Blog Activity

Blog Activity

Preparation:

Description	Learners will create a personal blog and post to it.
Source	Courtesy of Karl Wurst and Greg Hislop
Prerequisite Knowledge	None.
Estimated Time to Completion	20-30 minutes
Learning Objectives	To understand the purpose of a blog. To create and post a blog entry. To use tags to distribute blog postings to a planet.
Materials/Environment	Access to Internet/Web and web browser.
Rights	Licensed CC BY-SA
Turn In	Nothing

Background:

According to wikipedia: [1]

"A blog (a portmanteau of the term web log) is a discussion or informational site published on the World Wide Web and consisting of discrete entries ("posts") typically displayed in reverse chronological order (the most recent post appears first). ... Many blogs provide commentary on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries; others function more as online brand advertising of a particular individual or company. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important contribution to the popularity of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (art blogs), photographs (photoblogs), videos (video blogs or "vlogs"), music (MP3 blogs), and audio (podcasts). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts. In education, blogs can be used as instructional resources. These blogs are referred to as edublogs."

Blogs provide:

• Immediate availability with long term accessibility
• No HTML knowledge required

What makes a Web site a Blog?

• Personal writing with byline
• Can be an individual or a group
• Short entries – a paragraph to a few pages
• Dated entries – usually displayed in reverse chronological order
• Themed and often opinion based
  • Business topic
  • (for personal blogs) hobby, diary, report of cat activities

Blog to blog connections are common

• Blogs cite each other
• Multiplies visibility of postings
• Expands communities

Blog posts as threaded discussion triggers

• Many blogs allow comment posting
• Blogger controls thread topic by always posting the initial thread item

Blog posts can have tags and categories

• Which can support routing or selection of posts
• RSS (and RDF and Atom) provides a push technology letting people “subscribe” to a blog
• Blog planets provide a way to collect a stream of related blog posts

Blog Planet

• Definition A: Software to aggregate blog postings from a group of blogs
  • Example: http://www.planetplanet.org/
• Definition B: A Web site that uses planet software to present an aggregation of blogs
  • Example: http://planet.fedoraproject.org/

Directions:

Part 1 - Creating a blog

If you do not already have a blog, create one at wordpress.com. Do the following:

1. Go to wordpress.com.
2. Click Get Started and fill out the form provided.
3. Fill in basic information in your profile
4. Fill in the “About” page

Part 2 - Posting to your blog

Now that you have a blog, it is time to make a post.

1. This first post should be about you, the school you teach at, the courses you typically teach and your interest in incorporating HFOSS in your coursework. It will be your introduction to the other people who will be attending the POSSE workshop in June.

Part 3 - Tagging your blog post so it appears on the TOS planet

[2]

1. Tag your post with whatever tag you will use for posts that you want to appear on the Teaching Open Source Planet (suggestion: TOS).
2. Go to Teaching Open Source (http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Main_Page) and create an account: (http://teachingopensource.org/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&type=signup&returnto=Main+Page)
3. Add the URI for the feed for the TOS tag to the Planet Feed List 9http://teachingopensource.org/index.php/Planet_Feed_List). You will have to edit the Feeds section to add the URI and your name. Follow the format of the other entries there.