Hello world. Or at least some of it.
I signed up for the popular course run by the nice folk at Moray House – “An Edinburgh Model for Online Teaching”. We are encouraged to set up a University-based blog as part of the course, so here we go. The course set up a template and a first post, but I have now blitzed that and am writing these words we see before us. And of course played around with the theme. WordPress themes these days all look great on your phone, but on your laptop look like some kind of child’s drawing of a blog. Hey Ho.
I am familiar with WordPress, and it is so much nicer than using EdWeb!! For many years (from about 2007 onwards) I ran a blog at WordPress.com called “the e-Astronomer”, which had a brief period of notoriety. That has been moribund since 2014. More recently Mark Phillips helped me setup the Piazzi Smyth 200th anniversary website using the Avada theme, and most recently I set up a new version of my personal website on a commercial hosting site, but again using WordPress. I might set up a static front page with some links in.
This is actually Day 2 of Week 1 of the course. Every academic in the University is of course in a desperate state of panic about next semester, so we are all keen to see what we get out of this course! But I realise that its real value is in the longer term, for full blown online teaching, rather than the patch-and-make-do we are faced with over the next few months…
Hello Andy,
Welcome to the course and well done for starting to blog a bit. Your blog looks very nice!
I hope the course will live up to your expectations (and calm down all the desperate academics a bit).
I’ll be trying to keep up with your blog posts and look forward to reading your reflections over the coming weeks.
All the best
Markus
Hi Andy,
I wrote some comments on your first blog post, but it doesn’t look like it has been approved. It might be because I used the wrong email address. I hope this one gets approved, and I’ll then follow up with some more comments.
Best wishes
Markus
I only just spotted you have to approve comments before they appear! My apologies. In my old personal wordpress blog I always had it set up so that approval was not required. This was for good legal reasons. My understanding is that if approval is not required, the comment-writer is responsible for the content; but if the blog owner approves the comment, they are acting like a publisher and become legally responsible for publishing the content. Some years back, there was a lot of heated science-politics on my blog, and someone did actually threaten to sue me because of what a commenter had written…