Goals, overview. This week is dedicated to getting you started by having you create your personal “blog folio” – that is, a blog that serves as your portfolio during the course. Even if you have a blog now, please create a fresh one just for this course. Also, please turn commenting off for now, as we want just your work to show up on your blogfolio. We will use Felix for student discussions.
You can use any number of blogging or other social media services to do this, from Ning to MySpace. We recommend using Blogger, simply because it is easy. But feel free to use what you are comfortable with.
You have four tasks this week:
- Create your blog. To create your blog using Blogger, go to www.blogger.com, register if you need to and pick a template. That should be all you need to do. Problems? Email Jason at jasonohler@gmail.com.
- Let us know what your blog address is by posting it on the Forum. We will maintain a list of these so that your colleagues can view your work. They appear in a list on the right hand side of our class blog.
- Read about “visually differentiated text” (VDT). To do so, go to this web resource. Web writing often requires a more visually crafted approach to writing text than essay writing in order to avoid “the wall of text” effect that often makes web material hard to read. We call this VDT or “visually differentiated text.” It uses the 7 Bs: bullets, breaks, boldface, and others… Go to the web resource referenced above and read about it with the aim of trying to adopt some of the VDT techniques in your blog postings.
- Post your first blog entry. This will be a brief posting about yourself, your professional and/or academic background, and your professional objectives as a future Media Psychologist. This is your chance to introduce yourself to your fellow student cohort, as well as your faculty. Feel free to add relevant photos, videos or illustrations. Try to use visually differentiated text where it makes sense to you to do so.
- Lastly, make sure you can access your grade sheet at snapgrades.net. I should have sent each of you your name and password before the first week. The first time you log in you will need to enter the following:
- School: FGU
- City: Santa Barbara
- State: California
A word about successful blog management. A blog is often misunderstood to be a website that has to be used to host public interaction. In fact, a blog can be private, invite-only or widely publicized. And it can be used in a variety of ways.
From a functional perspective, a blog is simply a basic Web-page template for non-programmers (though it scales to programmers needs if required) that can serve multiple purposes. Using blogs successfully in your professional practice depends largely on choosing the appropriate metaphor for your application. Will your blog function as a newsletter? A debating venue? A cooperative research project?
The metaphor for your blog in this class is "a portfolio." We focus our conversation in Felix, away from your blog, and reserve your blog just for your work. The question your blog should address is: having read articles, watched media, and discussed the class material with your colleagues, what is your understanding of the topic?
