Lesley Anderson

Meeting 5

Just the girls met tonight, as Ben was busy, being a Satuday evening.
Mel and I met together first as Liz wasn’t able to join us until a little later - due to the time difference.

I helped Mel with setting up pages in the blog we have set up at http://redpod.wordpress.com/.  We had made a group decision to create pages for the blog instead of using categories as our information will be static and we need to access it all in one place.

Mel had the blog site open and I helped her with step by step instructions on how to set up a page, write to it and publish it as Mel hadn’t used Word Press previously.  I actually enjoyed the interaction and seeing the blog change as Mel worked on it at her end and I was checking it to see how she was going.

Meeting 1

As the date for our pod assignment was getting closer and we seemed to have little success facilitating meetings RedPod decided to meet on Friday 2/10/09 at about 8.30 pm using Skype as a meeting network.  We decided to use Skype as we had been chatting on it and found it a successful way to talk to each other. That time was chosen because one of our members - Liz Evans lives in Darwin N.T. and we needed to take into account the time difference.

The decision to meet was made by three of the pod members - myself, Liz and Melenna as we chatted on Skype the night before. We all felt we needed to make a start on our assessment and my thoughts were to try and get it up and running before my school holidays finished.

The pod has 2 other members - Ben, who was unavailable to attend and Shin for whom we had no contact details as this member didn’t appear to be using the forum and had not attended any previous attempts to meet.  We did post a message to the subject forum, just in case either of the other members were available.

During our meeting we did make some decisions about how we would address the assessment.
We decided to create a new blog purely for RedPod and use it to write our ideas and recommendations for the final assessment. This blog would become our group’s collaborative space and we would have all our research and information in one place.
We also decided to post reflections on the assessment, and logs of the meetings to our personal blogs.

We made these decisions knowing that other members of the pod needed to be informed and contacted - Liz volunteered to do this and I volunteered to create our new blog using WordPress.
http://redpod.wordpress.com

Our group also decided to take a social network each to begin researching in order to make a start on our assessment and meet again on Wednesday 7/10/09 at about 8.00pm for first discussions.
I created our blog and customised it a little to be suitable for the pod and I also created some categories to get us started.

Here we go…………

Blog or Wiki Design.

Select ONE blogging or wiki product, such as the one you use in this subject- eg Blogger.
Write a 100-word summary of how it has supportive tools that are similar to the design advice in this topic.
In your summary, consider how it satisfies the nine design requirements and the 3 underlying principles, suggested by Kim (2000a; 2000b)?

I have used Wordpress as my blogging tool for this subject.  Designed specifically for online reflection and responsive interaction, it comes with supportive tools, which may vary across templates, and a huge number of optional “plug-ins” that can add to security, interactivity and usability. Flexibility, ease of installation and variety of tools allows a community blog to be created and customized to suit particular needs at any particular time.  This includes posts and comments being added, replied to, tracked and moderated as the community requires, either by visitors to the blog or those assigned user status through their blog profile.

Blog or Wiki Design

How would you design and manage content in a blog? Use your blog experiences so far?

After spending a few weeks blogging for this subject, I must say I have enjoyed the experience.
I find blogging an efficient and satisfying way to respond to tasks, organise ideas and link to others within the subject group.

The first thing I did was plot out the structure of my blog site. I have only included 2 separate pages in my blog - About and Home. About contains a short piece of information about myself and the Home page is where my recent postings appear. I have relied on categories for the major method of organisation of my posts, and find that works well for me. I have major categories organised with sub-categories as follows - Read the rest of this entry »