I spent the entire week in blogs up to my eyeballs. Swimming in a sea of blogs. And there are blogs for everyone about everything and anything out there. Like all of the other information out on the web, some of it is good and some is crap. Even before reading about blogs in our two texts I was reading a couple of my friends blogs. One of my friends writes a blog as part of his job for eWeek.com where he covers Google. My other friend, who is a journalist, writes a more personal blog (www.the40yearplan.com) where he looks for answers to solve the worlds many problems.
Because of the first few classes of EDT696 I began to follow an RSS feed on Cloud Computing from the same site where my friend the Google beat, and even suggested to my students to conduct searches on Google or Bing about their favorite books, or genre of books to find blogs, and many of them came back the very next day already involved in online conversations about some of their favorite books and authors. A few of the girls called each other to both get on the same discussion thread at a Twilight blog. So the power of blogging to me really came through in the vast array of blogs out there, the topics that are being covered out there are constantly expanding.
I decided to add to the growing pool of information out on the web this week by creating a daily blog on a topic that I’m passionate about, music. After looking at a bunch of possible blogging sites to create my music blog, I chose tumblr. I liked the way that it looked, had many templates to choose from, and was very user friendly. For the past five days I have been updating the site daily and have even gotten some feed back through friends at facebook. It was great to hear that first person comment that they look forward to my daily posts to new music. You can check it out at: http://scottherman.tumblr.com/
The one thing that I didn’t like about the blog at tumblr.com was the option of visitors leaving feedback on your site wasn’t an option. So, I found a third-party site that added on that option to my blog at tumblr. The site is called disqus.com (http://disqus.com/comments/) and is awesome. Even if I want my students to see I link that I make to, lets say, a Haitian Relief effort link where we’ve discussed and studied similar information in class, now they can leave comments on the post with just their initials. They wouldn’t have to give out their names, and by using initials would all know who each other were.
And if I was to have the students set up their own blogs, I would want to give them the freedom to choose the topic that they blog about and where their blog is hosted so that they can have the same type of ownership feeling over their product as I do. Whatever they are passionate about can be turned around and compared to the literature we discuss in class, as well as the help it will give to their writing practice.
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