Blogging Instructions for Fall 2011

Students will be blogging during this semester's history of civilization course, "Reinventing Knowledge." Here are our expectations:


Blogging in Groups
Nine blogging groups have been set up that include 4-6 students each. The idea here is for students to regularly share and respond, teaching and learning, among a small group of peers.

Scheduled Weekly Posting
Group leaders will set up a publication schedule so that each student is responsible for a specific day of the week on which he or she will take the lead of conversation by publishing a "substantial post" (see below). This should be posted by 9:00am so that others will have the chance to respond to it during the day. Consider getting your post written the night before it is due and then use the scheduling feature to have it appear at 9:00am on your day (see "Post Options" next to "Publish Post" within Blogger to do this).

Daily Expectation
Each student is expected to interact on their group's blog daily (i.e., Monday-Friday) in two ways:

1. Producing content
   If it is not your day to be making a substantial post, you should be commenting on others' posts, advancing conversations, or otherwise supplying relevant content.
2. Reading and responding to content
   Bookmark your group's blog so that you can get to this readily, or use a feed reader (like Google Reader) to have posts and comments delivered to you. 

What's a "Substantial Post"?

A substantial post:

• is on point (it relates to the course learning outcomes and shows awareness of ongoing conversations within the group, the class, or related discussions elsewhere); 
• moves beyond merely expressing opinion or making an observation to analysis of content, synthesis of ideas, referring to and building on others' ideas; and making reasoned claims; 
• brings in new and related ideas or media that demonstrate the student's independent reading and research;
• promotes constructive conversation
• is concise. A rule of thumb is not to require readers to scroll down much.
• uses media, white space, bulleted lists, or other ways to break up text and provide points of entry into the post.
• uses labels or tags. This informal metadata is helpful for organizing and finding posts related to a specific topic later on.

Suggestions for Substantial Posts

• Illustrating an idea with a historical example
• Introducing an author, thought leader, or other person and relating his or her work to the current topics of study
• Analysis of a current event in terms of class learning outcomes or topics
• Longer response to another's post
• Introduction and analysis of a language, culture, period, event, invention, etc.
• Accounts of teaching or sharing course content with others

Suggestions for Commenting

• Be brief
• Be personal
• Be positive
• Suggest relevant sources or links
• Take issue, constructively, with some of the ideas or claims in the post