Lesson 17: Blogs and Wikis I

In this lesson we'll aim to focus on the importance of your public, digital identity. We're currently re-drafting the AUP (and turning it into guidelines for good practice) and part of this now runs:

In the digital realm, once something is posted online it has a persistence that is not like something that is said. It is also searchable and replicable and you cannot be sure who your audience is or will be. Once something is posted online, its effects are often magnified and can be mirrored out of context. All of this requires experience to understand. Remember: when you post, you have not only your own reputation to consider but also that of others and that of the school. Every member of the community has to take responsibility for his or her actions online.

danah boyd:

crafting & ... managing one's public image is a critical aspect of living in a mediated public world. ... People need to embrace the world we live in & learn to work within its framework. Don't panic about being public - embrace it ... with elegance.

And we'll discuss web etiquette: 'be civil' (Jeremy Keith's Irish music site, The Session); 'be polite and respectful in your interactions with other members' (Flickr); 'use common sense while posting' (Last.fm); "Use your best judgement. Don't forget your day job" (IBM, pdf); "IBM's integrity & reputation, as well as your own, are in your hands" (IBM Virtual World Guidelines).

We also want to explore a little of the heritage and significance of weblogs, setting blogs in the context of other ways we publish to the web, and you'll create your own weblog — which you'll use during the remainder of this course.

Feedback and discussion from last lesson and prep. about GTalk.

There's a useful timeline, The Life of the Blog, to which your teacher may refer. Blogs are 10 years old:

On December 17, 1997, Barger began posting short comments and links on his own Robot Wisdom website, thus pioneering the "weblog" as it is known today. His site soon included interlinked weblog sections titled "Fun," "Art," "Issues," "Net," "Tech," "Science," "History," "Search," and "Shop". (Wikipedia)

You'll be asked to look at Blogging is great by Tim Berners-Lee (2006) and to watch Blogs in Plain English, CommonCraft (2007).

Last lesson we looked at presence and, in particular, at Twitter and Jaiku. These are often called microblogging tools. Jyri Engeström, co-founder of Jaiku, has a useful slide here of the sweep that blogging now covers, from microblogging to much longer forms of blogging. If you're interested, you can follow his full, original slideshow.

Prep: your blog will form a key element in all your subsequent work in this course. For prep, try your hand at blogging and at adding elements to your blog — including playing with design. Add at least one full entry — perhaps a day's thoughts about school, what happened, or what you did over half-term.

To start with, set your privacy settings to maximum, following the advice in the Google video, Google Privacy Tips: Blogger.  Add your set teacher for now as someone who can see your blog and post him the URL of your blog. (You can always remove your teacher after this course is finished.)