes and surveys... You get the picture. What I'm really thinking about is asking students to write brief reflective essays about their learning in a blog-like journal. I had students write journals last semester in my writing course, but the writing was to be focused on biology (though many of the students wrote about other topics as well). What would be really valuable, though, is to get students to read each other's writing and to comment about it. Serious dialog and debate would make the experience much richer. It's hard to build a system that provides incentives naturally, rather than imposing some arbitrary reward scheme for participation. If anyone has any good ideas, let me know.
I had my BCRC staff to my house for a pizza party this evening. I used to have the staff meet in an abandoned classroom and just ordered pizza to be delivered. I think this is a lot better, actually. When I was an undergraduate, my advisor had all of his advisees to his house for dinner every year. I remember it as a tense, uncomfortable evening dressed up and trying to act proper. I just make four pizzas and have everyone around a big table to get to know one another. I haven't always been able to get everyone to come, but this evening I got almost everyone here. I think it gets better every time I do it. My older son helped a lot. He made an attendance list and checked people off as they came in. He then served punch to everyone during dinner. Afterwards he organized games in the living room.
A colleague in the library forwarded me this article which describes how librarians have been pushed to the forefront of battles to protect the rights of people to access information on the internet. I'm not sure most people have noticed, but libraries are one of those things that the current media conglomerates wish had never been created and are trying hard to make sure that digital media simply can't be accessed in library-like ways.