Mid-week review

It’s been a busy week for me and blogging has had to come a poor second to the pursuit of other work-related things. The multiple postings on smoking policies reflect some reading I am doing on the subject – not a lot of extra blogging effort.

I have been thinking about the issue of the amount of time I do spend blogging. In my case blogging is primarily a recreation - though a purposeful recreation.

I’d be very interested in reader’s experiences in terms of time spent blogging generally and perhaps in running their own blog. Do you worry about the impact of time spent blogging on time available for other things.

By the way, I thought the use of blogging software, by Tim Lambert , as a ‘content management system’ for teaching was neat. His specific illustration of a course he teaches on Computer Graphics is here.

Using the Wordpress blogging software Tim can password particular parts of the site such as solutions to problems. He also includes video clips and pod casts as well as information about the subject and links to background reference material. The comments facility can be switched on and off – clearly for small groups you could set online exercises that could be addressed in the same way that WebCT and other online teaching tools work. Snippets of mathematics can be added to posts by means of a Wordpress add-on.

‘So what’ you might say. Can’t you put all this material on a webpage? You probably can but this is approach is very easy to set up and update. I also like the temporal feel of the approach – this is what we are doing this week.

Again I’d be interested in reader‘s experiences using blogs in a teaching setting.