October 16 Class Notes

Today our scheduled task was to begin Knowledge of Self activities. These include finding out about your learning style, your personality type, and your career aptitude by completing several online questionnaires. It is a way of using the internet as a kind of mirror for self-discovery.

I have had to delay these activities because I had only received 3 students' blog links! It is important for you to send the link to me because I need to see your blog in order to know that it exists. If I can see your blog, I can evaluate your participation in the course. Without the link, I do not know if you are doing anything. Many of the projects we do in this class will become posts on your blog. The blog is a kind of notebook or portfolio for you to keep and display what you have been doing. 

It's a little funny, too, because when I walked around and talked to you, everybody seemed to be working on it, so I wasn't worried, but the e-mails never arrived. Hello? 

You can send the URL or "link" to your blog to me using e-mail, or you can send it by clicking on the COMMENT button on the bottom of this post or any of my posts. When you comment on my class blog, it sends an e-mail to me. You can control this (comment moderation, e-mail notification) for your own blog in your Preferences.  

As I write this, only 7 students have been able to create a blog and send the link to me. These seven are listed in the sidebar of the class blog. If you are unable to complete the task, the class will go on, but you will have received a zero for the two class periods of work. If your blog does not appear there, please e-mail me again. 

Please experiment with using your blog. You can try a different blogging platform, as I suggested, and write to compare the two. You can experiment with the layout and design of your blog. Maybe you want to add a custom header. Try changing the font or font size in your header. Upload images or embed YouTube videos. Look at other students' blogs listed on the right to get more ideas. Some have added daily sunsets, calendars, pictures they took, and other features. 

Some students have uploaded a photo to use as a profile picture, and added a short profile. This is good, but you do not have to give your age, your birthday, or your e-mail address if you do not want to. You should be careful to remember that the blog is public, so do not write anything there that you would not write in some other public place. There will probably not be many visitors to your site, however, so do not be too afraid or paranoid. If you use Wordpress you can see daily stats automatically (how many visitors to your site, etc) but if you want to do this on Blogger, you need to take some extra steps. 

It may be a good idea to link your blog back to this blog or to other student blogs. The Blogroll Widget in Blogger is a very convenient way to do this. That is how I added the student blog links ("feed") that you see on the right side.