Welcome to the World!

Welcome to Diverse Cultures and their Musics! I'm glad that you're here--both in the class and on my blog, which you'll be visiting frequently during the semester. Our class blogs will be places to explore, teach, and learn--they're some of the most fun parts of the class.

Blogs serve a few different purposes. They're primarily written journals, so you'll want to use your best writing skills (avoid texting lingo unless it serves a specific purpose). Unlike pencil-and-paper journals, though, they also allow you to share a variety of media. You'll be including pictures and videos and sound files on your own blogs throughout the semester, and you'll need to make sure they all upload and are easy for your readers to access. Finally, blogs do all of these things in a public forum, which will allow you to learn from each other, because learning just from me gets really old really quickly. Because they're public, though, you need to be sure that you conduct your typing as such--future employers and potential significant others might decide to do a web search on you, and wouldn't it be nice if they like what they find? I'll post all blog assignments in full on my blog, but there will be an assignment portal for each blog assignment in Canvas, so that the due dates will show up on your Canvas calendar and in my gradebook. As a general rule, you'll complete each of your blog assignments by uploading either the url address or your comments into the Canvas portal.

First blog assignment: Set up your blog! It needn’t be beautiful and interesting and polished (you can polish it as you create your first post), but it does need to exist. Go to blogger.com and click on "Create Your Blog." Sign in using your Converse email account. Once you've signed in, just find the place to create a New Blog, and them follow the prompts. Voila! 

A few tips as you create your blog--

1. Pick a unique blog address and title. Don't pick Diverse Cultures and their Musics--that won't identify you from the rest of the class. Instead, try something like Katie's Musical Journey, or Oh, the Places Aliyah Will Go!

2. Don't worry too much about visuals at this point. Choose a Theme that you like, knowing you can personalize it later.

3. Once your blog exists, make sure to visit both Settings and User Profile. The most important thing in Settings: Time Zone--make sure it's set to Eastern Time. The most important thing in User Profile: Display Name--make sure it's something that actually identifies you, and not something like "divculblog," which, again, could be anyone in this class. It's nice if you make sure to include a photo of yourself in your User Profile, too--not everyone here knows which names go with which faces.

It's important that you create your blog today. That way, if you run into problems, we can take some time at the end of class tomorrow to sort it out. For those of you that haven't experienced Jan Term before, it goes fast. Make sure to keep up with your blog posts (and your quizzes)--if you get behind even a little bit, catching up can feel catastrophic. Too, half of the blog equation is learning from each other, and if your blog is posted late your classmates won't be able to learn from you.

So, yes, the creation of your blog is due by 11:59 pm tonight. In order to get credit for setting up your blog, you must 1. Leave a comment on this blog about anything you like--we just need to make sure you can leave comments, and 2. Upload your blog URL address into the "Blog Setup" Assignment portal in Canvas. (As an example, the URL of this blog is kmvanemandcmfall2020.blogspot.com.) I'll use that list of comments to attach your blogs to my own, which will then become a hub for our collections of class blogs. 

Then, next week, the fun begins! Here's a bit of a preview...