Blogging Workshop at SJSU

I'm a highly insecure person when it comes to teaching new things. This is interesting because of the profession I chose. This Thursday I am presenting a workshop at San Jose State about Blogging. I blog for my online classes, I require my students to blog, I read blogs everyday, I have a personal blog, but this does not make me an expert by an stretch of the imagination.

I have been putting together a workshop that should last at least an hour and a half to two hours, and I'm terrified that I will receive questions I cannot answer, look like an idiot while I am facilitating this workshop or God forbid, the technology in the classroom will fail. My entire workshop is on the computer. I need to breathe.....

Needless to say, I have been doing some reading about blogging for a while, but figure that most students who will be attending will have very little blogging knowledge. Or at least I ASSUME that the participants will have very little blogging knowledge. Here is a schedule of how things will probably go:

1). Lecture/Discussion on what a blog is.
2). Chat about the purpose for blogging. We will chat a bit about some popular blogs here.
3). Anatomy of a basic blog.
4). Blog hosting and what this means.
5). A short chat about the content of blogs.
6). Components of blogging success.
7). Blogsphere - what happens when you post.
8). Blogging and Ethics.
9). Privacy/Reputation/Alienation
10). Choosing a blogging niche. We will chat more about specific blogs during this section.
11). Creating a blog. (This is a hands-on component)
12). Creating an RSS feed to read blogs. (This is also a hands-on component)
13). Individual group discussions about recent articles in the news about blogging. I feel that students should always keep up with current events.

All of this should take about an hour and a half....I hope! I will be testing out this workshop, at least the discussion part, tomorrow on my class at Sierra College. I briefly mentioned that I was doing a workshop on blogging and they seemed highly interested.

Even though I am preparing, I'm still terrified!