Monday, January 08, 2007

New Semester -- New Blogs

I spent most of the day prepping my ENG251 class -- Topics in Prose Writing: Writing about Society and Culture -- for next semester, and I finally have the class blog site up. I've decided to have this semester's blog hosted through edublogs. This means that it is still a wordpress blog, but I chose to use edublogs for a couple of reasons: 1) bad behaviour should help reduce spam. 2) James Farmer convinced me. In fact, I plan to have my students host their individual blogs through uniblogs this semester.

The features on the ENG251 blog that I'm most excited about: del.icio.us sidebar widget that reads only those links that I've tagged as ENG251 ( thanks dave )--meaning all the online class readings can be easily accessed from the sidebar (and will automatically update as I add more); easy access to the class wikispaces space--which will also update as we build additional pages; RSS sidebar widget for those sites that are important to stay on top of.

The syllabus is posted in a most incomplete form, so that needs updating. There's much more to do, but that is the beauty of a blog--it makes the progress part of "work-in-progress" so simple (and fun).