YouTube emｂed demo

This is a video that really changed my life, no really it did!

Here is a quick blog post with a picture of the little dude from the carnival.

A possible blogging process

Several students have asked me what is the best way to do a blog post. I don't think that there is one definitive answer to the question. Ultimately, I think that the blogger wishes to share some idea or resources with an audience.

Let's use this blog post as an example. I wanted to let my readers (students in the class) know about a few tools I've been using in my online life that might be relevant to the work we are doing in this class. I then composed the following post:

I recently discovered a useful blog which features free online resources for students and educators called DE Tools of the Trade.

The image with the post was found on one of the sites mentioned on the DE Tools blog. I used another image from Design Comics in the Test VoiceThread that appeared in an earlier blog post here. Check the class moodle to find a few sample images if you are interested in this sort of thing.

To add the text caption to the image, I uploaded the image I got from Design Comics to Aviary which is a free online image editing site. After I edited the file in Aviary, I then uploaded it to blogger and made this post.

All of this is to say, that I believe that in addition to the message you compose for your blog posts, it is also worthwhile to include images and links to outside sources that might be of interest to your readers.

Any thoughts?

First Test

Twitter for Beginners

If you'd like to learn about Twitter before we talk about it in an upcoming lesson, you might want to read Paul Boutin's "Twitter for Beginners" which appeared in the New York Times in March 2009.

Dvolver MovieMaker

I'm a sucker for these sorts of things. With this web application you can make your own movie.

Social Bookmarking: Delicious

Our next assignment will involve learning to use delicious as a social bookmarking service.

Please watch the video for a useful introduction:

Week 2 - preview

I want to thank everyone for helping make the first lesson go so smoothly. I'm impressed with how quickly all of you were able to set up your gmail, google documents and blogger accounts. I'm looking forward to reading your posts during the semester. Please try to think of an area you'd like to focus on in your blog in the next few days. You are by no means limited to only posting about that topic (you may write about what ever comes to mind).

I will be updating the Moodle prior to Wednesday's class (4/21). I would like us to look at subscribing to blogs through RSS and Google Reader, begin the social bookmarking assignment with a service called Delicious, and sign up for VoiceThread which will be the web service used for our first project of the semester. Feel free to follow the links above and set up accounts before class.

One more thing, when you share your autobiography document with me (due 4/21), please give me permissions to edit the document. That way, I'll be able to type comments on the same page. I will demonstrate how to do this in class.

Robin Cook on How to Blog

The guy in the video is named Robin Cook. His blog features a useful guide on blog publishing for beginners.

Hello World

This is the first blog post. Here's a bit of historical perspective on Hello World messages in computing.