Wednesday, September 1, 2004
Forty students with blogs. I helped forty students sign up for free blogs with Blogger this week, and I'm happy with the increased sophistication of that software. I would like to have set them up with more complex ExpressionEngine blogs through the university, but we haven't upgraded yet to EE v1.1, which has the much easier and faster set-up options.
The first discussion of traits of a good weblog and good weblog writing was enjoyable, with a good number of students pointing out features they had observed in a site they visited. We started drawing out of their examples some introductory thoughts about rhetoric, both as a power move intended to win arguments and as a form of inquiry and persuasion. We didn't quite get to the concept of invention, but it's lurking there. We talked about focus, about speed, about an audience owing a writer nothing until the writer earns it. We talked about skimming as a basic, perhaps the basic form of reading on the web, until a writer earns more from the reader. I introduced the phrase "value-added," by which I mean that linking ought to do more than point -- we should add some evaluation to the links we make.
Perhaps best of all, I thought that the people who spoke in class seemed to have no trouble finding the lively energy of the web. We can build on that.
I noticed the classic small problem in a class without tests -- almost nobody took notes. I'll probably talk about note-taking as a way of paying attention to the worthy contributions classmates make in discussions and then start asking people to summarize the highlights of the previous discussion at the start of each hour, as a way of saying that we need to build each discussion on what has gone before. [2 & P]
The first discussion of traits of a good weblog and good weblog writing was enjoyable, with a good number of students pointing out features they had observed in a site they visited. We started drawing out of their examples some introductory thoughts about rhetoric, both as a power move intended to win arguments and as a form of inquiry and persuasion. We didn't quite get to the concept of invention, but it's lurking there. We talked about focus, about speed, about an audience owing a writer nothing until the writer earns it. We talked about skimming as a basic, perhaps the basic form of reading on the web, until a writer earns more from the reader. I introduced the phrase "value-added," by which I mean that linking ought to do more than point -- we should add some evaluation to the links we make.
Perhaps best of all, I thought that the people who spoke in class seemed to have no trouble finding the lively energy of the web. We can build on that.
I noticed the classic small problem in a class without tests -- almost nobody took notes. I'll probably talk about note-taking as a way of paying attention to the worthy contributions classmates make in discussions and then start asking people to summarize the highlights of the previous discussion at the start of each hour, as a way of saying that we need to build each discussion on what has gone before. [2 & P]