I know you all are frustrated with the various technologies I’ve had you cobble together for this course. I promise…I have a point!
Furl
Hopefully you all have started to figure out the usefulness of Furl. My hope is that by the end of the class you find Furl useful enough to key using it. If you haven’t noticed, the really powerful aspect of Furl is that it archives, literally saves, the page that you bookmark. So, if the page changes tomorrow, or The New York Times puts the page in its “old” archive that you have to pay to access, you have the page saved…in Furl! If you are still unsure how to Furl…make sure you practice, practice, practice. I expect everyone to be comfortable with all the technologies by the end of module 1.
Uniblog
The blog is just an online journal that allows the rest of us to make comments. As I said above, if you are still unsure of how to use the blog, practice. Make sure you understand how to post new entries to your blog and how to reply to others. I would spend some time smacking all the buttons in the administration area to get a feel for what you can do with the Uniblog.
Gritwire
But I know, I’ve talked to many of you, that you really don’t get this Gritwire thing. First, you need to understand what RSS feeds are. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication (among a few other variants). Basically, sources can “push” their information out to the world through RSS feeds. So various newspapers and bloggers syndicate their new headlines through RSS. Individuals subscribe to the different RSS feeds using an RSS aggregator. Guess what Gritwire is?
Gritwire is useful to this class for two reasons. First, you can subscribe to a variety of newspaper, journal, and blog RSS feeds (in Gritwire they call them speedfeeds) about films and the entertainment industry.
However, Gritwire is more useful to this class for the second reason…it pulls all the course materials together. You know how you are responsible for reading through one anothers’ blogs and making comments? You can do that one of two ways. You can go to the course homepage (http://rrodrigo2.uniblogs.org/) and find everyone’s blog and furl links there. You can then link out to those pages, read material, reply, etc. OR…you can subscribe to everyone else’s blog and furl RSS (speed) feeds and have all the materials come to you in Gritwire.
There are help files on the week one homework page (http://rrodrigo2.uniblogs.org/course-schedule/week-1/). These should help you get everything set up and rolling. They also tell you have to find my list of feeds to subscribe to your classmates’ feeds. It is easy to identify all the furl feeds, they say “furl.” Look for feeds with “HUM210” in the title for the class blogs. Be careful, I also have HUM205 (Introduction to Cinema) feeds too!
I have checked that everyone did their homework for last week; however, I know that many people were still struggling with the technology. You all have until this Saturday, 1/28, to get caught up with everything (basically all the work from week 1 and module 1). As usual, if you have questions, email me!
