Blog orientation
As I was writing about Josip Dasovic's blog yesterday (Clouds, Clocks, and Sitting at Tables), I thought that at the beginning of a new school year, some orientation about the use of this blog might be relevant.Most of the blog entries are based on published news stories. I read through 10-12 online news sources almost every morning and pick out things I see as possible teaching tools. I excerpt big ideas from articles and offer some comments on how I think they can be used. Sometimes, I come across a topic I want to learn more about and do a series of blog entries about that topic. (See SoftPower for a series I did last fall.)
ORIENTATION
First of all, if you are at the teaching comparative web page (if you're reading your e-mail, you might want to go there for this orientation), you'll see a "Search Blog" box in the upper left of the screen. You can use this to search all of the 1,000+ blog entries that I've made over the past 27 months. If you search for "political culture," for example, you'll see every blog entry in which that phrase appears.
But that kind of search might not be appropriate for your purposes.
On the right side of the blog page (beneath the subscription boxes), you'll see a list of "Links."
The first link on the list is to the "Index of Blog Entries." At that index, you can click on any of the 90+ tags I've attached to entries and you'll be presented with those entries from newest to oldest.
The other links on the list are things I think might be useful to you in teaching comparative government and politics. There are links to other teachers' blogs, to the Facebook group Patrick O'Neil organized, AP Central, several pedagogical resources, and to the sharing comparative group, which offers members an opportunity to share teaching ideas. There's also an advertising link to my book's web site.
Beneath the map showing where yesterday's web visitors logged in from, is a list of the ten most recent blog posts. If you're looking for something you saw recently, this would be the quickest way to find it.
Below that are links to files of posts from the last 2+ years, organized by month. If you want to find a post about something that happened, for example, in the fall of 2006, this would be a place to look.
At the bottom of the sidebar are my editorial advertisements advocating freedom of the Internet press and net neutrality (without which a blog like this would probably be too expensive to "publish" without lots of advertising. -- You have noticed that mine is the only advertising here, haven't you?).
I also want to point out is that at the end of every blog post is a link to "Comments." If you have a reaction to a topic or a correction or an addition, this is where you can become part of this effort. Few people besides me use the Comment feature on this blog. I usually use it to post follow-up information (like the comment I added yesterday about the probable hospitalization of Nigeria's president). Please, feel free to make this more of a conversation.
And finally, those subscription boxes that are near the top of the right hand sidebar.
The first one allows you to subscribe so that new blog entries are sent to your newsreader.
The second one lets you receive each entry at your e-mail address.
(Then you don't have to visit the web site to see blog entries. But, I've been told, that illustrations don't always show up in e-mails and newsreaders.)
Do you have suggestions? Do you have topics you'd like to see covered? Do you have a class blog to add to the "Links" list? Do you have other resources to add to that list? Some people send me sources and ideas for blog entries, and I love to get them.
Use the "Comment" link at the bottom of any entry to contact me. The comments come to me before they get added to the blog.
Labels: pedagogy
posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:10 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home