Public Service Announcement

You are supposed to have 18 blog posts by Monday. Twelve of those should have been posted on or after September 26.

My Blog

I was going to wait until my dissertation was finished and defended to begin blogging alongside all of you, but current events have pushed me to start now. So here’s a link to Brave New Blog. If you’re interested in the topic, feel free to join in.

Committing to Topics

We’re finally there. You’re going to choose topics, and begin blogging. But first, I want you to do a few things.

1) Read the following short piece by Brian Jay Stanley. It’s called “Everything Is Interesting,” and it should ease some of the concerns about whether something makes a “good” topic for blogging. Short answer: there are no bad topics. The link is here.

2) Glance at some of these posts that we have deemed Good Bloggers. The links are after the “jump” (that is, the break between what is shown on the front page and what is hidden; click “continue reading” below to see what is beyond the jump).

3) Please complete your “About This Blog” page by next Thursday. We are happy to have conversations with you about your topics whenever you like.

And now, the jump…

Student Bloggers’ Legal Rights

Jen Teitle–wife and fellow occasional blogger–pointed me toward the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s website. They are “lawyers, policy analysts, activists, and technologists” who work for the public interest in matters related to the Internet and free speech. They have a lot of materials worth clicking around for, but most interesting for AP Lang is their FAQ sheet about student bloggers’ legal rights, based on legal precedents. I highly recommend that you all review the page in the next couple of weeks. Here’s a sample:

Welcome, Incoming Bloggers!

If you’re reading this, you’re probably an AP Lang student wondering how this blogging thing is going to work. Here’s a brief guide to this site.

There are four kinds of things you’ll find here:

1. Instructions for the assignment. There are two tabs at the top if you ever need some basic reminders about what I want you to do on your blogs. “The Assignment” give you the simple outline; “Why We Blog” is a more detailed explanation of my rationale for including them as a part of the AP Lang & Comp curriculum.
2. A series of “how to” posts to help you blog. If you want to know how to include images or video in your posts, or you’re having trouble adding a link, click on “Blogging 101″ on the right hand side and scroll through for instructions.
3. Fellow students’ blogs. If you want to find other AP Lang students’ blogs to help spur some ideas of your own, or you’re just curious to see what others are doing, they’re all listed on the side. I will also periodically highlight some student blogs with a post on Kennedy Blogs.
4. Other examples of blogs.  I’ve also included links to some really good blogs, so that you can see what highly successful bloggers have done. This includes professional bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Nate Silver, and also KHS grads who started their blogs in AP Lang & Comp. This includes one student who recently blogged for the Obama re-election campaign, and another who is blogging for a women’s center at a Big 10 university.

Entering the Conversation with Links and Quotes

Remember how I said I wanted you to start using links and block quotes to enter into public conversations on your blog? Here are some examples from honest-to-goodness bloggers:

• Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses some goings-on in the New York City school system.
• Brian J. McCabe at 531 notes some polling on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
• Susan Boyd worries about worshipping child prodigies.
• The PM of Keepin’ It Real vents about the labels “Fiscal Conservative” and “Tax and Spend Liberal.”

That last example, by the way, is by a former student who started her blog for AP Lang & Comp. Not sure of how to add links and block quotes? I’ll be happy to talk about it in class, but click those links in the last sentence for previously-posted instructions.

Blogging 101: Adding a Link List

I want you to add links to the side of your blog that are related to the subject(or subjects) your blog is about. You should already have KennedyBlogs linked; keep that link at the top, but add the others beneath it.

This is how you do it:

1. If you’re looking at your main blog page, there should be a little icon of a screwdriver and wrench under your list of links. Click it.
2. That will open up a new window called “Configure Link List.” Down below, where it says “New Site URL,” paste in the address of the new link. [For example: http://jfkblogs.wordpress.com.] Make sure you don’t accidentally end up doubling the “http://” at the beginning of the URL.
3. In “New Site Name,” type the text that you want displayed. [For example: "Kennedy Blogs."]
4. Make sure you click on the orange “Save” button at either the top or bottom of the window.
5. Now you can view the blog, and your new link should be there.

A Blog that Might Be of Interest

If you’re interested, here’s Anthony Bourdain’s blog through the Travel Channel.

Blogging 101: The Block Quote

This post is more about using conventions than providing tech help. Specifically, how do bloggers convey that they are quoting from somebody else’s blog?

First of all, some of you have noticed that on some of the blogs I’ve recommended, like Andrew Sullivan’s, many of his posts consist of a long quote, with a little intro and then maybe some response afterward. I recommend this as a strategy for coming up with topics: see what other people are saying, and respond to it. But you can’t just respond out of context; you have to let your reader know what you’re responding to. So here’s a very short example:

……………………

Christopher Hitchens wrote a fascinating column on Slate.com last spring, where he talked about British interrogation of German prisoners while the Nazis were bombing London. I had no idea they exercised such restraint. Quoting from a book about the subject, Hitchens described one incident where a German prisoner was being held, and a guard got too physical:

An external interrogator unused to the rules of Ham Common was exasperated by this initial stubbornness and “followed TATE to his cell at the close of that first interrogation and, in flagrant violation of the Commandant’s rigid rule that no physical violence should ever be used at Ham, struck the agent on the head. The incident led, on immediate representations by the Commandant, to the instant recall of [the offending officer] from the camp.” One blow to the head at a time when undefended British cities were being blitzed every night, and the brute was out of there for good.

Hitchens went on to explain that their reasons for being so strict about it was that they believed roughing up prisoners might get you information, but it was mostly bad information that you couldn’t trust.

………………………

Notice two things: first of all, I provide a link, so that an interested reader can go read the whole thing. Then I provide a block quote, which is indented. On Blogger, you have the option of highlighting text in your post and clicking the button with the quotation marks. The indentation signals to the reader who is saying what.

Also, doing this may have another benefit, by getting you to pay more attention to what others are saying, and making it easier to think of things to blog about.

Blogging 101: Embedding Video

If you want to include a video in your post, so someone can watch the video on your blog instead of just following a link to YouTube, here’s how you do it:

1. In another browser window, open up the YouTube page (this also works with other online video providers, but it works a little differently with each). To the right of the video, there should be a little box that says “Embed”. Highlight that text, and copy.
2. When looking at the box where you’re writing your post, back on Blogger, there are two tabs on the upper right: “Compose” and “HTML.” click on the “HTML” tab. Your post should still be there, though the font may change. Don’t worry, it will go back to what it was when you post it.
3. Paste the text you copied from YouTube into the text of your post.
4. Finish writing your post. If you return to “Compose,” the video may disappear temporarily. But when you post it, the video should be there.

Some videos on YouTube have the phrase “embedding disabled by request” in the “Embed” box. These videos aren’t available for embedding, but you can still link to the video from your blog.

See? Easy as one-two-three. Four.