Blogging Assignments

LITCS 114
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Bldg. 494, room 160B
Winter 2016

Assignment Overview

All students are required to set up a personal blog with a blog-hosting service of their choice and to create a certain minimum number of course-related posts during the quarter. (The exact number depends on how many units you expect to receive at the end of the quarter.) Each student is also required to comment on a certain number of her/his peers' blog posts throughout the quarter.

So, there are a number of things that you need to do to satisfy this requirement:

  1. You need to set up a blogging platform. There are free platforms available; there are platforms that charge you. There are platforms that you can host on your own web server; there are services that will host your content for you. There are platforms that are easy to use; there are platforms that are hard to use. There are platforms that allow you a great deal of creativity and let you customize your blog's appearance; there are platforms that do everything for you. You can choose whatever you want, provided that your chosen platform is set up in such a way that it meets the specific requirements for this assignment.
    • If you have a blog already, you can use it for this assignment if it meets the specific assignment criteria below. Whether or not you re-use an existing blog, I encourage you to make these blog posts on a blog that constitutes a meaningful personal presence tied to a stable online identity (whether or not it is your legal or otherwise real identity) and closely focused on your intellectual, creative, and/or professional pursuits.
  2. You need to write a number of blog posts throughout the quarter, each of which engages in some substantial and meaningful way with the course material.
    • That was the nutshell version; there are other specific course requirements explained below.
    • Part of the point of this assignment is to foster course conversations both on- and offline; you can't wait until the last week of the quarter to make all of your postings, because then you're not performing the assignment in a way that fully benefits the rest of the class. If you're smart about this assignment, you'll find time to post throughout the quarter, not just at the last allowable minute.
    • All of your blog posts must be completed by the end of week 9.
    • The number of posts you need to make depends on the number of units you expect to receive from the course. See the requirements section of the course syllabus for basic expectations in this regard.
  3. You need to comment on the blog posts written by other students in the class.
    • Again, because a large part of the intent of this assignment is to foster course-related conversations, you need to have done a substantial amount of work on this before the end of the quarter (there is an intra-quarter partial deadline for the commenting part of the assignment, just as there is for the entry-writing part of the assignment). Waiting until the last week of the quarter to make all of your comments is not acceptable.
    • The number of comments you need to make depends on the number of units you expect to receive from the course, and is again listed on the requirements section of the course syllabus. Short version: you must make (at least) one more comment on colleagues' blogs than the number of posts you are required to write.
  4. You need to keep track of the writing that you do so that you can send me a summary at the end of the quarter. At a bare minimum, this means that, as you go through the quarter, you should keep track of the URLs of each of your blog posts and the URLs of each your colleagues' posts that you comment on.

Finding a Host and Setting up a Blog

You must have at least a basic blogging presence set up by the end of the second week of class (note: this does not require that you have written any course writing and posted it to the blog by that point; nor does it require that your blog be aesthetically appealing). Once you have set your blog up, it must meet the following requirements (unless you speak to me in advance and we agree that you have a strong reason for deviating from these rules):

  1. It must be publicly viewable by anyone on the web who has (or can find) its URL. It may not require account registration or login to view the content you create to satisfy course requirements (for instance, you cannot use a private LiveJournal account for these assignments).
  2. The platform must allow other people to post comments of arbitrary length without requiring you, personally, to manually post the comments. (Virtually every blogging platform that intended to work primarily as a blogging platform already satisfies this requirement — though Tumblr is a notable exception to this rule. This requirement is primarily in place to disallow certain types of edge cases for more technically inclined people who may be considering setting up blogs in unusual ways — posting a comment should not, for instance, require that you re-encode an email in HTML/CSS and then edit the web page directly. That is: don't just use HTML and CSS to write a blog-style web page directly. If you don't know what this means, then you're not in danger of violating this rule.) You may moderate the comments, and (again) we can speak about the pros and cons of doing so.
  3. The blog posts that you write must appear under a single tagline that creates an established online identity consistently throughout the quarter. There are good reasons (such as increasing your own visibility on the web) why you may want this tagline to be your legal or commonly used name; there are also circumstances where you may want to post under a pseudonym. We can discuss the various pros and cons of using your own real name, but you need to make a decision on this matter by the time you write and post your first post, then stick to that decision throughout the quarter.

Writing Blog Posts

You need to produce somewhere between two and four blog posts during the course of the quarter; there is a mid-term deadline by which you must create approximately half of your posts. Each of these must be a substantial reflection on some portion of the course material. That is, you should analyze, apply, synthesize, deconstruct, disagree, problematize, explain, clarify, or otherwise do something thoughtful with the course material other than merely quote it. Excellent work, though, does more than this by pushing itself to be clear about its own relevance: rather than merely interpreting a passage of a literary text, it also addresses, in some way, the question of why that reading matters; rather than merely pointing to a phenomenon (a text, an event, a judicial ruling, an election outcome, a story) as an instance of a theory, it argues for its claim and interprets it somehow. To put it another way, this assignment expects that you will take interpretive risks and dig deep into your chosen topics to make your data pay off.

