Blogging CE Course at the SLA Annual Conference: Picking Blog Software
I think it’s safe for me to report that Jim Hunter and I have made very nice progress on the blogging continuing education course the News Division will offer at the Special Libraries Association Annual Conference this June. As the News Division’s professional development coordinator, Jim must work on both of the CE courses. The other one about intranets sounds equally exciting.
The blogging course will focus on blogging within news organizations and have a major hands-on component. I don’t want to give away too many details about what we’re doing yet, but I will say that I’m very excited about it. The course will cover the very basics of blogging as well as present some material useful for people who are already blogging. We’re targeting beginners, but even experienced hands might have a thing or two to learn.
The big challenge I’m facing now is choosing which blog platform to use in the course. I would prefer something free, hosted, easy to use, somewhat popular, and something people can continue to use outside of the class, if they choose to. I’ve also thought about at least demonstrating a few different platforms so people can see for themselves the differences, even if it’s just a different interface or procedure for posting.
I’ve also considered having one blog for the class to which everyone can do test posts as opposed to having everyone start their own weblog. And there’s also the option of opening up this blog to class members at least for the day, maybe for the week.
Do any of you who have done these kinds of classes before have any thoughts? How about any of you who might take the course? Do you have a particular platform that fits the above criteria you’re eager to try? I have some ideas, but I’d like some feedback.
January 19th, 2005 at 2:38 am
Free, easy to use, etc. is good. But are you also going to talk about how to integrate a blog into an existing intranet?
January 19th, 2005 at 11:33 am
Hey Eli! Good question. We will definitely talk about integrating weblogs into an intranet and a number of details related to that, like marketing them. I imagine for this audience, focusing on using blogs on an intranet is probably more important than blogging in public.
With the hands on part, I just mostly want to give people the opportunity to get their fingertips wet, if you will, and have something concrete they can “take with them” at the end of class, so they can experiment with blogging if they’d like to.