Saturday, March 29, 2008

Success!

The work that you've been doing in your blogs has attracted international attention. That's great news! Have a look at the comments in this post and this post. Keep watching this space.

While we're on the topic of broadening communities, if you have a blog post that you would like to submit to Larry's EFL/ESL carnival, the deadline for that is Monday, March 31. By taking part you could broaden your readership and create links with a global audience.

Keep up the good work!

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

How do you keep track of your classmates' blogs?

You may remember me suggesting at the beginning of term that you familiarize yourself with RSS and subscribe to a service like Google Reader or Bloglines to make it easier to read your classmates' blogs. Well, I'm curious to know how you are getting on. How have you been keeping track of your classmates' blogs? Please give me some feedback by filling in the poll in the sidebar. Or you can leave your comments here.

Update
Thanks for taking part in the survey to those who did. The results are in now and for the record, here they are:
Votes: 15
I use a feed reader like Google reader: 3
I click on the links in the Blackboard course: 3
I click on the links in Christoph's blog: 2
I click on the links in my own blog: 7

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

What makes a good blog?

I've enjoyed the process of watching you come to grips with blogging over the last 8 weeks or so, and get your thoughts online. Some of the posts have been very interesting to read, and it has always been good to go into class with your perspectives on the set reading at the front of my mind: that has certainly made the teaching process a lot easier for me.

I'm curious to know what you think makes a good blog. (Do any of you read any of the teaching blogs out there?) Based on your experience of reading your classmates blogs, what are the things that most grab your attention? Is it writing style, content, the interactions and commenting on the site, presentation or a mixture of all of the above?

One way that you can try to measure the 'impact' of your blog is by searching it on Technorati. Technorati is a web-based service that indexes blogs, and currently has over 100 million blogs indexed world wide. Technorati can tell you how many blogs are linking to your blog, and records this as the 'authority' of your blog. According to Will Richardson (in his book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts) a blog that has an authority of 100 or more can be generally regarded as well-accepted by its community of readers. But that's not to say that a blog with an authority of less than 100 can't be a good blog.

So getting back to the original question, what do you think makes a good blog post? You might like to have a look at some of the blogs that I read, for ideas. I'll put them in a blog roll, in the links column.