At the same time, it is not necessary to develop revolutionary new theory in every blog post you write; I just want to encourage you to make sure that you are pushing your ideas as far as you can. Don't hold back; don't be timid; don't stop just because you suspect you might have already crossed the this is good enough to satisfy minimal requirements line. Do, however, think carefully about scope: you don't need to take on a whole body of theory or an entire novel or or every aspect of a political situation; part of good, thoughtful writing is knowing how much to take on. Identify the actual topic that you're writing about in a post, then explore it fairly, honestly, and deeply.

You should ensure that your posts run through a number of different topics throughout the quarter. In particular, your group of blog posts must meet the following criteria:

If you write thoughtfully, it's possible that a single blog post may satisfy more than one of these criteria: you might, for instance, use a theoretical work to interpret (some aspect of) current events; or you might use a work of literature to problematize some claim made in a theoretical text; or you might treat a work of literature as containing theoretical content, and use that theoretical content to interpret current events. (There are other possible permutations, as well.)

And so: there's no minimum length for a blog post; neither is there a maximum length. You should identify a course-related topic that you find worth exploring, then explore it. Do so honestly, with clear and engaging writing. Then post your writing and know that you're one step closer to finishing the course requirements.

Responding to Your Peers' Posts

You are expected to respond meaningfully and substantially to your peers' blog entries as well as create your own. As with the primary posting assignment, there is an intermediate set of deadlines part of the way through the quarter by which you need to have done approximately half of this work. As with posting, you need to engage meaningfully with the content of your peers' posts in some way: by discussing related aspects that the original poster did not consider, by adding context, by applying an idea to a new area, by thoughtfully disagreeing based on factual evidence—by moving the class's conversation forward, in other words. Statements that boil down to I agree or I disagree add little to the conversation and do not count as substantial comments for purposes of satisfying this requirement. If in doubt, ask yourself What would other people in the class say I've actually contributed to the conversation here?

You should, of course, always ensure that you interact with your peers politely and professionally, online as well as offline. More than this, though, your overall goal for your writing in this course should always be to work your way toward that slippery and difficult creature, The Truth. This means that you should always strive to take all relevant information into account, that you should deal honestly and fairly with opinions and viewpoints that differ from your own, and that you in all other ways strive to satisfy requirements for academic and intellectual honesty. You need not always be perfect—part of the risk of working with complex material in a way that leads to real developments is the risk of falling short of perfection—but you should always be honest with yourself and your readers about your logical processes.

The Internet is a Revolutionarily Democratic Publishing Platform. The Internet Is a Terrible Place.

As you all know, because (at least some of) the old people in your life have been gushing about this for as long as you can remember, the Internet opens up radically democratic possibilities for people who will never meet in person to exchange information and ideas. As you all probably also know (sometimes, unfortunately, from personal experience), the Internet also makes it possible for horrible people to cloak themselves in anonymity and harass strangers because they are sad, lonely jerks who have more spare time than they know what to do with. Horrible people who would have been kept in check fifty years ago by their status as ideological minorities who couldn't find other horrible people in their local communities to reinforce their horrible ideas can now seek out virtual echo chambers and team up with other horrible people who reinforce their horrible beliefs. Unfortunately, many of you may already know from personal experience that those who are (or are identified by others as being) women tend to have different kinds of experiences online than men do, in part because there is a small but very active group of Internet misogynists who believe that they can and should police what women say, and what people can say about women.

Randall Monroe's xkcd #1357

The facts that you are expected to develop a public-facing set of writing for this quarter, and that you must perform writing that is course-related, and that the course topic involves politically contentious issues, may mean that some of you draw the unwanted attention of some of these horrible people. While we are a small, non-prominent group and may very well not attract any unwanted attention from Internet trolls this quarter—and I certainly hope this is the case—I'd like to say a few things in advance about this possibility.

As you think about what kinds of comments on your blog foster genuinely productive conversations, you might want to look at what kinds of discourse are valued by respected online communities:

Zach Weinersmith's Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal #2164

Your research blog is of course not the same thing as Wikipedia, Reddit, etc.; its goals are probably quite different. Nevertheless, thinking about the kinds of choices that have been made in these documents can help you think about how to make your own decisions about interacting with other people online, and about how you want to craft standards for the small online community that your blog becomes.

