Welcome to Blog Talk

Hello and welcome to Blog Talk on DML Public Radio, with us “Click,” “Link” and “Embed,” the Connected Brothers, and we are broadcasting this week from… the Connected Courses website.

Woah, are there a lot of elite educators connecting in to this course. We have no idea why they put us on stage first, but there you go.

We hope the nice folks at NPR understand the possible similarity between what we do and a little show they run over there — it’s just a coincidence! If they give us some flack, they might hear from our lawyers, Dooey, Blogum and Howe.

This pre-course is an opportunity for you to get your blogs on the road, because that is the place you will be doing most of your work in Connected Courses. The three of us have tons of experience working inside the engines of these machines. But, we are still learning as we tinker — Brother Click is still driving a theme from 2008, Link can barely type a sentence without a type, and Embed sometimes struggles to get his GIFs animated.

Before going nuts and bolts, we will touch on some broader questions:

Why open learning? Why create your own space, domain, host? Why use your own tools? Why be a node on the web? Why is this important? What does connected learning mean?

We know these blog machines pretty well, but the choice of what you drive is up to you — anything from the fully get inside the engine running your domain and installing something like WordPress. But, you can also choose to just drive a reliable model off of the lot from WordPress.com, Blogger, tumblr, or a few of the other dealers down the highway.

For Week 1 – 9/2-5/14

Our first reference is a post summarizing some of these options as well as how to get your jalopy plugged into the Connected Courses site so your posts appear right there in the flow of the front page.

If you are new to tooling around in a blog, we have a few suggestions to help you start Blogging Like a Connected Courses Champion, using media, linking — but truly, we expect that you will develop a style that fits your interests as you get out there and publish more.

On Sept. 2, 2014, at 10 a.m. Pacific Time (check for your local time), we will host our first live call-in show, via Google Hangout. We will review these topics, but really hope some of you pull your blog into the garage and we can take a look at your site and maybe give you a tune up.

Week 2 – 9/8-12/14

We will keep the garage open to address all questions related to Week 1, but for those interested in the full fledged blog vehicles, we will introduce you to the capabilities of a full cPanel dashboard and what that affords individuals.

Our second call-in show is set for Friday, Sept. 12, at 2 p.m. Pacific Time. This is yet another chance for you to pull into the garage, put your blog up on the tracks, and let us give you a free checkup.

So, that’s the plan for the pre-course, a chance to get your blog machines running like race cars, so when Connected Courses goes into full motion on Sept. 15, you are ready to write and connect, and not worry too much about the mechanics of blogging.

Welcome to Blog Talk!

Oh — and one more thing — Don’t blog like my brother!

Click, Link, and Embed
The Connected Brothers

Orientation

Unit 1

Unit 2

Unit 3

Unit 4

Unit 5

Unit 6