About OSinEd
March 16, 2008
Once we agree upon the goals and writing membership of this blog, we will share this information with you. Until then, use the links on this blog and search the internet to learn more about FLOSS and Linux distros. Check out Ubuntu and Edubuntu. That should fill your head up until we get this blog and its sister wiki up and going.
Thanks for your patience.
March 22, 2008 at 1:08 pm
I have not really blogged before, so I might need some help. How do you decide what to set up for categories? How is FOSS in Education different from Teacher Resources?
I see there you have had 30 hits, but I only read a comment posted by Judy. Does that mean people are here checking/reading and just not posting? Is your blog open to the public? How do folks happen along on your blog?
Thanks for this opportunity to blog and read about open source.
March 22, 2008 at 10:06 pm
The one nice thing about blogs is that you can create whatever categories you wish to have and delete or change the names of categories if you wish. I just brainstormed a list and created them. I thought that FOSS in Education would be more about opportunities for using FOSS and suggested software programs where teacher resources might be things like tutorials and suggested lesson plans, etc. If an author wishes, she/he can check both boxes when posting and it goes into both categories. Posts can be part of more than one category and also have more than one tag. I haven’t relied on tags so much, but you can have a tag cloud in the sidebar. By clicking on a tag you will go to all posts/articles that have been given that tag.
Most people read on the internet and don’t post to blogs for a variety of reasons. It may be similar to some concerns that people have responding in listservs. This blog is open to the public. So anyone can access this blog and most find it by doing searches in their web browsers. Along with the blog stats, you can see how people came to your blog. Some bloggers have links to other related blogs and you can see when people visit coming from other sites.
In order to create your own post with title (kinda like starting a new thread), you need to register with wordpress.com and let the creator of the blog know that you would like to add original content and not just comment on existing posts. I simply add your name to the users list and set you up as an author, editor, or administrator depending on what works best for the blog. I feel the weakness of blogs is that most of the writing is done by one person. I hope this blog or a new one that we establish have several contributing authors. Then the bloggers don’t feel stressed to continue to come up with new content to keep the blog viable. Would you like to learn more and become an author?
Another thing you may notice is that this is a page (not a “post”
and I set up the “pages” not to be seen in the list of articles (posts) listed from the most recent to the oldest. You can have your blog open with a page and it looks more like a conventional webpage.
It’s really easy to set up a blog. It’s very time-consuming writing and maintaining one if it is active. I think it is important to respond to questions from readers. I get an email every time a new comment is put on one of my blogs. I try to respond to the individuals email and also respond in the blog.
I learned about blogging by starting a basketball officials learning blog (http://iaabo.wordpress.com) and later a baseball umpires learning blog (http://embua.wordpress.com). Currently those two blogs have a combined 20,000+ hits. If you establish good categories, tag things well, and use the common language native to your purpose, I have found that my blogs usually come up on the first page of Google search results.