Warwick Blogs for PhD students – intro session

I'm running a session tomorrow morning for the Graduate School to introduce some PhD students to using blogs for research work. I will start of by covering these 10 key points about Warwick Blogs:

1. a blog always has an owner, usually an individual, sometimes a team;
2. the owner chooses a title, a description, and a style;
3. it consists of a series of entries written by the owner;
4. the latest ten entries are displayed on the homepage, you can use the calendar to see older entries;
5. every entry has a category, there is a page that shows all of the entries in a category;
6. there are (currently) five types of entry, including standard, follow-up, and review entries;
7. you can allow people to comment on your entries;
8. images can be uploaded into galleries and used in entries;
9. the blog owner can control who can view and comment on each entry;
10. public entries are indexed by Google.

And then I will get them to think about ways of using blogs in the research process, for example:

• Publishing agendas
• Reporting on meetings
• Recording and commenting on reading
• Recording new ideas
• Developing ideas
• Reflecting on skills, performance etc
• Recording experimental results
• Reporting on lectures, seminars and conferences
• Book reviews
• Writing about blog entries by other researchers
• Writing about other online resources
• Publishing photos of experiments and field-trips
• Evaluating technologies and techniques
• Recording and reflecting on the development of documents.

It will be interesting to see what other ideas they have.

Robert O'Toole : 22 Oct 2004 22:45 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (3) |  Report a problem