I haven’t been posting as much as I would truly like. I’ve been so swamped with work, including trying to prepare our selves to get the LMS up and running. I have however been introducing a few more people to the fabulous use of blogs and wikis.
I have one friend that loves to write poems and has been using the Facebook feature of Notes to capture them. I suggested that if she wanted something a little more private then she could open a blog and use it as a private journal. She also writes collaboratively with another friend. The two of them take turns write a paragraph of a story and see where it goes and ends up. For this I suggested and set up a wiki for them to try out. This way they can go in and read each other’s work, make edits and suggestions. They can also create a new page for each story or for each theme of stories and can keep it private or share it as well.
My final sell this weekend was using a blog for a newsletter instead of a paper based item. Currently they create a newsletter in Publisher and then email it out. They only send electronically and do not print it to paper. Sounds like a job for something webish. I took their articles from their last newsletter. Created a new post for each article starting with the last one first. This would allow a reader once they open the blog to read the first intended article as the most recent post of the blog. The last article of the paper copy would appear as the last post as well. The first post they open was titled “In this Issue”, with the month and volume/issue number. Then a listing of the post headings as links to each article.
My arguments for them using this system were:
- articles can be tagged for reference and searching (ie: volume 6, issue 3, meeting, agenda)
- articles are all searchable by any word
- articles are all archived individually and monthly
- links on the main web page can be added to the newsletter blog and back to the web page
- because of the flexibility of posting, special articles could be added at times other than regular newsletter issuing dates
- members can subscribe to updates, rss feeds
- the blog can have stats tracked regarding usage.
I’m still waiting for responses on all 3 “new ideas” that I’ve put out for my colleagues. Now just waiting to see if I sold it all properly.