As described in the course guidelines, every student will rotate through three different blogging roles throughout the semester. You can find out your group number on Blackboard. See the course calendar for the blogging schedule.

At the end of each three-week blogging period, you will receive a grade on a scale of 0-3 for each blog post. At the end of the semester, I will drop your lowest blog score and average your remaining scores to get your blogging grade. See the blog criteria on the course guidelines page for more information on how I grade blog posts.

Here are more details about what I expect from each role:

Readers

These students are responsible for posting initial questions and insights about Tuesday’s reading to the class blog by 10pm Monday night. There are a number of ways to do this. You can situate the reading among the other readings we’ve encountered in class; you can write about an aspect of the day’s reading that you don’t understand, or something that jars you; or you can formulate an insightful question or two about the reading and then attempt to answer your own questions. These initial posts should be about 300-400 words and strive to be thoughtful and nuanced, avoiding description and summary. Remember that to receive an “exceptional” score, each post must include an image or media clip that illustrates — rather than trivializes — its point. Furthermore, the source of the image or media clip must be clearly given.

Responders

Students in this group will build upon, disagree with, or clarify either a reader post or something from Tuesday’s class discussion. Responder posts should be submitted by 10pm Wednesday night. These posts should also be about 300-400 words. Responder posts should also strive to be thoughtful and nuanced, avoiding description and summary. Do not be afraid to disagree with, challenge, or otherwise complicate your classmates’ posts. Hold each other accountable. Remember that to receive an “exceptional” score, each post must include an image or media clip that illustrates — rather than trivializes — its point. Furthermore, the source of the image or media clip must be clearly given.

Observers

Students in this group will obsessively collect data over the course of the week and then post this data to our class blog. This data will range from the trivial to the substantive to the weird, and the kind of data I ask students to collect will change after each group has rotated through this role, or every three weeks. In addition to posting this data, observers must provide a short (no more than one paragraph) reflection on the data and/or the process of collecting it, highlighting what makes this data interesting, worthwhile, unusual — or, if appropriate — problematic. This post is due by 10 pm on Friday night. Observers do not need to include an image or media clip to receive a score of “exceptional.”