Contents
Blogs (for UoB students)
Blogs are websites.
goto http://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/createnew/ and select the first (or if you like the 2nd) option.
Follow the instructions to name and create your site. Make the name personable to you! (e.g. Don’t call it XE404!). Note that this will be a wordpress site that is hosted within the University.
Note also the publication settings (internal or external, searchable or not, etc).
The edublocks userguide is useful, and so too is the image formatting guide.
Note that you can do the site using HTML if you wish, even inside the WordPress environment. By all means try this, here’s the linkedinlearning fundamentals course on this.
Documenting your work
An overview to documentation and websites, and where to find out more.
Why?
- Got to keep notes (when you do it, and when you come back to repeat it)
- Offload your brain: you will forget
Helps you learn (Lifelong Kindergarten Creative Learning Spiral)
- Shows how learners construct knowledge through making
- Sharing is an important part of that spiral
- forces you to look at it from another angle – someone else
- verifies that you actually understand it and helps you identify the bits you don’t
- Feynman: ‘if you can’t explain it simply then you don’t understand it…’
Get noticed (Laura Kampf)
- Other people use your work, building on it
- Projects with good documentation get take-up from others
- Projects that invite people in help cultivate a community around your work
- (And if you’re daunted by these successful people, look at their early work.)
some other examples:
How?
Good documentation
Examples:
- Steps taken, reference to go back to, issues and fixes: http://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/xe404lakelly/2019/03/28/week-8-fusion-360-cam-for-mould-making-and-casting/
- Diagrams, WiP, videos: http://www.jacobstanton.com/3d-printed-hand-screw-clamp/
- others:
Project documentation sites:
- Instructables (search for anything)
- Fab Academy
(in XE404 We’ll review weekly)
Resources:
Other options (by all means play!)
Site structure:
- note you can use posts (chronological) or pages (static)
- use categories to help sort by subject
- use tags to help search by keywords/topics
- consider your menu structure (draw a tree diagram)
- play around at first
- then decide and be consistent throughout
Considerations:
- embed video (do not upload)
- label+manage files+images like a jedi. Never upload a full res image (images always <1Mb)
- test your website for its loading speed (here is an example website analytics tool)
- here is a useful site for developing sustainable websites with design resources/tips
- note only 1Gb storage capacity
- love your blog, document constantly, like a person possessed, and show it off!
Assignment for this week
- Create your edublog.
- create an ‘About me’ page, including an appropriately formatted+filenamed image of yourself and describe the digital fabrication projects you’ve made so far (if you have any)
- create a page documenting this week’s assignment (creating the website!). Cover what you’ve learned about publishing on the web: show what you did, what went wrong, and how you fixed it.
- Go through the edublocks userguide and the image formatting guides. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/html-essential-training/
- submit the URL of your site into the assessment submission area on Studentcentral. Add a short note about what you have submitted. Check with your tutor (and other students) that they can access the site. Submit again each week with a short update on progress.
- Play around and populate your site:
- test out some themes (noting requirements for image sizes/ratios etc)
- test out embedding an external video from youtube/vimeo/other
- use tags and categories
- create a menu (or multiple menus) and add these to your site as widgets
Note: if you have experience with websites you could create your own site externally if you wish. You could also purchase an external domain (e.g. www.derekcovill.com) and point it to your edublog site if you wish!
