How to Add Your Blog to the Course

By Stephen Downes
Oct 05, 2021
Transcript of How to Add Your Blog to the Course

Okay, so now I'm recording the audio. And I'll just put a comment in here. If you can't see the video, reload this page, I'll put that in. And that'll make sure that people who may be watching can see this page.

So as usual hit looks, you know, this is, like I say, this is a one man operation, sometimes held together by binder twine. But on the other hand, it's costing almost nothing to do. So you know, and and it's open and accessible to everyone.

You know, I can have nice, you know, all in one solutions that work really well. If you can't video, really, if you can't see the video, okay, trying to do too many things at once. If you have a nice all-in-one application, sure, then it looks seamless. But if you're trying to do a bunch of different stuff, less so.

Okay, so what do I want to do right now, I'm just gonna minimize some stuff here. What I want to do today is I want to talk about, I want to talk about how you can participate in the course. And the way to participate in the course, there's really two steps, well, three steps, but really to:

first of all, create your blog, if you already have one, great;
and then secondly, submit your blog RSS feed to the course. So we'll show you how to do that;
and then the third step is, of course, actually write something in your blog relevant to the course.

So first of all, to create your blog, I'm going to use something that I don't normally use, I use Microsoft Edge here. And I don't want "what's new", so I'll just try to ignore that. So a good place to go to create a blog is Blogger https://www.blogger.com. And you just click Create your blog. And you can choose an account or you can use some other account, if you already have a Google account.

I'm going to use my existing Google account. And so I'll enter my password. If you don't have a Google account, create a Google account. And if you don't want to create a Google account, then you'll want to use a different blog platform. And I'll show you a couple before we get too far into this video.

So I'll enter my password. Notice it's a pretty long password. That's a good habit to get into. You know, for each extra character in your password, you've made it that much more difficult for people to crack it.

So these are my existing blogs. But if I wanted to make a new one (trying to figure out how to do that here, I probably should have created a new account, shouldn't I have, but yeah, I don't know where to create a new blog...) There must be a way... new post... new blog! And that's what will show up right at the top if you're brand new.

So here's a new blog, I'll just call it "Ethics, Analytics (and I'll try to spell analytics correctly) and the Duty of Care". Okay, so we'll go next. And we'll choose a URL. So let's try 'ethics21' because that worked really well. No, it's not available. Someone already took it. 'Ethics2021'. That one's available. So we'll, we'll go with that. And sorry if you were planning to use that, and that's it.

That's all we need to do to create my blog. Now, your blogger, if you're your blog, let's just create a quick new post Welcome to my blog. All right, I really can't spell. "Hellow world" and I'll publish. I always felt that Hello should have a W on the end. So okay, so welcome to my blog, and I've published it.

Now I can view this post. And notice the URL here, ethics 2021, which is what I chose. And my blog URL, how you can get it just by clicking on the title of the blog, is https://ethics2021.blogspot.com.

My blog is created that step one. Now if you don't want to use blogger, or a Google property, you could use Tumblr, oops, not with an e - tublr.com. No 'e', right. And again, you can sign up login, or you can continue with a Google ID or an Apple id as well. Wordpress.com is another blogging platform you can use. And there are other blogging platforms, I won't give you a whole list. Although it might be a good idea to provide a list. You can choose any blogging platform you want, there's no limit, you're not locked into a particular platform here. You could even write your own blogging platform and use that. In fact, I've done that in the past.

So anyhow, step one, create a blog on any one of these platforms. So step two, so we're going to go to the course, ethics.mooc.ca, and notice I'm still using Edge. And the reason why I'm using Edge here is because I'm not logged into anything on Edge. Well, except for my blog now. So I'm not benefiting from you know, okay, I have special access and you don't.

So I'm showing this to you. So here, down here is where we're going to submit our blog to the course. So I'll click on Submit feed. Okay, now, whoops, oh, that went a bit too fast there. So here's here's the list of blogger software, you can also use edgy blogs or medium. Now if you can't find, you know, here, here's your, your blog.

And you might not know where your RSS feed or even what your RSS feed is, it doesn't matter. Click on this link right here, the OERu Feed Finder. Okay, I now here, get the address of your blog. Copy it. And and then what we'll do is go to the go to this page and put it in here. So I'm just using Ctrl V to submit it. So and then submit. So it's going to verify that it's a real site, it'll look for the feed, and then it's found to Atom or RSS, it won't matter which one you use. So I'm just going to use this one which is Atom. Oh, it won't matter. I'll use RSS because I'm just just feel better with RSS copy. Alright. And because I tested it, and I know it works, but the other one also works. So we'll come back to that page. Okay. So here is the link the RSS link.

Now what's the title? Well, the title is what I called it, right? Ethics, Analytics and the Duty of Care. So I'm going to copy that. And I'll put that into my form. Just making this bigger so you can see.

And then the web page. This is the web page. So I'll copy that. And I'll put that in my form.

And then optionally, your name can be your name can be some other name that isn't really heard. Name (I'm not really going to be watching for that) can be a pseudonym. I'm just gonna put my own in. So that you know, it's me, and then submit. And you're done. That's all you need to do.

So let's go back now to the course outline. And you'll notice the course tag is ethics 21. So this is the third step. Now we'll go back to the Blogger application where I'm writing my blog, I'll create a new post. So we'll just call it "New Post". And I'll write, "test new post", and then put the tag, either (whoops, that's not the tag... So put the tag either) in the post, #ethics21 or in the title, or as one of the labels for your post. And in other blogging platforms, it might say categories or something like that, any one of these three things will work, they each correspond to different data elements. And the course platform checks for each of these, and then publish your post.

And it's done. So I'm not going to actually harvest this post, so you don't get this ugly post in your newsletter. But that's all you have to do.

If you do those three things. Then in the course, in the course newsletter, the the link that you posted will show up here in the newsletter, and I might change the format ever so slightly, but you see here, Matthias Melcher already did the process that I've just shown you, here's the link. And when I click on this link, here it is. And now I can read his article similarily.

If you're receiving the newsletter by email, you will see this link, you click on the link, you can go straight to his post. So that's all you have to do to participate in the course. So you might want to start doing that. I'm going to assign this as a task later on. And I'll talk about tasks in one of the upcoming videos. So you don't need to feel you need to do that today. But if you do that, then you will be in a position to take part in the course using your platform of choice, such that what you contribute to the course will be visible to everybody else who's taking the course.

And that's it for today. That's all I have for the course for today. So I'm going to wrap up this video and we'll save that and we'll login and we'll make sure that this video goes out in the newsletter as well. Because that's how the course is going to work. I'm going to present you know these small short videos that will show up during the week in between the live sessions. So thanks a lot for joining me and I'll talk to you soon. Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai and moderately edited by me (the transcription was pretty good).

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