Introducing: A Multiliterate approach to writing

To prepare for his course in Spain this summer, Vance Stevens <http://www.vancestevens.com/vance.htm> will work with a small group of writers (You, EVC members  ) who will write using blogs. A blog is a the short for web log. or on line journal. ( See one of mine (Nelba's): http://n21810.motime.com )

He will teach us how to use tagging and rss to aggregate our blog posts. These are new uses of Internet to help people collaborate and work together online.

Aggregate means to pull together in one convenient place each other's writing. We'll learn what aggregate means (it's not a widely understood term). We'll learn how we can aggregate many things (like our blog posts, photos, and links to websites) that people put on the Internet when taking a writing course.

A tag is a word that helps describe what your post is about. For example if you are writing about the education system in Argentina, you might tag your post: writingmatrix, Argentina, education, ministry of education, secondary education (or university, and whatever other words you think might attract readers to your post).

First we will learn how to start our blogs, post to them, and tag and edit our posts. We will tag each posting 'writingmatrix' plus any other tags you wish to use. The writingmatrix tag will become important in helping us to aggregate our postings through social networking, which we'll learn about later.

Rosaura ( one of the participants) asks: what is RRS?
Blogs generate RSS feeds ( kind of links). We use these feeds to see each other's blog posts.

• Blogs automatically come with RSS "feeds", so people can subscribe to them.
• If I SUBSCRIBE to your RSS feed then I can know when you and your colleagues update your blogs.
• In our group we will subscribe to each other's RSS feeds through an aggregator called Bloglines. Bloglines will tell us when there is something new for me to look at, read, and respond to.
• Using Bloglines, we don't have to check each blog separately to find what has been updated.