WCLD ePortfolio Pilot

I just spoke with Patty about joining the pilot after getting the nod from El and Rick. I don’t have all my notes with me right now, but from what I recall, the pilot is a year-long project to get users comfortable using Blogs@PSU as a supplement to PSU’s Staff Review and Development Plan (SRDP) process.

I’m really excited to be apart of the pilot. I even created a root-level page that lists the other [awesome] participants in this pilot. I’m kind of joining the game a little late and might miss some of the kick-off events, but I’ll work hard to catch up.

I mentioned a few things about the pilot to Patty based on my limited knowledge of MT4 and blogging in general.

1. MT4 doesn’t have a way of displaying a user’s list of tags at once – I found this a very useful feature in other blogging tools; what I do is literally hit every single letter in the alphabet and see which tags apply for any given post
2. Web Analytics – I’m using Google Analytics to check the traffic on my blog, it’s a great way to justify or plan work I’m doing in my blog… once I get some visitors that is
3. When to blog – just had a minor comment that we some users may chose to work on a pretty flexible schedule while others will like an hour or two each week to focus on blogging
4. ePortfolios to replace SRDP’s – yea! but that’ll never happen 🙁

There’s a lot to MT4 I still don’t know. I would like to learn about best practices regarding:

1. Categories – what the heck are they?
2. Trackbacks – see above…
3. Keywords – how are these different in use from tags?
4. Widgets – what the heck are these?
5. Preferences – anything in particular we should or shouldn’t be doing?
6. Publishing related to aggregating post contents – Is it better to create a new post or update an old one? If one updates an old one, does that mean we should change the publish date? If we change the publish date, then we have to be careful of changing the URL. So, does that then mean we go back to previous posts and just add links to newer, related links?
7. Importing/Exporting – when might we use it?
8. What to put on my front page?

Thing I still want to do with my blog:

1. Customize my blog’s appearance
2. Possible to post audio? Think blogs + RSS + atoms = podcasting!

var gaJsHost = ((“https:” == document.location.protocol) ? “https://ssl.” : “http://www.”); document.write(unescape(“%3Cscript src='” + gaJsHost + “google-analytics.com/ga.js’ type=’text/javascript’%3E%3C/script%3E”)); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-15285145-1”); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}