Posts from — September 2004

FIguring out the template stuff a bit more (note the links section and my “about me” section on the right side of the page). Now, if I can only find a way to make this into 3 columns and jazz up the template a bit, I’ll be a happy Canadian. Well, I’d probably be a happy Canadian anyway. Happier still if I could find a TIm Hortons in Vermont right about now….

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This looks like a job for the Alberta Rat Patrol!

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I’m tempted to require my students to attend….

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Ecto is working out very well for me as a means of posting to this weblog.

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I tried over the weekend to get a new blog going for my English 86 class with no success. I used the “create new blog” option after logging in. I can see the entries I’ve created, but when I try to view my blog it doesn’t show up.

I set it to be blog.uvm.edu/paulwmartin/086 Is that the source of my problem right there?

Also, I know Steve and I have tried to set up categories within our blogs with no success.

Any ideas as to how we can get these rolling?

Thanks!

Steve, Holly, John and I had a productive meeting yesterday about getting my course blogs off the ground.

Here are some of the links that we keep going back to in our discussions. I’m putting them here now so that we have a central spot to go back to as we get my course blogs off the ground.

The person whose work to which I keep returning is Liz Lawley. She’s done some great work on a series of templates that allow MT to function very effectively as a form of courseware.

Three great examples of her courseware in action are here, here, and here.

I did begin to play around with blogs for my courses last year and you can see my early attempts here.

To use this medium effectively, I also want to begin to blog more regularly myself and want to use MT to create a blog versatile and rich enough to be of use to myself and others. This site, scribblingwoman, from Miriam Jones at UNB is a great example of what an academic blog can do in my own discipline. Scroll down her site and look at all the resources that are listed in the right and left columns. I’d like to create a blog that can do something similar in the field of Canadian literature studies, as well as something which can also connect to my work on Northwest Passages.

Given that, aside from basic HTML, I not of much use in the design dept, I’m hoping that CTL will be able to help me:

a) design and implement an effective template/stylesheet up and running for my personal blog
b) use either Liz Lawley’s templates (which for the last week or so have been unavailable for download from her site) or another effective approach to get course blogs up for my current English 86 classes and probably my senior seminar on Michael Ondaatje

c)troubleshoot and get the hang of MT and what I’ll need to do to eventually do a lot of these things myself.

My goal in doing all this is that we can get a working model together for other parties at UVM (and, to some degree, elsewhere) of how blogs can be excellent tools to use in the literature classroom. Thanks to the great help I’ve received so far from CTL, I think we’re well on our way to making this all happen very soon.

Hi Mike and all,
Just tried fooling around a bit with the main index template with no success. I was denied permission. Is that easy enought to fix that I can customize my blog page?

My huge thanks to Mike and everyone who is helping to get this rolling. I think blogging will be a great tool for my courses, as well as for my own research.
I’ll be trying out MT more over the next day or two.
For now it’s off to class!
Today’s class is on Michael Ondaatje’s book The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.