T Blog

The good news: I’ve accepted a great position at Franklin Pierce University, as a full-time learning specialist. The not so good news is that this will prevent me from teaching my Thinking and Writing course, A Blog of One’s Own, in Fall 2008.

I’m excited to have an opportunity to serve academia and get benefits, an office, and a regular salary. Of course, it’s bittersweet not to get to teach the blog class or Women’s Studies–they’re both exciting and challenging courses.

At Franklin Pierce, I hope to continue to incorporate social media into my work, but am not sure yet how I’ll do that or on what platform I’ll maintain my online presence–I start the new job next week and will see then what’s in use at the school.  If they don’t have academic tech I might use Netvibes  or Pageflakes.

There’s a possibility I’ll be able to teach at Keene State in the spring or summer–we’ll see how it goes. I love the classes I get to teach at Keene.

One of the nice features of a blog is that readers can comment on your posts, and WordPress has a pretty good Comment management system. The amount of spammed comments on my blog has really skyrocketed over the summer, though, and every time I open my email I have ten emails to delete, notifying me of comments. An email from a student with the same situation prompted me to take a look at the options for these emails.

If you’d like to stop getting emails about comments on your Keeneweb blog, here’s how to do it:

Sign into your Keeneweb blog (http://keeneweb.org/wp-admin) and from the dashboard click on the Settings tab (it’s one of the three smaller tabs on the right side of the screen), and then click on the Discussion tab. The second box on the Discussion page contains the “Email me whenever” options. Uncheck the two boxes there and you’ll get no more emails.  Don’t forget to scroll down the the bottom to hit the Save Changes button.  You will still be able to receive comments on your posts, and you can manage the comments whenever you sign into your Keeneweb account.

The Keeneweb Wordpress software has been upgraded to version 2.5. There are some features of it I like already, such as the support of gravatars in the comments tool.

Here’s a link to a YouTube video about WordPress 2.5 that Russ Cobb in our IT department told us Keeneweb users about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxZLkTnUn34&feature=related.

I think summer is a good time for me to experiment with different templates, so this blog may have a different look every time you come to it for a while.

Here’s a video with Joi Ito (who we’ll be reading in ITW 101 a Blog of One’s Own) explaining Creative Commons and the strength of amateur content. This should be of interest to people researching or using music file-sharing, fans of Nine Inch Nails, and folks who know that information wants to be free: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bb-S0ByUwA&eurl=http://joi.ito.com/

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For Blog of One’s Own Students students who want to know their grades for the course, you can view your scores on Blackboard. It will display what you got for the major course components, and I think your My Grades view will also display a “Running Weighted Total,” which is what your grade for the course is.

This is how the final grade is calculated:  semester-long project 40%, blog 25%, attendance and participation 25%, and drafts and peer review 10%.

As you’ll see, I’ve used the KSC grade scale (A, AB, B) rather than A, A-, B+, B, since that’s the scale that is used by the Registrar in records and transcripts. The percentage equivalents are:

A 95%

AB 90%

B 85%

BC 80%

C 75%

CD 70%

D 65%

F 0-60%

I’m pleased to say that I had to use the upper end of the grade scale much more the lower, this semester!

Remember back when Laura Clawson was coming and I offered extra attendance credit for posting a question on her KeeneNing wall? Josh and Rob won the lottery on this one. (Since all the questions ranged from pretty good to excellent, I threw all the questions that weren’t repeats of ones already posted into a hat and chose two at random.

So all 17 people that posted a question get a homework credit, and the two big winners get an extra half-day’s attendance credit.

I’ve just learned about a handy software program called TextAloud. The program, which offers a free trial download, will read any computer text aloud, and even convert it to an MP3 so you can listed on your iPod or other MP3 player. (Okay, so the speech sounds like Stephen Hawking’s voice machine. But did I mention it’s free?) TextAloud is available at http://www.nextup.com/index.html.

Although many classic texts are available online for free, A Room of One’s Own hasn’t entered the public domain yet in the United States.  Interestingly, it is legal to distribute in Australia, and is availble on the University of Adelaide Library page at http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/ or at Project Gutenberg’s Australian site at http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200791h.html. The ebook can be bought legally in the US for about $7, on sites like http://www.ebooks.com/ or http://www.ebookmall.com/.

Use Google Reader to view your pod’s latest posts:

Google Reader is a free aggregating tool for reading and sharing blog posts. I’ve set up my Reader account to let me easily view the latest posts on student blogs, and thought I’d share the links for those of you that would like to keep track of your podmates’ work or want to add feeds to your sidebar (I’m offering extra credit for this right now, but the offer won’t last forever.) I’ll list the links below, and you can also find them listed in my sidebar along with the direct links to student blogs.

Lambda’s Latest Posts

Mu’s Latest Posts

Nu’s Latest Posts

Xi’s Latest Posts

Omicron’s Latest Posts

Pi’s Latest Posts

Rho’s Latest Posts

Sigma’s Latest Posts

Tau’s Latest Posts

I’m considering the possibility of providing extra credit for useful or informative class-relevant short videos or other multimedia that could be shared with the class. This might entail presenting some of your findings from your research in a podcast or PowerPoint, demonstrating the use of the 3-D scanner in the Mason Library and uploading it to YouTube, or creating a Flickr photo stream with pictures of the covers of magazines in the current periodical section of the library that cover topics in social computing.

See me to discuss possible ideas.

If your mailbox is filling up with Keene-Ning messages, you can turn it off by going to the Forum (where you participated in the “What’s Fun and Cool” discussion) and click on the “Stop Following–Don’t email me when people reply” link.

(Thanks for alerting me to this issue, Mia.)

Hi everyone: just to let you know, there’s a Brown Bag lunch at the Student Center on Thursday where the KSC webmaster, Mike Caulfield, will be talking about blogs and blogging. These “brown bag lunches” are short presentations and conversations on topics of interest to the faculty and staff, and I always enjoy the ones about instructional technology. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend due to other commitments.

By the way, I’m using the block indent button to indent the material below–some students had questions about how to do this. It’s the 7th button in the tool bar if you’re under the Visual edit tab, or the 3rd if you’re in Code edit.

Subject: Brown Bag: Using Blogs to Get Things Done

Please join us for a lively conversation about the merits of blogs and blogging. Mike Caulfield will cover some of the many approaches to professional, political, and academic blogging. The conversation will focus mostly on how blogging can dramatically increase productivity, innovation, and academic community. We will review some examples of professional and academic blogging communities and discuss how blogging might be applied to challenges that Keene State currently faces.

When: 12-1pm Thursday 2/14

Where: Student Center 309

Light refreshments will be provided.