How and Why to Create Your Academic Blog

Tara Pina's student blog for Digital Culture

I'm requiring my students to blog as part of this course in Digital Culture. Blogging is a vital new means of communicating today and can be a great part of a learning process. However, a student blog can also be a dead end if it is treated merely as a digital dropbox, or as a way to prove to a teacher that one has done one's homework. 

So I hope to get my students launched well on blogging. First off, it helps to see blogging as one component within what I've called a tiered content model. In short, blogging has a middle position between "teaser content" (more brief, frequent, and active content shared within social media streams like Twitter, Google+, or Facebook) and "formal content" (longer, more final publication of some kind).

A blog is a place to grow and develop ideas that have received social proof when shared in briefer form within a more active (but random) medium like Twitter or Google+.  Blogging allows for exploring ideas at greater length without yet feeling required to make those ideas take a fixed or final form. 

Here's how to set up your student blog:



Blog Setup

1. If you will be using an existing blog, skip to step six. To set up a new blog, please go to Blogger.com
   Use your Gmail or Google account and sign in. 
2. Within your Blogger dashboard, click on "Create a Blog"
3. Blog Title
   This will appear on the top of your blog. Try not to make your blog title sound like a boring assignment ("My class blog" or "English 326 blog"), and don't make the title too long. If you use a quotation, make it super short. Your blog title can be changed later, but you shouldn't change it often or it will confuse people. 
4. Blog Address (URL). Normally you can choose anything (that's available) to go in front of .blogspot.com.  However, for this class please follow this naming convention for your blog: LastNameFirstNameCourseNumber. Example: burtongideon326. If this name isn't available, please add a middle initial or another variation on your name.
5. Choose a Template
   You can play with this later, customizing the look and feel of your blog. Pick one of the simple standard templates to get started. Later, go back through the "Design" tab to customize more.
6. Publish your first post.
   Take a concept that you or others have posted on Google+ or discussed in class and compose a short post about it. When you hit "publish," you should get the option to share a link on Google+ to your blog post. Always do this so that people watching the Google+ stream will know you've put something new on your blog. 
7. Fill out the form here to submit your blog's URL: