So, on Monday I’m going to have a Google hangout regarding the crazy collaborative writing thing we talked about yesterday. One class that will be involved is a writing and the environment group at SUNY-ESF, and they’ve been posting introductory tweets recently. Here they are, all collected into one Storify.

Posting that link for 2 reasons: a) you can see some of the other students we might be working with, but mainly b) you can see how they go about introducing themselves in 140 characters and with a single image. That’s not exactly what we’re doing with the badges, but might give you some inspiration as you work on them (and, not to give too much away, but you’ll be working on some “about me” text for your sites sometime soon, so …)

• Badge. As we talked about in class today, you need to make a badge for yourself. It should be 300 pixels by 150 pixels and it should include some sort of a visual and your name. The optimal thing would be for your badge to be visually striking and to somehow convey a sense of yourself or your interests. If you need a photo editing program, Picmonkey is a free browser-based photo editor that’s easy to use, but feel free to use whatever tool you’d like.

[Update! I meant to add about the badges: I think I said in class that you should email these to me when you finish them? I don’t know why I said that. Don’t email them to me. Make a new blog post add the badge to the post. To be an extra cool student, add a few sentences about the badge–why it looks the way it does, whether you’re happy with it, how you made it, whatever seems worth commenting on to you. Don’t forget to include any attribution details & links if you used someone else’s CC-licensed work!]

• Theme. Choose and install a new theme for your site besides the default theme. Here’s a document with some helpful guidance on changing themes. As I said, you can expect to find this process to be a little frustrating and you may try a few different themes before you find something that works for you. You can always change the theme again down the road.
• Survey. Fill out this simple Google form so I have some basic information about you. Once I have your gmail addresses, I’ll share the first set of Google docs with you for the group blogging assignment.

You’ll need to also read Understanding Comics chapter 4 & Maus I chapters 5-6.

The Readers should publish their blog post by Monday evening.

[Note: I’ve added a plug-in that allows me to set some posts as “sticky” (i.e., even though they retain the time and date stamp they were published on, they stay up at the top of the page and new posts come in underneath them).

I’m telling you this just in case you swing by here, see this post at the top and then think there must be nothing new. There are new posts beneath this one. One of them is even an XKCD comic!

I’m also telling you because I want to be transparent about how I manage this site, so if you’re wanting to try to do the same sort of thing, you can figure out how.]