However, persistence pays off eventually. I have finally cracked facebook (I think) and aim to share some of the solutions and resources here.  I hope I can help others who are going a little crazy figuring out this illogical application.

The most useful resource I found was written by Jennifer Laycock on her blog The Search Engine Guide. Jennifer has written a wonderful tutorial which even comes with visual aids; it is titled The Super Simple Guide to Setting Up Your First Facebook Page Without Blowing a Gasket

The Search Engine Guide by Jennifer Laycock (This is a great blog with lots of excellent tips and tutorials.)

Good luck getting started with your Facebook organization page!

Lucky folks living in the Michigan area can attend Lunch Ann Arbor Marketing meetings once a week. The group meets to discuss important marketing topics and they then (very generously) make their slide presentations available for public viewing over at LA2M Slideshare.org

Lunch Ann Arbor Marketing has created 36 presentations to date, a quick dip into their list provided the following presentations:

Facebook Advertising

Visual Storytelling: Creating and Engaging Brand Experience

Marketing and Non Profits

Clearly all presentations were originally accompanied by a talk, however they provide great jumping off points when you are brainstorming new marketing ideas.

This machinima titled ‘CLICK’ explains what  ’Immersive and Interactive Virtual Art’ is while showing us the work of virtual artists. The work shown is part of the University of Western Australia’s 3D Art and Design Challenge exhibition.

So where to begin if interested in experimenting with blogging? If you type in ‘Blogging software’ in Google you will see there are 12,200,000 responses. These are advertisements and reviews of blogging software programs. To save you time it might be help to know that there are three very good contenders to consider as you step into the blogosphere as a potential blogger.

Many of the versions of blogging software that are available cost money to operate, this is usually paid as a monthly fee, and this provides the user with phone support; a massive amount of storage; plus a range of extra ‘bells and whistles’ (these are mainly tools relevant to advertising and are used by bloggers hoping to draw in an income from their blog). It simply does not make sense to opt for these fee based programs when first beginning to experiment with blogging. Try out the medium before making any financial commitment. Later, if an individual creates a blog that is attracting thousands of readers each day then there would be some point to taking this route.

In the meantime, if someone is considering blogging for the first time they would be advised to seek out free software. There are some very good programs that are easy to use and produce a highly professional appearance.

What to look for in blogging software

When looking for software seek out programs which offer most of the following features:

• It is free.
• Easy to download.
• There are different templates to choose from, enabling the blogger to select the appearance they feel most reflects them, and their blog.
• Look for ample online file storage space; this particularly applies to blogs that use photographs (as images eat up storage space rapidly).
• The blog can be either a public or a private blog. A public blog will be made accessible to search engines and the blog can be seen all around the world. A private blog will mean that only those people who have been given a password can access the blog. There are also some bloggers who use the blog as a private notepad and only they are able to access it.
• Most blogs will offer a statistical tool; this provides the blogger with the numbers of visitors who come in to their blog every day. These also tell you where your visitors are coming from i.e. what links they followed to reach your site. This lets you know whether your visitors arrived on your site via a search engine, or via referral from another blog. Statistics also tell the blogger which individual posts are the most popular.
• Make sure that there is a photographic uploading facility.
• It is also extremely useful to have the ability to embed (insert code into the blog) linking to external services such as the video site YouTube video or the photography display site known as Flickr.
• It is important to have a powerful and efficient ‘Save’ function on the site. The best programs provide for the automatic saving of text, this is very important as many people write directly into their blog. Automatic saving creates a backup every few minutes; some blogs even give the facility to review each save, thereby making it possible to revert back to an earlier version. A blogger can work on a piece of text over several days and know their work is stored safely online. When they are ready they can then publish the finished piece. Every post created by the blogger is then archived on the site making it possible for readers to browse back in time, reading earlier blog posts.
• The software should provide a clear and easy to use tagging system. This saves keywords, and then makes these words into searchable tags that are then made available to the web search engines. (It is worth spending the time to develop thoughtful tags, as good tags help readers to locate relevant posts.)
• It is very important to have good spam control on your blog. Spammers will deluge the blog’s comment box in the hope that the blogger will let the spam through and into the blog’s comments area. Comments are meant for genuine readers to use, they give readers the opportunity to hold discussions directly with the blog author, and with other readers. The spammers try to disguise their spam as a comment saying something along the lines of ‘Great post! Visit my site at ‘X’ (they then add a web link)’. Some of the spammers are trying to get the blogger to inadvertently link to pornographic and gambling sites. A good spam filter will detect possible spam and the blogger can train the filter to prevent this from appearing again. The blogger has the opportunity to review the comments and publish all the genuine ones on their blog. (The spam filter is also trained to recognize approved individuals so that their comment is automatically uploaded to the blog site without the blogger having to handle it.)
• Community forums are very helpful to new bloggers. These forums publish the questions and answers of bloggers using the same software. The software developers keep an eye on these forums and will also provide technical support in the form of suggestions and links to tutorials.
• Many blogging software packages provide language support making it possible to automatically translate the blog post into many languages.
• Look for software that provides the facility to run more than one blog. (Many bloggers find themselves running several blogs on different themes.)
• You may want to run one blog with a group of people (a class for example) so look for blogging software that allows for multiple authors.

