The Blogging Chronicles With Professor Isidra Person-Lynn: Ease Of Use Of Blogs

By Chris A. Heidelberg III, Ph.D., Publisher & Producer & Isidra Person-Lynn

This was the fourth in a series of interviews with Professor Isidra Person-Lynn. In this interview, I discuss the importance of ease of use when constructing blogs for learning.

Professor Isidra Person-Lynn:

How hard do they say they are to set up?

Me: Actually, blogs are fairly easy to set up; however, I would recommend Vox and Blogger because of their ease of

use despite my affection for Wordpress which creates great looking blogs.

The biggest problem that I had was teaching folks how to load PowerPoints onto the blog. It was fairly simple but I would say approximately one-third of the class did not know how to do this, so I put the instructions online and demonstrated it live in class. In fact, some students figured out how to put all of the PowerPoints up as posts and it looked great.

The other thing that I had to demonstrate was how to load video from YouTube directly in the post, but this was not as big of an issue. Ironically, loading photos did not seem to create a problem.

Overall, it was pretty painless! I just had to keep reminding folks to answer the questions, and post them on the blog so that they would be ready for their final which could be posted on their blog too.

This did two things. First, it provided students with an opportunity to think about what they were writing from a visual and audio perspective and they had to basically create storyboards through video and photo images to tell a story in a more concrete and three dimensional way than basic print can ever do; and it also enabled students to create a paper from my final exam questions just by cutting and pasting legally with citations.

Yes, I tricked them into learning while having fun, but I warned them in the beginning that they would be learning despite my methods. At the end of the day, my students, to a man and a woman, loved my approach and all of them expressed this in very complimentary terms.

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