Segue went into production at Middlebury in the fall of 2003. It has been used primarily for the creation of course websites and curricular resource sites.  It has also been used extensively by the Teacher Education program for student portfolios.

Below are some usage statistics that should give a better sense of how Segue is currently being used.

Middlebury community users can authenticate into Segue using their Middlebury user accounts.  Visitors can register for a Segue account.  Below are the number of users that have logged into Segue v1 since it went into production at Middlebury in 2003.

Segue v2 went into production at Middlebury in August 2008, though was in limited use at Middlebury for about 6 months prior to being in production.  Below are the number of users that have logged into Segue over this time period

Segue is content management system that has support for managing courses.  About 50% of the sites in Segue v1 were course sites.  The remaining sites were either personal sites or sites created for a given curriculum of study, projects, e-portfolios, departments and other types of sites.

On average, about 25%-30% of courses use Segues for course websites.  The majority of course sites are made with Segue.  Some course sites have also been created in WordPress and MediaWiki.  Some courses use a combination of Segue and WordPress or some other application.

Some faculty chose to create course sites or distribute course material in the courses folders on the classes server.  Course folders include a PUBLIC_HTML folder for a course site, a share folder for sharing documents amongst class participants, a drop box with sub-folders for each student in the class and a Students folder.

Faculty who most frequently use course folders to distribute class material or to create the course sites are the following:
John Isham (Economics, Environmental Studies, First Year Seminar Program)
Michael Olinick (Mathematics)
Holly Allen (American Civilization & Literature, American Studies, First Year Seminar)
Kareem Khalifa (Philosophy)
Frank Swenton (Mathematics)
James Berg (English and American Literature, First Year Seminar)
Don Mitchell (English)
David Horlacher (Economics)

Faculty who frequently use Segue include:
Patricia Saldarriaga (Spanish)
Mary Ellen Bertolini (Writing Program, First Year Seminars)
Hector Vila (Writing Program, Teacher Education, English & America Literatures, First Year Seminars)
Susan M DeSimone (Biology)
Claudia Cooper (English, English & American Literature, Teacher Education)
Nancy O’Connor (French)
Natasha Chang (Italian, Literature, First Year Semnar)

Segue supports the hierarchical organization of content within sites.  Sites can contain sections, pages and content blocks.  Segue also supports tagging (or associative organization).  Content blocks can be tagged by authors and editors and tag clouds can be displayed for any node in a site (i.e. tag clouds can be displayed for only the tags applied to content blocks in a given section and/or page of a site)

Segue includes a number of plugins that can be used whereever content blocks are added to a site.  Within content blocks, users can safely embed code from trusted sources such as YouTube and Google, as well as MiddMedia, Middlebury’s YouTube-like media server application.

Use Cases:

Audio:
The audio content block type was introduced to Segue v2 in last August 2008.  Most of the audio resources sites created in Segue v1 have yet to be migrated to v2.  Here is a sample of Segue v2 sites that use the audio plugin:

Música, cinema e literatura no Brasil do século XX (Fernando Rocha)
Introduction to Western Music (Brian Robison)
Japanese 0401 (Mark Silver)

Here’s a sample of Segue v1 audio resource sites:

Video
Video can be embedded in Segue content blocks using the video text template.  This template supports embedding video from trusted video sharing sites such as YouTube, Vimeo, Hulu and Google.  Videos can also be embedded from MiddMedia (the application behind MiddTube).  Here is a sample of Segue v2 sites that include embedded video clips:

MiddMedia video clips:
Reflet (Alex Chapin)
Paris City of Exile (Chuck Nunley)
Segue Project Site (Alex Chapin & Adam Franco)
Biology Equipment (Susan DeSimone)

Other video clips:
The United States and the World since 1898 (Joyce Mao) – 7 YouTube video clips
society and the individual (Lynn Owens) – 5 YouTube video clips
Media, Sports and Identity (Hector Vila) – 5 YouTube video clips
America and the Pacific (Joyce Mao) – 3 YouTube video clips

