Writing Online

Usually, when we set up a blog, we think about it for perhaps a month or two, considering its focus. In a class, we don’t have that luxury. But within a few weeks, you should finetune what you wish to write about. Once you’ve done that, then consider a title (and a tagline) that reflects that interest and write a blurb for the “About” page that tells readers what your blog is about. You’ll also want to build up a blogroll of blogs that write about that interest and create “categories” for your posts.

Today, we talked about the course requirements and mentioned the four class projects:

• blog
• website
• wikipedia article
• reflective analysis portfolio

We also created our blog and wiki accounts. For the blog, you’ll choose an interest of yours and blog about it. You’ll create a network of like-minded bloggers, putting them on your blogroll, and subscribing to their feeds and reading them. The wiki will act more as a proving ground for your ideas, documents, and so on.

Later, either today or tomorrow, I’ll start filling in the directory with your blog and wiki information, and I’ll email everyone everyone else’s blog, wiki, and subscription information. Hopefully, reading classmates’ work will give you better ideas on how to proceed with your own work.

Don’t forget as you read in the internet to post interesting links to the class del.icio.us/wic account.

One more note. When writing a blog post, if you click on “Save,” the post is saved but not published. For others to be able to read the post, you must “Publish” it.

This course will explore Writing in Cyberspace. We will look at how writing online differs from writing offline. We will also investigate the “reality” of cyberspace, along with the identities that we, and others, take, identities that differ from our offline personae. And we will read and write a lot, including maintaining our own blogs, websites, and wikis. Good luck!!

Deciding on platforms for student blogs and wikis is not easy. I have my own, but need to have the same or similar platform to my students so if something goes wrong, I have a chance of figuring it out. I do like wordpress and wikispaces, which gives edublogs the lead.