March 14, 2011 | By: Nick Morris

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The Nature of Blogging (pun intended)

I have been writing blogs for around 8 years. The blogs I normally produce are of personal nature and are more a kind of journal than a real blog. However, about two years ago I started writing a blog for my students. So, this means I now effectively have two 'professional' blogs, this one and the one I keep for my students. But, why have two?

Simple answer: they fit different needs and have different aims.

My student blog

I started my student blog for two reasons: 1. I am lazy, and 2. It might get students to engage with the subject....

Being Lazy

I am lazy. I am always looking for ways to minimise the effort I put in to something, and for ways to maximise the return, and I certainly apply this approach to my teaching and research (and I don't think I am alone in adopting this approach). For example of 'being lazy' have a look at last post on 'Write once, publish many - connecting with students'.

I realised a couple of years ago that I was sending a lot of 'repeat' emails, that is, new students started on the course and they would tend to ask the same questions as previous students. No surprise there. However, it occurred to me that there may be a better, and easier, way of dealing with this instead of re-writing emails each year.

Initially I thought of keeping a database (see Do you speak my language: D is for Database, debug, DNS) of answers, but after some thought I realised that I would still have to find the answer and send it. It then occurred to me that a wiki (Do you speak my language: W is for Web services, Wiki, W3C, Webserver, WWW, Wordpress) might be the answer. This had the advantage that all the answers would be available online for the students so they may be able to find the answer, and therefore not email me. Again, after some thought I realised that I might not have the level of 'granularity' I needed, that is, I would be limited in sorting, categorising and possibly cross referencing.

My student blog - the Software

For my student blog I use Wordpress (which is uses MySQL to store the blog posts; see Do you speak my language: W is for Web services, Wiki, W3C, Webserver, WWW, Wordpress and Do you speak my language: M is for MySQL, MAC address, Malware, MashUp, Metadata, Middleware), which is a great system with a number of fantastic plugins available that can be used to easily extend the functionality of the system. Plus, you can edit and extend Wordpress yourself. For example, I have edited the Wordpress template I use so that Tweets don't appear on the front page (see Write once, publish many - connecting with students for information about getting Tweets to automatically appear on your blog).

For posting to the blog, when using a computer, I tend not to use the built in 'dashboard' in Wordpress, but instead use TextMate and Markdown. In addition, Wordpress has a bunch of mobile Apps available for pretty much every mobile platform, so you can blog on the move.

TextMate: Great text editor for the Mac (but now in need of an update). What is great about TextMate is you can post directly from the program to the blog, and the editor comes with a number of 'Bundles' that extend the functionality of the program. In fact, the 'Bundles' are great as it is easy to create your own (think of them as short cuts or small pieces of script that can be run), and it also easy for users to share bundles.

Markdown: This is a text-to-HTML conversion tool. What this means is that with Markdown you can easily write a webpage with all the formating without having to know a lot of HTML. For example, in Markdown you can include a web link in page by typing [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/), and a text placed between ** and ** will appear as bold (more information on Markdown syntax).

The great thing about using Markdown is it means you can concentrate on the words and not the format.

Why blog for Nature Scitable?

Well, as I said in my first post on this site - why not?

My Scitable blog has a different function to my student blog, that is, Scitable is a place where I write about the use of technology in teaching, whereas on my student blog I write about things relevant to the courses I teach.

Nature Scitable - the Software

Nature Scitable uses its own software and a WYSIWYG editor, so you can only post direct on their website.

This does have some advantages for bloggers that are not 'techy' as the WYSIWYG editor is very much like Microsoft Word (although I do think Wordpress editor does a better job in their dashboard - sorry guys). However, there are two major disadvantage with the Nature Scitable setup, first, putting in links to other webpages is a real pain (oh, how I miss Markdown), and second, you can't 'blog on the go', that is, you have to be in front of a computer.

Now, I have got a solution to lack of 'blogging on the go' problem, and it is called Evernote, but more on that in a later post.

So, do you blog as part of your teaching job? If you do, then why not share your experiences below....

2 Comments

March 14, 2011 | 09:32 PM

Posted By: Nick Morris

Thanks for the comment, and I am glad you found some of my posts useful.

March 14, 2011 | 08:59 PM

Posted By: Chia Huei Tan

Hi Nick, I'm heading down the academic route and definitely would like to get a blog running when i start lecturing. I think it's great that you have your material for other students and teachers to access. For example, I just stumbled upon your post on the Bradford Assay and Enzyme units, both will help me when I have to teach an Enzyme Kinetics lab course this semester!

I have been trying to start a biology website for high school students (A-level/IB/AP) but haven't found the time between my PhD work and tutoring students to build up the content. I guess each chapter will go in as I tutor them!

Looking forward to more of your posts!

The Nature of Blogging (pun intended)

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