This is the first post of the rest of your life

Hello all! Welcome to YOUR site, CTERblog.

This space will become what you make of it over time: your posts, your ideas, your agreements and disagreements. My contributions will be rare, except to urge the process along, if necessary.

What is a blog? It is many things. It is a diary. It is a journal. It is a workspace. It is a newsletter. It is a soapbox. It is a way of writing and adding text, images, links, and clips and quotations from other sources, in an ongoing conversation among (in this instance) a group of fellow students, and then publishing it. There are individual and collective blogs - this is a collective blog. Perhaps some of you will get motivated to create your own blogs -- in which case they can be added to the sidebar of "Links" on the right hand side.

In another sense, a blog is a community: the community of people who post on the blog, plus the community of people who read and/or comment to it. If you put valuable content and interesting ideas here, other people will find it, read it, and eventually link to it themselves. This is how the "blogosphere" grows.

This blog is not a class assignment, and I am creating it with no expectation of what you will do with it, who will dive in and who will not. That is up to you - it is, as I said, YOUR blog.

A few ground rules though, if I may. This blog should be limited to ideas pertinent to the CTER program, the content of your classes, and the issues or questions growing out of them. If you want to address other issues, it is free and easy to start a blog of your own.

Second, this is a PUBLIC blog. People can read it, including co-workers, friends and families, supervisors, (your professors!), etc. This is not a closed or private conversation - so don't say anything here, or say it in a way, that you wouldn't want any of those people to see.

Third. . . well, I guess there is no third. Have fun!