Finally: if you would like to take a more theoretically informed approach to strangers behaving badly on the Internet, here are some selected background readings:

Notes on Hosting

Here is a list of free blogging platforms that (as of the time of this writing) I believe satisfy all of the criteria above, either by default or with appropriate, fairly easy configuration. None of them require that you explicitly install software on a server or on your computer.

Some services I'd prefer you didn't use:

Here are some less common options that some students may want to consider, though they are less widely applicable as general suggestions than are the suggestions above:

Technical Cautions, Tradeoffs, and Other Concerns

There are many free blogging services; there are many more that you can pay for; some of the paid options are quite inexpensive. Remember the old adage: You get what you pay for. Too, remember the more recent adage from the Internet age: If you're not paying for the product, you are the product. You are welcome to locate, identify, and use any service that meets the requirements outlined above as your blog host, but it is your responsibility to investigate what you are getting yourself into: are you transferring ownership of your content to someone else? Are you restricted from posting content that your host considers to be offensive? If so, how expansive is their definition of offensive, does it match your own definition, and does it prohibit the kinds of writing that you may want to produce? Are you licensing the company to republish your content in other places or in other mediums? Will the company put advertisements on your blog? Will the company suddenly disappear or stop offering the service, effectively removing the writing into which you've put so much work from the virtual world?

As with so many other aspects of adult life, there is no magical guarantee that everything will work out for the best; as with so many other aspects of adult life, you have to take some sort of action to complete this assignment, but anything you do is a gamble to some degree. And, as with so many aspects of adult life, there are things you can do to minimize the amount of risk you're taking. Here are some suggestions:

In Conclusion ...

This assignment actually asks a fair amount of you: you need to plan ahead, demonstrate some technical skills, write in a way that is visible to the public at large, interact professionally with your peers, think about implications of multiple choices, and keep up with the curation of an online presence. That is, you need to stay on top of this assignment more or less throughout the entire quarter, without entirely losing track of it for very long at a time. There are a lot of different ways to have difficulties or get stuck here. Part of what this assignment is asking you to do, actually, is to plan out a complex project in a specific form and know what you need to do in order to execute it (and execute it well). However, a more subtle goal of this assignment is to encourage you to understand where your own strengths lie, how you can play to those strengths, and when you need to ask for assistance.

I realize that all of this can seem overwhelming, especially in combination with the fact that this class also requires keeping up with a decently sized reading list, a theoretical presentation, and (possibly) a final project. So do be sure to keep track of what's expected of you, and try to keep up with the recommended checkpoints below as often as possible. If you think you're falling behind, come talk to me and I'll see if we can't work out a way for you to catch up—it's far better to come ask for help and to work out a catch-up schedule than just to wind up with fewer units than you needed after the quarter is over.

All of which is to say that I am perfectly willing to help you with any and every aspect of this assignment that you have trouble with. If you need help setting up your blog, please come talk to me. If you need help figuring out how to narrow an idea for a post to a manageable scope, please come talk to me. If you're not sure how to respond to a colleague's post or how to phrase your praise or your disagreement, I'm happy to talk through ideas with you. If anonymous strangers are making your life unpleasant, please let me know.

Calendar

Week Date What's due What's recommended
2 16 January Your blog must be set up at a determinate location, and you must email me the URL of the blog by this time. (You are not required to have made a post yet, nor to have made your blog aesthetically pleasing, though you may certainly do so if you wish.) You may want to have written at least one blog post by this time.
4 30 January   You are strongly encouraged to have written at least one post on your blog by this time. You may want to start looking at other people's posts and writing responses about this time, too.
5 6 February If you are taking the course for one unit, you must have completed at least one post on your blog by this time. If you are taking the course for two or more units, you must have written two blog posts by this time. You are encouraged to be looking at other people's posts and writing responses from here on out, if you have not already started doing so.
6 13 February   You are encouraged to be looking at other people's posts and writing responses from here on out, if you have not already started doing so.
7 20 February If you are taking the course for one, two, or four units, you must have made at least two meaningful, substantial comments on blog posts by other students by this point. Students taking the class for three, five, or six units are encouraged to have made at least two comments on blog posts by other students.
8 27 February If you are taking the course for three, five, or six units, you must have made at least three meaningful, substantial comments on blog posts by other students by this point. You may find it wise to have made more comments than are required by this point in the quarter.
9 5 March You must have completed all required entries on your blog by this point in the quarter. It may be smart to also be working toward finishing up the comment requirement.
10 12 March All students must have completed all required comments on other students' blog entries by this point in the quarter. If you are taking the course for four or more units, you should have made substantial progress on your final project by this date.
finals week 19 March Send me an email that
  1. provides the URL for each blog post you produced during the quarter;
  2. provides the URL for each blog post you commented on during the quarter;
  3. reflects on what you learned from performing this assignment during the quarter.

QR code for this page:
QR code for this syllabus