Feel free to explore these tools (or others) for your research journal. Don’t forget to check the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy before signing up.
- Mahara, aka myUCportfolio – hosted on the UC servers, so you fall within the University’s privacy obligations. Access it via the 7840 LWT LearnOnline (Moodle) site in the Network Servers block (top left-hand corner).
- Tumblr – a very simple blogging tool, almost perfect for journalling. Does not allow comments, though, and you have to do some tricky stuff to get a tag cloud to display.
- Blogger – fairly easy to use. A Google service.
- WordPress – a very powerful blogging tool, a bit more complicated but you can do just about anything with it.
- Edublogs – a WordPress-based blogging tool, normally not blocked by schools
Any questions, remarks, observations? Leave a comment below 🙂
Learning with Technology - University of Canberra 
Hi Meg,
When I look at blogs that I like, and I want to comment, do I need to join the community of that particular blog (say, the blog is a .blogspot, or whatever) b4 I can make a comment? Sometimes they give an option like “follow on facebook”, or “follow…” somewhere else (eg twitter, or other places I don’t know…) I don’t want to join every option, if I can help it.
ta, Gaynor.
Hey, Gaynor,
Thanks for posting your question here 🙂
To answer your question: It will depend on how the blog administrator has set up their site. In some cases, it’s open slather, and you can make anonymous comments, but in most cases you will at least be required to put in a display name and an email address. In still other instances, you will be required to register. In the case of the LWT blog, you are asked for a name and an email address — the email address isn’t displayed in your comment, though.
With Blogspot (aka Blogger), I think Google (who owns Blogspot) generally requires that you use a Google account or WordPress account or similar before you can comment — but I might be wrong on that, and it still might depend on how the admin has set up the site. If anyone else has an answer, then please let us know!
And, no, you don’t have to follow all and sundry! In next week’s tute, we’ll be going through ‘RSS’, which sounds, like, soooooo boring, but actually will help explain in a practical way how all these ‘web 2.0’ things talk to each other. So — sit tight and come along for week 2 😉