If you’re interested in starting a class blog, it’s fairly easy.  Just go to blogs.butler.edu for a simple tutorial or stop by Instructional Resources in the basement of Jordan Hall.  They’re happy to help.

As you think about how public you want to make your blog, know that there are several different ways of hosting blogs with different levels of “searchability.” The FYS blog, for instance, is done on WordPress through Butler and can only be seen by those who receive the address, in this case FYS instructors. The audience is FYS instructors/administrators only.  If you’re reading this now, you know the secret address.  You can’t read it unless you do.  You can give the secret address to someone else, but hopefully it will only be someone who is interested in teaching FYS.

In that way, a blog can be much like posting things on Blackboard–just prettier and more user friendly. As is true of Blackboard, the contents (student papers, syllabi, comments we make to one another, internal documents) of this blog won’t show up on any search engine. You can’t google anything that shows up here, in other words.

Robin’s blog is another example of an internal Butler blog. It was created for the use of students enrolled in the course and now lives on the FYS Blog to serve as the example of a plug-in useful for those of us teaching FYS. We have permission to view the papers and to read Robin’s comments but not to copy students’ papers or use them in any other context. Subtle reminder there.

On the other hand, the website my class created was hosted on Blogger and was intended to work more like an online magazine.  The papers were written specifically for the blog. I think I’ll use WordPress next time, because it’s easier, but I think I will continue to get student permission, operate it as a magazine, and make the site both public and moderately searchable. The downside of making it public is that not all the papers are equally good or very well edited and everyone sees that. The advantage, though, is that the students had readers, including (in addition to parents and friends) some readers in England, Russia, and India. They loved this, and I think they wrote differently because of it.

Brave new world! I hope we can continue discussions about all of this both on the blog and at the beginning of the new semester.
Susan Neville