Blogging: A Comprehensive Beginner's Guide

Here's a good resource from "Social Media for Organizations."  It puts blogging in perspective and provides guidance for getting started.

This blogging beginner's guide is intended for people who want to incorporate blogs into their organization’s social media efforts but aren’t sure where or how to begin. Individuals interested in blogging for personal/career management reasons, as well as folks aspiring to be professional bloggers, may also find the guide useful in helping them get started... Read More 

FAQs

When students are working on their individual blogs, there are several common questions that arise.  Those questions and brief responses are as follows:

• Q:  Where do I create my blog?
• A:  You are welcome to use a wide variety of blog services.  Most students choose WordPress.com and Blogger.com, probably because they are free and rather user-friendly.

• Q:  How do I make my blog entries private?
• A:  Most blog services have privacy settings that allow you to limit access to your blog.  In addition to password protecting your blog, you can generally prevent your blog from being indexed by search engines, thus eliminating the likelihood that someone would randomly come across your blog.  For Blogger, privacy settings are described under the topic: "How do I control who can view my blog?"  For WordPress, privacy settings are described under the topic of:  "Blog visibility."

• Q:  How do I create hyperlinks within my blog entries?
• A:  The system for creating hyperlinks will vary somewhat depending on the service you choose.  The instructions for Blogger are posted under the topic: "How do I make a link to another webpage?"  The instructions for WordPress are posted under the topic: "How to create links with the visual editor."

• Q:  How do I incorporate graphics or pictures?
• A:  For Blogger, the instructions for adding images are posted under the topic: "How do I post pictures?"  For WordPress, the instructions are posted under the support heading: "Images".

• Q: Where can I find graphics and photos to use in my blog entries?
• A:  To avoid any copyright violations, you should be cautious about which images to include with your blog entries.  Fortunately, Creative Commons licenses allow you to use images that others have created and avoid issues with copyright violations.  I suggest searching for images via the search service offered by Creative Commons.

• Q: Where can I find examples of other students' blogs?
• A:  I've created a separate blog for reposting some of my favorite blog entries from students.  It is a WordPress blog titled Best Leadership Blogs.
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If you have additional questions to add to this list, or if you find any of links to be broken, please add a comment to this blog entry.

The Reflection Blog Assignment

As an educator, I am always looking for ways to foster and facilitate learning with my students.  I often get ideas from colleagues, and I came across a great idea that was shared at the 2009 conference of the Association of Leadership Educators.  Dr. Greg Gifford shared about his experience using blogs for critical thinking development.

It turns out that several researchers have found benefits of using blog assignments to facilitate learning.  According to Fredig and Trammell (2004), there are four benefits of student blogging: (1) Students become subject-matter experts, (2) student interest in learning increases, (3) students have legitimate chances to participate, and (4) blogs provide opportunities for diverse perspectives.  A review of empirical research suggests that more research is needed to confirm and verify the benefits.  However, I'm convinced that blogging offers great promise as a tool for facilitating learning, so I have been incorporating it as an assignment in my classes.

I am still perfecting the reflection blog assignments for my classroom, but I am now to the point where I am comfortable sharing my experience and recommendations with others.  My description of the assignment varies somewhat, depending on the course.  However, I always ask the students to follow a "what?", "so what?", "now what?" format, and I give them some consistent recommendations for creating high quality blogs.  For anyone that is interested, I am glad to share an example of the assignment and rubric I use with my classes.  I hope others will benefit from my experience and share their ideas in return.