Recommended free blogging software.

I have tried each of the following and these comments are based on my own preferences. Other people will have different preferences this is just meant as a guide for beginners. The best thing is to start experimenting!

WordPress: http://wordpress.com/features/

WordPress has a very clear user interface (called a dashboard) and is very stable. It provides huge photo storage facilities; has a very powerful link to Google search engines, and community forums. There is an automatic ‘tag’ linking system that generates links to other blogs discussing similar topics in their posts. This provides a great way to locate blogs you would not otherwise know about. WordPress does not support java script; this code provides an extra layer of information to the blogger, giving highly detailed information about where visitors are linking in from. However, there is still a simple statistical tool that provides a bare bones list of information about the blog’s visitors. (If a blogger wants to make use of the extra layer of sophistication that java scripting would provide they must pay for the professional version of WordPress.

(This blog is a WordPress Blog and I am not being paid to promote it – though willing to discuss such an option of course!)

Blogger: https://www.blogger.com/start

Blogger is one of the oldest blogging software programs available. It has the broadest range of features and is relatively easy to use. Blogger includes java scripting, making it a more powerful program than WordPress. However, the user interface is not as well thought through as the WordPress dashboard. Blogger is weak with regard to image management; if the blogger wishes to use photographs extensively then this will not be the best program to chose. (The pages have a tendency to allow images and captions to slip into erratic positions or just cause an un-pleasing visual result.)

Vox: http://www.vox.com/

Vox may be the easiest blogging software to use; it is extremely photo friendly, and has lovely looking customizable layouts. Vox sites look excellent, but they can begin to feel frustrating because they limit other options. One of the best features of blogs is the ability to use them as a central information management system, where you can create sets of links to other useful web sites and blogs. Vox seemed to only permit limited external links (this was the case when I was experimenting with it) and this soon felt very restrictive. Nevertheless Vox is a great place to begin exploring blogging. (If the creation of individual blogs was part of a class assignment then the Vox software would be a great place to send students to.) They will produce very strong, professional looking blog sites in no time at all using Vox.

This post was originally published in 2008 on the blog ‘cyberloom’

If you have been toying with the idea of creating a blog this would be an excellent place to begin. Those of you with established blogs may also find posterous tools useful due to its ability to sync posts with other blogs. (You may find that you want to fine tune the appearance on your second blog following such a synchronized post.)

One of the features you may enjoy with this new blogging application is that they have made posting a ‘piece of cake’ by letting you email directly to your blog. Other blogging software provides this same feature but posterous.com seems to have really simplified and streamlined the procedure. The only drawback to posterous that I could find was that it seems to only be able to upload one image per post.

A screen capture showing the posterous.com sign-up page

posterous.com

FastPencil website (screen shot)

One of the concerns we have nowadays is that so much information is being transferred to the web. Costs are pushing literary journals into purely digital format and university presses are folding. It is reassuring to discover that new businesses are evolving that aim to help us capture and publish our work in both e-book and printed formats.

Take a look at this recent New York Time article titled FastPencil: Turn You Blog Posts Into A Published Book

Writing a book will never be easy, but FastPencil’s mission is to make things easier for authors by bringing this process online and to collaborate with others. FastPencil takes writers from idea to published book. The service offers features for collaboration, editing and design, as well as professional consulting services for authors. One cool feature of FastPencil is that it can import blog posts and turn them into books and e-books that bloggers can then sell through all the major book distribution channels.

