"The discipline of blogging has made me a more efficient scholar"

Bill Caraher of the University of North Dakota always has something interesting to say about the process of blogging. After running an academic blog ("The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World") for two years he reflects on its value:

1. Audience.
2. Blogging as Professional and Social Networking.
3. People read blogs.
4. Content and Form.
5. Always be Composing.

Why does he blog?

The motivations comes from two sources. One, I am energized by the idea of producing text that people want to read, and, two, the discipline of blogging has made me a more efficient scholar.

That sounds like research-led blogging ...

A Primer for Blogging

Archaeologist William Caraher of the University of North Dakota has written an interesting piece about the elements of blogging ("How to write for the Pyla-Kousopetria Archaeological Project Blog: A Primer in Archaeological Blogging", April 20, 2009).

The various PKAP blogs are among the most unique aspects of our project. Our blogs inform our friends and families, bring the experiences of archaeology back to our colleges and universities, and become the face of our project on the internet. Our blogs also encourage us to think carefully about the processes and experiences of archaeological fieldwork as it takes place. At the end of each season the directors the project archive all the blog posts, and they become part of the permanent record of the project. Over the past few years, individual posts have become popular destinations on the web and continue to attract traffic even now. In fact, people remember well-written, exciting, and clever posts and bring them up to project members at social and professional events!

There are some other helpful points to bear in mind if you want your students to use blogs in a constructive way.

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Why (archaeologists) blog

Bill Caraher, an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of North Dakota who works on Late Antique Greece, has an interesting reflection,"Why blog?" on The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World.

He summarises:

1. I like to write and find the discipline of writing valuable.
2. A desire to make visible the process of writing, thinking, and revising.
3. A feeling of social obligation to a wide range of "stake holders".
4. Finding community.
5. The Death of the Note.

Why do we blog?

Windows Live Writer

I was writing a fairly positive review of Windows Live Writer, a new blogging tool from Microsoft, when it crashed on me before I could publish the article! Nonetheless, I was still sufficiently impressed to persevere.

The good news is that Live Writer does most things that you'd expect a capable word processor to do including spell checking (but no grammar check). It has the extra bits and pieces that all bloggers need including image, video and map embedding. It also has more advanced features that are nice but are often not provided, principally a WYSIWYG table editor that outputs valid HTML with a GUI that will be familiar to all word users. Other nice features include categories and tags.

Live Writer has 4 modes:

• a normal mode
• an HTML editing mode
• a WYSIWYG editing mode and
• a web preview mode (pictured)

The first two of these are essentially the same as Blogger's browser interface. Interestingly it download's style information from the live blogging site to provide good fidelity for the last two modes.

It is easy to set up, providing built-in support for Windows Live Spaces and Share Point blogs as well as interfaces to Blogger, WordPress, and Moveable Type blogs (among others). To set it up to post to the Learning Lab Blog in order to compose and post this entry, I needed the blog URL, account credentials and the blog id. After this, the Writer downloaded the style information needed for WYSYWYG editing and preview. I also tried to link it to my WordPress blog at blog.swan.ac.uk but for that I needed the URL for the publishing API which I couldn't discover (perhaps a friendly sysadmin will provide it in the comments).

The one feature that isn't turned on by default is auto save (although drafts can be saved locally on the desktop). However, you can turn this on from the options! Given my experience, I'd recommend this!

Blogging: Where do I start?

One of the helpful guides is The Rough Guide to Blogging by Jonathan Yang. It contains helpful information about choosing the right platform, setting up RSS feeds, adding podcasts, etc.

There is also a blog to accompany the Guide.

Shout out for OUseful Info!

As I mentioned it at this morning's E-Learning and Cakes session, I regularly read OUseful Info. Tony Hirst's regularly updated blog is a great source of ideas for new ways to use and mash-up Web 2.0 goodies into E-Learning resources. Tony is an E-Learning Technologist at the Open University (OU), and the OU is an institution that should really know how to do e-learning! I find I have 43 of Tony's articles starred in Google Reader and among many other things, it helped me discover Grazr, Slideshare and Pageflakes! I thought it would therefore be worth recording the link for others to share.