RSS Feed Display
Segue can display RSS feeds anywhere content can be placed.  Segue’s RSS plugin supports various abstractions of feeds including title only or title and description.  Here is a sample of Segue v2 sites that include RSS feeds:

Jane Austen and Film 08 (Mary Ellen Bertolini)
Les Intellectuals (Thierry Leterre)
Curricular Technology (Alex Chapin)

Tags
Tags can be added to any content block in Segue.  Segue v1 has around 700 tags that have been added by users.  Segue v2 has around 200, see: Segue Tags.  These can be displayed using the tag cloud display plugin (though this is still in development.  Here’s one Segue v2 sites that has a tag cloud display:

Jane Austen and Film 08 (Mary Ellen Bertolini)
Technologies for Teaching, Learning and Research (Middlebury College academic technologists)

Google Maps
Google Maps can be embedded in Segue content blocks using the Google Maps text template.  This hasn’t been used much yet.  Here’s an example:

Appalachian Trout (Matt Dickerson)

Google Calendar
Google Calendars can be embedded in Segue content blocks using the Google Maps text template.  This hasn’t been used much yet and is still in development.  Here’s an example:

Media, Sports and Identity (Hector Vila)

Any content block in Segue can be enabled for discussion in the same way that any blog post in a blogging application can be enabled for discussion.  Segue discussion differs from most blogging tools in that Segue discussions can be threaded and sorted in various ways including recent first, recent last and by author.  Most course management systems do NOT model their online discussion on blogs, but rather provide forum like discussion UI’s.

Usage statistics indicate that Segue is used a fair amount for online discussions.

Segue allows users to make use of hierarchy to organize content.  Most blogs only allow users to create blog posts or pages.  Most wikis only allow users to create pages.  Most course management systems only allow users to create files and folders and rarely allow users to view the contents of more than one file at a time.  Segue allows users to create sections, pages and content blocks and maps these to a navigation (like most content management systems)

• Percentage of pages with more than one content block (i.e. pages which make use of microcontent)
• Percentage of sites with sections (i.e. 2 levels of hierarchical organization)
• Percentage of sites with sections within sections (i.e. 3 levels of hierarchical organization)
• Percentage of sites with 4 or more levels of hierarchical organization

Segue allows users to choose a theme (i.e. design or appearance) for their site.  Unlike most web applications that support theming, Segue allows "regular" users (i.e. non system administrators) to modify themes in 2 ways.  Segue provides a UI for theme options for most themes that allows users to chose theme variations and Segue allows users to modify the CSS and HTML markup for themed components.  Segue also allows users to chose a template (i.e. specific layout/configuration of sections/pages/content blocks) for their site.  Templates are only starting points for a site and can be fully modified later.  

Number of sites that use custom theme options: 157 (27% of all sites)
Average number of custom options selected: 2.88

Segue has a relatively unique content rendering engine that allows users to layout the content of their sites in innovative ways.  Most content management systems either: 1) include content layout as part of the theme (e.g. WordPress) or 2) provide a set of layouts to chose from (e.g. Drupal Panel module) or 3) provide users a general 3-column layout (e.g. Moodle). 

Segue allows users to define a different layout of content for each page of a site as well as define a hierarchy of layout containers to control the context.  For example a section sidebar is displayed on all pages of a given section, whereas a page sidebar is displayed only for the page in which it has been defined. 

In addition to sidebars, it is possible to define "top bars", content containers that remain at the top of a page that is formatted independent of another content container below them on the same page.  This allows uers to ensure "explanatory" or "introductory" content remains at the top of a page that is otherwise filled with content blocks sorted recent first.  An example use case would case would be a single site containing many different blogs on different pages.  The "top bar" could describe that blog on that page and distinguish it from other blogs on that site.  

• Percentage/number of sites with page sidebars
• Percentage/number of sites with section sidebars
• Percentage/number of sites with both page and section sidebars
• Percentage/number of sites with page "top bars"
• Percentage/number of sites with section "top bars"
• Percentage/number of sites with both page and section "top bars"