Task #3

Hey -- what happened to Task 2? Dunno. "Task 2" in the syllabus asked me to title my blog article "Task 1", and now "Task 3" wants it to be "Task 3". Shrug.

Anyway, this is about the nature of blogs. Reading, writing, and so on.

One obvious thing to note about blogs is that any blog post should be reasonably short. That last one (Task 1) was pushing the TLDR envelope, I think. If you've got a lot to say, it probably should be broken up into digestible chunks, because internet readers don't want to be scrolling endlessly down a long stream of text. Breaking the long stream of text up with images or videos probably helps a little, but makes the stream even longer.

Images also help in the "ooh, hey, what's this?" aspect. Obviously, with students, that brings up the question of etiquette on linked images. Most sites hate leeching bandwidth by hotlinking images, there's fair use and copyright issues (creative commons media FTW) and proper attribution to consider. If you make your own images, there's storage and so forth to consider.

The style of blogs tends to represent the creator, and what their own slant on the material is. A couple of blogs I liked from the suggested list were very different in style. Said the Gramophone is fairly abstract -- its a music blog, but it seems to be adding a sort of free-form artistic response to the music. Music appreciation not as abstract criticism, but as personal creative expression. On the other hand, I though Kathy Shrock's Blog was a good example of a blog I might visit for practical purposes. She's got plenty of pragmatic examples of using technology in education, complete with illustrated instructions as necessary.