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Logging and blogging - The Open College of the Arts

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Logging and blogging thumb

Logging and blogging

This is a post from the weareoca.com archive. Information contained within it may now be out of date.
 
OCA encourages its students to keep learning blogs, rather than or as well as paper based learning logs. Blogs are a great way to share your learning with others, get feedback and make tentative steps towards putting your work ‘out there’ online, in the public domain. Some students prefer to keep their blogs private, providing permissions only for their tutor. This is OK of course, but it does mean a lot of the advantages of keeping a blog get lost.
When it comes to assessment the presentation of your blog is important (except for creative writing students who don’t submit a blog or log). It’s vital to make it crystal clear how to navigate around your blog, and enable assessors to lay their hands on the bits of the blog they want to see quickly and easily. This means tagging your blog by exercise, project and assignment. Some blog interfaces make tagging easy, and others simply don’t provide a tagging mechanism. Because of this, OCA is now recommending WordPress to all its students as the default software within which to blog. Please don’t panic if your blog is in Tumblr, Blogger et al, but do consider switching to WordPress on your next course.

To help you create a WordPress blog, OCASA rep Pam Wright has created a WordPress template for OCA, to provide an ideal OCA blog, with hints and tips embedded into it. This has been used by a number of OCA students already, and their feedback has been helpful in ensuring the blogging template is useful and works. Take a look at it here. You’ll find a link to it embedded in OCA’s free Induction course on the OCA student website, (An Introduction to Studying at HE) in section six Using Blogs, and there is also a link to it in the resources section of the OCA Student site as well.


Posted by author: Jane Parry

5 thoughts on “Logging and blogging

  • I already have a WordPress blog and feel reasonably confident now in how I utilise it. However, Pam’s guide is excellent for anyone contemplating starting up a blog; changing provider or thinking that their blog just isn’t laid-out the way they’d like it to be. Pam’s instructions are very clear with just enough detail to get people started without being confusing. Very well-done Pam!

  • This should be included in the welcome pack when starting a course. It is the single most useful reference I’ve seen anywhere. I have updated my blog and ditched the “scrapbook”.
    Thank you

  • Hugely useful sample blog. Mine wasn’t too far off, but this has helped me tighten up a few areas that just needed a bit of a tweak. Thank you!

  • An excellent guide – it would have saved me several days of effort in geting to grips with WordPress (much of it wasted effort as I went down dead end after dead end!). Yes, it must become a part of the Welcome Pack.

  • have been trying to set up up wordpress blog omg so hard still not sure how i get my assignments in there wish someone would make one for me already set up so i can just add the info kin

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