Class Recordings Folder

There is now a folder in Compass for class recordings. You can follow the link there to the audio for today's class. You need to turn your speakers down to hear this. It is audible, but far from perfect. We'll continue to tweak this process as we make more recordings.

Also, this did require me to do some post processing, because the file size was too large to put into some of my more obvious places, so I converted it to an flv movie and put it on my blip.tv site. I hope at some point it converts it back to mp3 format so I can just distribute the audio file that way. It will not let me upload that as the source.

I do have the raw audio on my laptop so if teams want them to write up the post part of their interviews, I can give it to you, if you have a thumb drive or some other way to port the file.

A feed for comments on student posts

I made a single feed for the comments on all the student blogs, so you can track new comments that way.

Mini tutorial on linking

Below is a quickie tutorial on how to using the linking tool to make hyperlinks to online references. It is a straightforward process.

Linking to Gail Collins piece on Levi Johnston to illustrate how the linking tool works.

Your Wish Is My Command - Email Subscriptions

There is now an email subscription box on the left sidebar. I'm not sure whether you get post by post updates or a digest for the day. But try it out, if you wish, and let me know how it works. Incidentally, for anyone who wants to do this on their own blog, I used Feedburner for this. Apparently works with both Blogger and Wordpress blogs, though the integration with Blogger is a little tighter (no surpise there) since Google bought Feedburner a while back.

I like Google tools but I'm afraid the great monopolist in the sky will start to favor its own offerings too much, for short term gain but long term ill health.

Non Compos (Compass) Mentis/Group Work Space

You guys are an eager bunch. I see that some of you got into the "Journal Topic" in Compass called Student Reflective Posts. Let me explain how I'd like to use that space and also briefly discuss group work space for you.

First, a few of you mentioned that the Compass site says only 395 and not 396. I'm not sure why that is but if you can log in when you need to that is all you should worry about. I know who is in which and will track your work accordingly.

On occasion I will give written feedback about your posts that I can't do as a comment on your blog because it contains some assessment of your work, whether letter grade, numerical evaluation, or what have you. I'm not supposed to do that by email either - it's not secure. Compass is, so that is where that sort of communication will occur. We still have a few more weeks before any of that will happen. Sometime before then, no rush, you should log in once into that discussion topic. Once you do it will show up on my screen so I can post to you or make comments on something you post. Until then it is invisible to me.

Likewise I will do the same for group work and I'm making a journal topic for each team. Team members should see their own topic. Non-team members should not have access. So far I've made groups and discussion topics for Action (A) and Best (B). While each of you have your own team to look at, I've got the list of teams, which explains my first letter requirement on naming. You don't have do to anything on this score at present. I do see the team discussion topics after they are created.

Also, you don't have to check Compass for these messages. I will alert you in class and via announcements on this site that such messages are there for you. You should monitor this site regularly, not Compass.

Now let me switch to the matter of group work space. You don't have to do anything about this immediately, but when you do start doing written work in the team, you'll need a space both to archive team work in progress and to deliver drafts and final product to me. One option for that is to make a group blog. If you go that route, I leave it to you. There is also a course wiki. (If one brave soul wants to login and verify s/he can do that, I'd appreciate it. If you are the brave soul please let me know that it worked.) The wiki is (should be) set up for each of you to have read/write access while the rest of the world has read access. Your team can make a team page and then have children pages for the projects, or some other schema of your own choosing.

Reading and Commenting on Student Posts

You can follow the posts of your fellow students from the blogroll in the left sidebar. But there can be some difficulty in doing that because it doesn't personalize for you there and hence doesn't track whether you've already read that post or not. There is other software which does that sort of thing. Those applications are called "readers" or "aggregators." Here's a site that lists a variety of good ones. Some of these are stand alone "clients" while others just run in your browser. I use Bloglines for my other blog reading and am trying out Google Reader for the student posts in this class. Both of those are browser based. When the class gets completely set up, I can provide a file (it's called an OPML file) with the list of all the student blogs. You can then import that file into your own reader and follow the student posts that way. This doesn't mean you "have to" read everything your classmates write. If you are curious, however, this makes it easier to do so.

Writers typically appreciate comments from readers. It gives more meaning to the writing activity and makes it seem more like a conversation and less like a broadcast. In our class setting it will help us to feel like a community rather than like a bunch of individuals who happen to meet together on occasion. So I encourage you to comment on each others posts. You can do that directly or in your own blog by making reference to that post, in which case you should link to it. Commenting directly has the benefit that the author will almost certainly see the comment and may very well respond to it with another comment. Commenting indirectly through your own blog shows how the original post influences your own thinking by tying it into your other ideas.

Unfortunately, spam is a reality with blogging. So you need to take some steps to block it. There are different degrees of protection you can take. These include who can make comments as determined by their login, whether commenting requires word verification, and comment moderation. Keeping the spammers out, however, makes it more difficult for legitimate comments to get through. In particular, if you moderate comments, you should set up an email alert so you know there is a comment that awaits moderation. I believe Wordpress is more sophisticated than Blogger on this score in that once a login has made a comment successfully after moderation the same login is given free access to make comments without moderation thereafter. (Especially if you use Gmail, Blogger does have some benefits over Wordpress in its integration with other Google applications.) You do want to encourage your readers to comment. Assuring that legitmate comments appear in a timely fashion is part of doing that.