This document provides guidance on effective blogging for a media studies course. It introduces blogging and blogging tools, and encourages students to start their own blogs. The document outlines several benefits of blogging, including deeper learning, collaboration, and developing reflective skills. It then describes some common blogging pitfalls to avoid, such as including irrelevant content, relying too heavily on text, clustering posts, providing insufficient detail, using informal language, and having inconsistent quality throughout the project. Finally, it emphasizes the importance of organization, detail, terminology, multimedia tools, frequent posts, consistency, documenting the entire journey, and providing strong first posts to set up a successful blog.

1. Foundation Portfolio in Media

2. Aims & Objectives – Todays Lesson
•Introduction to blogging
•Introduction to blogging tools
•You will start blogging

4. • Example
• http://asmedia1314sam5.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Marc?updated-max=2014-03-04T12:55:00Z&max-
results=20&start=20&by-date=false
• My Blog
• https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?
blogID=6773806116803475798#overview/src=dashboard

5. With the proliferation of technology, Blogs will probably be
replaced by something else at some point.
But the skills learnt from their use are essential in the 21st
Century
• Analytic thinking
• Critical thinking
• Collaborative working
• Referencing skills
• Producing texts with clear fluidity
• Competent use of technology

6. Blog Benefits
1.Deeper learning – getting students to think for themselves
2.Encouraging you to reach out to each other – sharing knowledge
3.Easy to manipulate – easy technical understanding. Elastic in design.
Convenient and engaging
4.Encouraging a more reflective individual
5.Creative platform – potential to use a wide range of tools/widgets etc
6.Students can shape their own contributions to suit their
styles/audience

7. Nonsense blogging
• Students sometimes embrace the journal aspect of
blogging during a project a little too much. Random
jokes, recounts of arguments and general content which
is not applicable to the project can often dominate.
• Whilst we don’t want to restrict personal response and
deter you from the flow of blogging, the content of the
blog needs to be a balance of personal reflection and
direct accounts of what has taken place during the
project.

8. Text-heavy blogging
• We (OCR) too often see blogs which are
dominated by text – almost like the posting of
mini-essays throughout
• However, blogs have the potential to be an
innovative and interactive forum combining
visual, audio and written communication
forms and this should be actively encouraged.

9. Cluster blogging
• Like retrospective blogging, cluster blogging is
very obvious. It’s not just spotted through the
date indication but also recognised through
the depth of the recount of the process.
• It is easy to forget something that happened
or was carried out when you are blogging
together in a bulk. This approach also
encourages text-heavy blogging as panic sets
in.

10. Scanty blogging
• Like limited powerpoint slides, posts which fail
to include any specific detail or lack depth
often do not contribute to the journey.
• Obviously, at times you want to post if there
has been a complication. However, such posts
need to move beyond exclamatory
statements and provide detail to the
occurence!
• E.g. – ‘Today we did our filming.’ ‘Lost all our
footage!’

11. Colloquial blogging
• Remember the importance of formality and to
consider your audience.
• Over-use of slang and colloquial terms will not
do you many favours, especially during the
evaluation stages.
• You should always proofread, checking for
spellings and punctuation.

12. Great start, poor finish blogging
• The risk with blogging is that this happens.
You get lots of research evidence, then some
planning and then the next post is the final
product.
• You blogging needs to be consistent
throughout the project!

13. Key to a Successful Blog is:
1. Organisation
2. Detail
3. Media specific
terminology
4. Web 2.0 tools
5. Frequency
6. Consistency of quality
7. The journey

14. Transforming the blogging experience

16. First POSTS
• POST TITLE: The Brief
• Label: Genre Research
• POST TITLE: Initial Genre research – watching
Fear Itself and reflections
• Label: Audience Research
• POST TITLE: Initial Primary Audience research
and reflections