Thursday, August 16, 2012

Blog Assignment


Blog Assignment
            In this course, you will be responding to the readings, discussion and your classmate’s responses by using a blog. The purpose of these blogs is for you to 1) prepare for that week’s topics or texts, and activate your schema on any given topics and 2) engage with the theories and concepts from class in a written form. Use this space in order to explore, question, (dis) agree with, synthesize, explore or complain about the texts or in-class discussion. 
The Blog Assignment is split into two parts: The Pre-Reading/Pre-Thinking Blog and the Post-Reading/Reflection Blog. As the titles suggest, the Pre-Reading/Pre-Thinking Blogs are done before you do the readings for that week and the Post-Reading/Reflection blogs after. Additionally, the blog format makes these responses public and therefore, allows an additional space for us to ‘talk’ with one another. Keeping up with these blog posting is an integral part of your grade so think about doing them shortly after completing the readings for that week.

For sake of uniformity and accessibility, we will all be using the blogs from blogger.com. Please follow these steps to set up a blog. Please email me the address of your blog account by Wednesday, August 29th[1].
1.    Visit www.blogger.com
2.    Create a username and password if you do not already have one. (Please note: blogger is synched with google.com so if you have a gmail or google+ acoount, you may use that information to log in).
3.    On your “dashboard” click the “Create New Blog” button.
4.    You are now creating the blog for this course- please label it accordingly (Something like “Ryan Gosling’s ETHS 100 Fall 2012 Blog”, if your name is Ryan Gosling would be appropriate).
5.    Go to eths100f12.blogspot.com for our “Class Blog”. Here I will post the guiding questions for each week as well as the links to everyone’s blog. Please “follow” it so you can keep up to date and easily access it.

Blog Guidelines
·      For each week’s readings, I will post a number of ‘guiding questions’ on the Class Blog; One set is “Pre-Reading” Questions and one set, “Post-Readings” is for after the readings. You may respond to the readings by using these questions or in any other way you see fit. In order to receive credit blogs must be at least 400 words. Please include the word count for your blog on the bottom.
·      As stated in the syllabus, in order to get a “B” for the course, you must complete at least 10 of each blog posts throughout the semester (5 “Pre-Reading”, 5 “Post-Reading” Blog Posts).
·      One of the benefits of using blogs is that we can continue our class discussions via this forum. Because this is so valuable, I expect that you will comment on your classmate’s blogs at least 6 times throughout the semester. These comments will be part of your grade.
·      While I encourage you to go any direction with your posts, they must- in some sense- be topical to the course. Please use the readings, discussions or concepts as a jumping off point for your blog posts. If I see that your blogs are not meeting this requirement- I will contact you privately.


[1]  If, for whatever reason, you do not have access to a computer or Internet access to complete the blogs- please contact me. We will figure out an alternative assignment.

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