Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am in a classroom this morning on the campus of Belmont University, standing before a convocation-starved crowd of 25 students. We are talking about Blogging for Beginners... a convocation title developed by Nathan Baker of Belmont Vision and Reporting from Honduras fame. I will try to make this session as informative as possible, leaving a large chunk of time for Q&A's.
Social Networking Technologies
I would guess that over 90% of the people in the room already have Facebook accounts and of those, I would guess that less than 20% realize that the old guy standing in front of the room also has a Facebook account (students are taking notes at this point to remember to log on to Facebook and restrict access to their profiles from all faculty and staff). What students may not realize: the same social networking principles that allow facebook users to connect with one another applies in a similar manner to building communities of bloggers. We may not get as far as learning community building (in the Peter Senge sense) in the 50 minutes or so of today's presentation, but it is a seed that is worthy of planting.
According to Nathan, "This copy has been placed in MovableType's Extended Entry text box just to demonstrate how really long posts can be broken up so that readers can still see other material on the home page of the blog. This is a feature of MovableType and may not be available in other blog software packages"
End of example blog for convocation... Don't forget to have those ID's scanned on the way out! Now, back to your regularly scheduled, blog-challenged, lives!