…Once you have finished your book, you can publish it as an e-book and printed book. These services, however, do cost. These paid services include printing, obtaining ISBN numbers, and organizing the distribution of your book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Ingram Digital and other retail partners. FastPencil also offers a number of editing services like design, illustration and editing services. Besides printing hardcover and paperback books, FastPencil can format books for virtually any digital platform, including DRM-free ePub e-books and the Kindle.

(Above quotes taken from the NYT article FastPencil: Turn You Blog Posts Into A Published Book

“Social media is about word of mouth (well, maybe word of keyboard) relationship building.  It’s today’s version of old-fashioned marketing.  Like it or not, our fast paced world is here to stay and social media gives us the tools to keep up with it.  So, I’m going to join the new wave and figure it all out.  It’s a lot like learning a foreign language but I did Spanish before, surely I can do this.”

Quote taken from post titled ‘Twit It!’ on The Problem with Money blog by Jane Honeck

To learn more about her research please see:  New evidence that bullet-points don’t work on Olivia Mitchell’s blog Speaking about Presenting.

You can also see Chris Atherton’s own PowerPoint titled ‘Visual Attention: A psychologist’s perspective’ available on Slideshare.

e board dashboard view

The idea of e-Board is that you have a simple cork board for your messages and notes. It seems  very straight forward to use, the only issue I had was that I could not cut and paste text directly from my Word document. However, it is easy to attach the Word document to your note enabling others to open it up on their desktops. If you are looking for software that will help you collaborate with others on large documents this is probably not the application to use (Google Docs would be more useful).

For quick notices and messages to a group this has the potential to be a very useful tool. Other features of e-Board include a calender and email notifications to your group or class.

e-Board is currently mainly being used in schools to connect pupils, teachers and parents. It is, in effect, a  simple social networking tool that offers the opportunity for groups of people to easily share information and stay in touch with each other.

I taught a 3-semester-hour blended course (one classroom hour, two online hours) for several years, and I discovered that students who almost never said anything in class were usually very active in the online discussions, and many of those students told me afterward that they had learned much more than they would have if they had just listened to me lecture. Also, the reflective writing for the required  online discussion board  strengthened many students’ understanding of the subject matter and made it more relevant to their lives.

I have used and enjoyed online course management software (CMS) packages for years,  but these  CMS-driven courses tend to be somewhat confusing for  new users to navigate, as they are packed with so many “gizmos”  — which may not even be that effective!  Since OLLI courses do not require the extensive testing and record keeping ability required for teaching for-credit courses, then probably the sophisticated CMS packages are not needed.

Fortunately, we have a new tool at hand.  Our ability to use very simple blogs, such as those provided free of charge by Blogger and WordPress, instead of more complicated software makes online courses and discussions  easier than ever — both for teachers and for students.

The new report quoted  below has some encouragement for those wishing to add online and “blended courses” to their OLLI offerings.

A Department of Education study shows that students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction. The study is a meta-analysis of the research, and it is accompanied with the warning that the findings apply primarily to adults. Researchers were surprised to discover how few research studies of the effectiveness of online learning for K-12 students have been published.

The authors encourage more K-12 research and caution that their findings should not be applied to K-12 students. For adults, however, the benefits of online learning apply to undergraduate, graduate and professional learners. Online learning, points out the report, gained traction because early studies had shown it to be a cost-effective and convenient route to equally effective learning. However, as the tools and online environments have improved, it now appears to be superior. Even so, not all gizmos make a difference.

The study posed four key research questions:

• How does the effectiveness of online learning compare with that of face-to-face instruction?
• Does supplementing face-to-face instruction with online instruction enhance learning?
• What practices are associated with more effective online learning?
• What conditions influence the effectiveness of online learning?

Key findings include:

• Blended and purely online learning conditions generally result in similar student learning outcomes.
• Elements such as video or online quizzes do not appear to influence the amount that students learn in online classes.
• Online learning can be enhanced by giving learners control of their interactions with media and prompting learner reflection.
• When groups of students are learning together online, support mechanisms such as guiding questions generally influence the way students interact, but not the amount they learn.

Source: U.S. Department of Education, Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies

via DIGITAL LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS: Tools and Technologies for Effective Classrooms.