Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Onion Article

It's not just academics who use the word discourse. Take a look here.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Video Resume

You can see the video resume we talked about here.

Thursday, September 11, 2008

This class is serious business.


So is this.

Word Clouds

After you finish your literacy narrative, you may get a kick out of feeding the text into a wordcloud generator. It takes about a minute, and all you do is cut and paste text into wordle.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Bookmarking

Data, data, data. If you visit a number of websites frequently, one thing you can do is use networked tagging software to organize your information. One of the easier ones to use is delicious.

Link Link Link

I encourage you to link to the blogs of your classmates. There are all sorts of nifty features you can add, and you can see how long it has been since they were last active. Snap.

Thursday, September 4, 2008

Blog posts are easy

Simple text is the easiest way to write in your blog. You can also learn how to embed links.

If you want to get tricky, you can learn to embed images and video too.

We are going to watch a short clip about blogs. It is called Blogs in Plain English.

As you can see, blogs can be used for a number of different things. You can use them for linking, social networking, and journaling. You can use them to organize information or maintain a cheap and easy web presence.


The Knobel and Lankshear article gave you a typology of some different blogs. There were blogs that contained links to other sites with commentary, such as slashdot or the drudge report.


There are also personal blogs that serve as journals. These are becoming more common as a way for corporations or celebrities to keep fans in the loop. An example would be by an academic or a corporate entity.


Some blogs just pick up steam and become sensations. An example is the blog of Kyle Macdonald, who created his blog to document his quest to barter a paper clip into a house.



How you use your blog is up to you. I will occasionally ask that you do certain things with them, such as respond to an online text or a reading, sort of like an academic journal.

But other than the occasional request, all you need to do is actively use yours and turn it into something. You can use it to organize your lists and tags, you can provide commentary on what other people are finding on the web, and you can use it to network with your classmates.