Length Of Posts
For each part of the course, you’ll have a written assignment on the course Forum. Your initial response to the discussion questions should be approximately 150-250 words long (roughly 20 lines of text). If you have more to say but have maxed out your word count, then we suggest posting more on your blog and linking to it from your forum post.
Response Posts
For each part of the course, you’ll read through what others are posting in the course forum and respond to at least two people. Begin your response by mentioning the person’s name (e.g to respond to Dan Wilt  you’d use @danwilt and then begin to write your response).
Important: To find out someone’s @name simply click on their name (at the start of their post). This will take you to their profile page where you’ll see their @name next to their picture. If you begin your response with @person’s-name then they’ll more easily be able to find it on the Activity page by clicking @my-name to see who as responded to them.
Your responses may be as short as a sentence or as long as two paragraphs. Please keep your post limited to this size.
When Writing On The Web
Create space when writing on the web. When writing, a new paragraph (with a hard return between paragraphs) should occur after every 4-5 lines of text. This allows for ease of reading when viewed on a computer screen by others. This can often make the difference between someone reading your post or not reading it.
Footnotes
You’ll be making references to course material (as well as external ideas) when writing posts and crafting your creative project. We use Chicago Style footnotes to show where the ideas are coming from. When writing simply add a number like this 1) in your post. Then at the bottom of the post you can add a corresponding footnote like the one below.
1) Tom Wright, Jesus And The Victory Of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 150-153.
If You Choose To Blog
Some of you may choose to post a weekly blog reflection regarding the course (required for those taking this for university credit). If you do, here are a few pointers.
The goal of having you blog your reflections for this course is to begin to engage you in a global conversation related to worship. When posting on your blog, we want to help you to create a network of conversation that goes beyond your blog, connecting your thoughts with other blogs, and ultimately raising your presence in some of the conversations going on today about worship and emerging worship ideas.
For this reason, we want to create a “link catalyst system” on each post you write on your blog that connects to the wider world, and is a gateway for others connected to WorshipTraining blogs to find you.
We also want to be able to quickly identify which post on your blog is meant to address the  themes you are reflecting on each week. Not all of your blog posts need to be related to a course, so we want to be able to distinguish your course posts from other posts.
Create a category on your blog called “Insert Your Course Name Here” and file all of your posts in this category.
On each blog post reflection that pertains to our class, we’d ask you to follow this example format.
Ex. Under “Title Of Post” type, for example: ”I’ve Been Thinking About Worship (Insert Your Course Name Here)”
At the beginning of your actual post, type the following, then continue with your post:
“For: Insert Your Course Name Here”
Link the description that you just wrote to WorshipTraining.com.
Now, if you have tags available to you in your blog (key words that you can select to each post), type in these tags, and add your own:Â Dan Wilt, online, course, training, worship, leader, training, essentials, values, art.
Why Do All This?
Links to these will help tag your site in searches. Proper blog protocol is to do as much linking in posts as possible for maximum cross-linking.
Typing out the words in the title post, making tags, and putting the opening lines above (with no words abbreviated) in your post, will insure that Google and other other search engines will relate your posts to word searches such as “Worship,” “Insert Course Name Here,” “Values,” “Dan Wilt,” “Paul Baloche,” etc..
As your blog then gets comments, or you comment on others’ blogs, the web of connectivity begins. ALWAYS make sure when you are commenting on others’ blogs that you indicate your blog address in the appropriate field. This will highlight your name, and bring people to your blog.
Why Comment On Highly Trafficked Blogs?
We also recommend that you comment regularly on highly trafficked blogs. This list of blogs may be any of the blogs linked to on www.DanWilt.com, and you can choose which blogs you would like to post on each week. You may choose to comment on other blogs you know of as well.
Note that on trafficked blogs (ex. www.DanWilt.com) thousands of unique visitors come each month. When you comment on a blog like this, chances are that many will see what you’ve written, click on your name, and end up over at your website. This is the beauty of blogs.
If you’ve never started one, why not try it now? Just go to WordPress.com and start a blog.
