If everyone blogs is it still cool?

Probably not, but blogs have become very mainstream. The blog as we know it has been around since the late 20th century. In the world of the Internet, they are not new. But many of our campus community are still wondering "what a blog?" So, from Wikipeida (which is a wiki) we find a blog is:

"... a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order."

Blogs can be about anything: personal diary; forum on local news; an outlet for dissident thought. Sites like MySpace and Facebook are next-generation blog services that incorporate many social networking aspects. Blogs can be text, photos (photoblogs), video (vlogs), audio (podcasting).

Here are a few blog hosting sites that I have tried:

• Blogger (free)
• LiveJournal (free/paid)
• MySpace (free)
  
• TypePad (paid)
• WordPress (open source, free/paid/self hosted on a PHP/MySql server)

There are many others, but I haven't used them.

MySpace is considered a blog host with social networking aspects. It has recently become very commercial with lots of advertising on the pages, but it still remains popular.

For ease of use, Blogger is my choice. It was recently aquired by Google, so Blogger now has that powerhouse behind it. The new version of Blogger is a bit buggy, but has some nifty features and is pretty dummy proof.

For customability, self-hosted WordPress is great. To get the full impact of WordPress you have to host it yourself or pay for it to be hosted for you. WordPress offers free hosting at WordPress.com, but you don't get to play with the software or plugins.

Most of the best looking blogs I have use TypePad or WordPress. And, yes, the way a blog looks is very important.

technorati tags:blogs

Keep up the good work

I am so happy that you have created this blog, and I believe after some time, people will begin to use it to air their views--will require some constant reminding on your part to do that as the faculty is basically quite conservative when it comes to making public statements in a blog--still a new avenue of communication for most. All of my courses will blog in the fall, as I have decided to experiment with this free and quite easy assessible blogging. I like that studnets/classes can now restrict who indeed gets to view--so all of the students in one class will access only to their blog--I am a still experimenting with the how of that, as well as with which blog to use..

As to a previous posting about last Friday's assessment online workshop---I posted a comment that stated, irrespective of how you teach--meaning delivery, "best practices apply"--the degree by which you use these best practices IS impacted by the delivery---so much has changed in the past 2-3 years as to how you can interact online--effectively eliminating much of the criticism directed to the online effort in the past, as opposed to the traditional. It's all about how much and what you wish to use as tools for teaching--and how much contact you desire--same is true in the traditional class---given that I teach mostly lit and writing classes, I have far far more contact with my students in the online courses, and we now video conference as well, so the 24/7(within reason) capabilities of online vastly expands the reach of any course----same is true of my non distances courses as most work is posted on the Internet for review by me and students withing a time span--far expanding the ability to share from that of just classtime in a fixed location in the past. What needs a good examination is if there is indeed any shift in the work habits of students. I have come to see that irrespective of teaching modality, the working behavior of a group of students in terms of deadlines, getting the work done etc, is pretty much the same. That was not the case in the past, as many thought the online would be easier, less work etc, and sadly discovered it was the oppositve. Also had a bit more procastination in online before, but that has also come more into line with a traditional class. Students are students, and once a teaching modality becomes standard--and online is becoming quite standard---I have seen much more similar behavior with students in either modality.

The points made by the workshop speakers apply just as well to any other type of teaching--what is causing some problems is that many who teach online/distance have not yet learned how to use online the plethora of tools available to duplicate the best practices of an excellent traditional classroom environment

WordPress on UH server

Want to host your own website and don't want to use a commercial blog service? Try hosting WordPress on a UH department account.

WordPress is a powerful personal publishing platform, and it comes with a great set of features designed to make your experience as a publisher on the Internet as easy, pleasant and appealing as possible. WordPress offers a freely distributed, standards-compliant, fast, light and free personal publishing platform, with sensible default settings and features, and an extremely customizable core.

What you need if you want to host your own WordPress blog site at UH:

• ability to do basic PHP/MySQL scripting
  
• PHP/MySQL enabled website at UH
• Access to your web server (via shell or FTP)
• A text editor
• An WebDav Client (you need to install WordPress on the remote server)
• Your web browser of choice

My experience: Other than some WebDav configuration problems (using a Mac) and configuration and addressing errors at the site and with the MySQL database (which UH ITS corrected quickly), the process was OK. I would not say it was pleasant, since I don't know PHP. I do know enough programming in other languages to make sense of the PHP scripts. Since I know SQL at an intermediate level, I found that part easy. WordPress pretty much installs itself. You only need to know PHP and MySQL if you want to change the default setup and for some of the plugins. When I get the site on the production server, I will post the URL here.