For the record...

Here is the course description and grading policy, as passed out in class today.


Course Description

In July of 2006, technorati.com tracked its 50 millionth blog. Politicians, professors, soldiers, schoolchildren, programmers, critics, watchdogs, moguls, malcontents, caregivers—it seems everyone has a blog. We’ve accepted the word and its world into our lexicon, but how do we address ourselves to this medium? What’s it done and what’s it doing to the ways in which we write and think about writing? Where do we fit in?

This will not be a how-to course on blogging. There will be no discussion of the proper uses and methods of blogging. Why? Because the rules of this medium are in process; the rules are currently being written, and rewritten, by its practitioners. By you.

Rather than answer the question, “how do we blog?” this course will ask, “why do we blog?” So what will we do in such a course? We will be writing ourselves into the blogosphere. We will be inserting ourselves into this medium by reading the blogs of others, by responding to the blogs of others, by writing our own blogs, by responding to the blogs of strangers and friends, classmates and teachers, and by engaging in the act and world of blogging.

We will examine blog genres, and consider the places were classification breaks down. We will write to audiences large and small, by variously conceiving and recruiting audiences for our writing. We will consider the world of public and private, as we negotiate a medium that positions itself as intensely personal while existing on the largest distribution medium ever conceived.

How will all of this change our writing? Will we draft? Will we compose directly online, or write privately first? Will we alter content once it is posted? Will we integrate graphics or audio into our texts? How do visual aesthetics affect audience and readability? Will our text be standard, written English, or something more specific to our blog? Will we chose a genre to write within, define genre as the writing develops, or refuse classification? Does any of that matter to my audience or influence the way I write? What is possible on a blog that is not in other forms of writing? Does it matter?

Nuts and Bolts

In this course, each student will be responsible for two blogs. One blog will be an individual blog, whose content, purpose, and audience (beyond our class) will be solely defined by the single author. This blog can have an explicit purpose, or can be an exploration of possible purpose. This blog can seek wide readership, or choose to reveal itself as audiences find it. The space is what you make of it. You can post once per week or ten times per day. The only requirement is that you post a minimum of 500 words each week. Students wishing to blog primarily with non-traditional text are welcome to speak with me about how to do so while still meeting a workload requirement, roughly equivalent to the 500-word minimum.

The second blog will be a collaborative blog. Groups of three or four will write together on a blog of expressed purpose. Possible topics and/or genres will be generated in class, and students will place themselves in a collaborative group of their choice. Each member of the group will be responsible for posting a minimum of 250 words on this blog each week.

In addition to generating main posts, students will be commenting on the blogs of their classmates. Students will be placed in rotating comment groups, so that throughout the semester we will be reading and commenting on everyone else’s individual blogs. Students must comment once per week on the Individual blogs of each member of their comment groups.

Grades & Attendance

Since this is a pass/fail course, students wishing to pass the course must complete a minimum of 80% of the blogging requirements and miss no more than two classes. Students missing three or more classes will be unable to pass.