You can use any blog which has the capabilities to tag or label posts. Most OERu learners use WordPress or Blogger. If you would like to use your existing blog, we will harvest posts which are tagged or labelled using “ds4oer”. However, you may prefer to set up a new dedicated course blog.

Hosting your own course site

We strongly recommend that you set up a course blog using WordPress to familiarise yourself with this open source content management system because we will show you how to host your own WordPress site for publishing materials authored in WikiEducator during Session 9 of this course. Inspired by the Domain of One’s Own initiative at the University of Mary Washington, on this course you will explore how to host your own WordPress site for publishing materials developed collaboratively in WikiEducator. (We are unable to provide this service for self hosting using Blogger, but you are free to use Blogger for your course blog.)

The learning challenge which follows is based on WordPress, but participants are free to choose their own blog service provider.

Overview of the steps to set up your blog

Actions Additional resources
Create a blog account
Configure your blog Customise preferences (including settings for comments) and personalise the layout of your blog:

Post your first blog entry and “declare” yourself Learners are invited to compete the learning outcome actions for the: Declare yourself learning challenge.
Register your blog url Remember to register your blog url on the course site by clicking on the user icon () in the site menu and filling out the url for your course blog. Tips:

  • Be sure to submit the url for the published view of your blog post and not the url used for editing.
  • Remember to tag or label your post using the course tag: “#ds4oer”.