We hope that the Bootcamp will provide a useful resource for using independently or in developing your own Bootcamp.
It may also be useful in running other collaborations or learning using Glow Blogs
The idea is to have a ‘course’ blog which issues assignments or challenges. Participants respond on their own blog
You can, of course, use the resources in anyway you like.
The idea behind the camp was simple, each week tasks, support and challenges were issued, classes and individuals responded on their own blogs. These posts were pulled through to the Bootcamp Blog’s sidebar to make it easy to see what other participants were doing. During bootcamp 1 we used an external RSS aggregator to do this.
It is now easier using the Syndication Plugin provided by Glow Blogs.
We also have the Jetpack plugin which you can use to add a contact form for participants to sign up for a course.
Organising a Bootcamp
Set Up a Hub Blog
This is set up in the normal way, you probably want to activate the Syndication and Jetpack plugins.
Creating a blog
Plugins
Jetpack Plugin
Syndication Plugin
Create a schedule
If you are running a blogging bootcamp you can view our schedule and adapt it to your needs.
Gather participants
You could use the Jetpack contact form to allow participants to signup for a Bootcamp.
Communicate with users
We found email to be the best way to push information to participants. Although the ‘course’ consisted of weekly blog posts we also email the same information to participants.
Syndication of participants posts.
In the original bootcamp we used an external service (inoreader.com) to syndicate participants contributions it is now possible to do this with the syndication plugin.
You can either bring in all of the posts from a participants blog or ask them to use a particular category or tag.
You need to gather participants ‘feeds’ to syndicate, this is a one time exercise. One way to do it is to ask the participants to email the url to their first post.
for example to bring in all content from
https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/nl/JohnJohnston/
you would use the url
https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/nl/JohnJohnston/feed
in the syndication plugin.
If I wanted to only use a particular tag I could use:
https://blogs.glowscotland.org.uk/nl/JohnJohnston/tag/video/feed
instead.
Call and Responses
The course activity consists of a series of posts on the hub blog, issuing ideas, instructions and challenges. The same information can be sent to participants via e-mail.
These can be a supported with videos, files, Glow Meets and links to other. If you are running a blogging bootcamp feel free to use the resources on this site. Videos here can easily be embedded on other Glow Blogs using the code on each page. You can copy links to files and copy text and images. (If you do it would be nice if you link back to this blog.)
The participants respond on there own blogs, these responses are automatically syndicated into the hub blog.
Participants can easily see work of others and visit the posts to comment and discuss their work.
