We’ll be using the course blog as a platform for syndicating the posts you make on your ePortfolio blogs. Basically, I will pull your blog posts into the course site by subscribing to posts that follow a pretty simple rule (described below). This is important for a couple reasons.
- It helps pull into one location the really good things you’re doing on your individual blogs, which makes it much, much easier for us to see and engage with your ideas and writing without having to bounce from blog to blog to hunt things down.
- It gives us all a sense of what syndication does in online environments. Content syndication is pretty old and is quite common in newspaper publishing: Comic strip authors are syndicated, so their comics appear in multiple newspapers; opinion writers are often syndicated, so their articles are in multiple papers; and the Associated Press newswire is a kind of syndication that most major news organizations rely on to learn about and report breaking news.
By default, your ePortfolio enables syndication. I simply subscribe to your blog “feed,” establish some settings on our course site, and pull in blog posts that fit the following parameter:
- Your post must contain the following keyword: “collreadwrit2e”
- To help us get specific content pulled into the course site, I’ll ask you to add that keyword to the bottom of homework blog posts.
If I forget to include that instruction on an assignment, help me out by remembering on your own.
I will also ask you learn to use “tags” to label your posts. Begin by creating the following tags for your ePortfolio blog: ENG123, Reading, Writing, Revision, Creative, Reflection. Feel free to add others that work for you.
By using tags, you can impose order on your posts. Since ePortfolio can be used in multiple courses and for multiple purposes, a tagging system can help you (and a reader) find the relevant posts. For example, the ENG123 tag tells you that the post is part of the course. Adding the Reading tag to the post tells you it’s a post on reading in your ENG 123 class.