What is the service?
The Academic Blogging Service is the University’s centrally supported blogging service. The service provides staff and students with a range of different blogs to support professional development and learning, teaching and research activities. The Academic Blogging Service supports a number of platforms that host different types of blogs including Learn, Moodle, Pebblepad and the WordPress service, blogs.ed.ac.uk. This service is intended to complement, rather than compete with, EdWeb and our institutional virtual learning environments. You can read the Academic Blogging Service’s Vision Statement for further information about the service.
What support does it provide?
There are a number of reasons why you might want to use a blog and the type of activities you want to support will influence the kind of blog you choose. For example you might want to set up a personal blog to develop your own professional profile. You might want a blog to highlight the activities of your research group. Or you might want to set up blogs for your students to use as part of a course assignment. The Academic Blogging Service home page will guide you through the process of choosing which type of blog is best for you and provide you with all the information, advice and guidance you need to set up your blog. The service also provides a full range of digital skills development workshops, online training resources and video case studies to help you get the most from your blog.
What this workshop covers…
This workshop will introduce you to the basics of academic blogging to build your professional profile. It will cover the benefits of academic blogging and provide links to further reading and examples of a range of different academic blogs. We will also look at some of the different uses of academic blogs and how you can develop your own writing style. We’ll cover privacy, openness, copyright and licensing and show you where to go to find further advice and guideance in all these areas. We’ll show you how to set up a new WordPress blog on blogs.ed.ac.uk, and how to link your blog to your EdWeb profile. And we’ll also show you some of the ways you can use social media to amplify and disseminate your blog posts.
…and what it doesn’t.
This workshop will guide you through the process of setting up your new blog, but it won’t teach you how to use WordPress.
There are lots of useful tutorials and documentation freely available on how to use WordPress. LinkedIn Learning offers a wide range of online training courses covering all aspects of using WordPress and we also recommend using the Help available in WordPress itself. We’ve created a list of videos and documentation that we’d recommend viewing if you are new to WordPress: Blogs.ed Help and Support
If you are looking for advice and guidance on setting up blogs for your students to use as part of their course work, we run another workshop that covers this. Visit Academic Blogging Service for information about all our skills development workshops, or book a place directly through events.ed.ac.uk.
(CC BY University of Edinburgh, https://edin.ac/30817lV)