So far, weeks 1-3 have mostly involved building basic skills, knowledge and awareness about blogging. By now, if you’ve been working hard on your blog, it may be starting to get a little messy – this is ok. At this point we’re going to start looking at ways to organise our content to provide an ideas experience for our readers.
At the end of the video lecture for this week, there are two resource’s to check out: Joyce’s Twelve Blue and Prezi – Engaging Blogs . Have a look at each of these (before the workshop) and think about these questions:
- What makes them hypertexts (or not?)
- How do they enhance (or detract from) your experience of story?
- What are they lacking? What would you do differently?
More workshop here:
Discuss:
In what ways are our blogs an example of Hypertext and/or Hypermedia? What are some ideas for how we enhance this?
Exercise:
Hopefully you have collected more media items after last week to use on your blog; either still images, audio or video. If not, make some. You can experiment with all three forms, but it might be easier to focus on one medium for now.
Set up an account (or use an existing one) for a site that is based around the media that you are using. Check out these lists of good sites for Images, Audio (I suggest Soundcloud), and Video (Youtube is handy, you’ll need to use a personal email account though). Some of the sites in these lists won’t be appropriate for you (i.e Spotify, Netflix) but check out some that are new to you and see what they do (or make your own top 5?)
Upload some content to one of the sites, and see what options you have for embedding them into your blog. You will need to find out how to ’embed’ them; this can be a different process depending on which site you use.
The idea of this exercise is to find a new way (new for you) to display, arrange and present content. This could be through a purpose built site as suggested above, but could also be through a blog widget, WP plugin, or using code (javascript etc). Challenge yourself!
Suggested Blog entries:
- Reflect on the site(s) that you used, and what they allowed you to do
- See if you can do something similar to the exercise through your own blog, using widgets, or the ‘Gallery’, and discuss how this is better/worse and why
- If you haven’t already, add some blog categories for you posts, and discuss how this can help you organise your blog