Well, the class portal seems to be coming along nicely at the moment. Most of the text tour is complete, but it lacks a little pizzaz.
To make our class portal dazzle I suggest the following:
- We need pictures. They are worth a thousand words. Or so I’ve heard.
- We need to whip that sloppy spelling into shape.
- We need titles that grab the imagination.
- We need someone to show us the bigger picture.
- We need to be able to find our way around the posts.
- We need everything to look the same.
To this end, I suggest that the following roles need to be taken on:
- Images Editors
- Proof Readers
- Sub-Editors
- Big-Ideas People
- Archivist
- Typesetter
Some of these are real jobs in professional publications. Some of these should be real jobs in professional publications, which is why your class portal is better than a professional publication.
Please read the job descriptions below and suggest in the comments which roles you would like to take on. Suggest your first two preferences; I’ll try to make everyone happy.
Image Editors
The image editor’s job is to carefully read the articles and decide what type of image should be used to accompany each post. Because we want to be responsible internet users, we only want to use images that have a Creative Commons license, so that we are not breaking copyright. The image editor will have to make sure that all images are attributed to their source.
You can use http://search.creativecommons.org/ to find appropriate images.
Proof Readers
The proof readers are responsible for making sure that the content is typo free and makes sense. You can make small edits, such as changing ‘teh’ to ‘the’, but if you think it needs major re-writing in order to make sense, simply pass your suggestions on to the original author and they can fix it up.
Sub-Editors
The sub-editor needs to do a couple of things. Firstly, they must read the post carefully and then add any details that they think will make it more interesting or accurate. Some moderate re-writing is appropriate from the sub-editor. The sub-editor should then consider what the main message or point of the post is and then re-title the post, if appropriate.
Big Ideas People
Ok, so this is a made up job. However, the big ideas people will be responsible for bringing they key ideas and themes of the posts together. How they choose to do this is up to them, after all, they are the big ideas people, but they may choose to use tools such as Glogster or Bubbl.us to bring a visual representation of each of the key themes together. One big ideas person might, therefore, put together a poster representing the importance of family relationships for our survival, with some interesting images and key quotes on it. This can then be uploaded to the class portal and could even then serve as a link to the relevant posts relating to that theme.
Think BIG.
Archivist
The archivists need to make sense of all of the material we have produced and put it together in some sort of usable order. They might decide to make a page of hyperlinks that acts as a contents page to all of the text tour posts we have written. Some other structural changes to the site might be appropriate, too, so this can be decided by the archivists.
Typesetter
The typesetter needs to decide upon a format that all related posts should follow and then go through the site applying this format as they see fit. They might decide, for example, that all quotes need to be bold or indented, so they would need to go through the posts and make those changes.
Unknown
I don’t know everything. Don’t tell anyone, though. Maybe I haven’t thought of a job that needs to be done on the class portal. If you can think of a job that you’d like to do, that I haven’t mentioned, please leave your idea in the comments and the group can decide if it’s a good idea.