Blog Assignment

Writing in a journal is a fun kind of writing. In part, this is because a journal gives legitimacy to our own voice and frees us from the tyranny of formality. Most of us who are teachers now, probably wrote our journal entries in personal notebooks when we were college students. Today, most college students spend their creative, journal writing energy on social networking sites, writing in a much more public way. College professors assign journals to help students engage critically and creatively with course material and to practice writing. Last semester, we experimented with creating an assignment that makes use of the journal-like nature of a Blog and allows students to think critically about their writing that is also public.

Dr. Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis and I designed this assignment for a research and writing course - English 102:

Prepare
1.Assign students to write a draft that can be used in a blog post. We asked students to document and describe an experience at a restaurant. See the full assignment here.

2.Have the students share their writing with one another. We use the course management system, Moodle at SMU and had students post their writing in a Moodle forum.

3.Sign up for a blogging service (we chose Blogger, which is very easy for beginners) and follow Blogger's prompts to setup a class blog. Then invite students to be authors on the class blog.

4. Remind students to accept the invitation (they will get an email from you) and sign up for the blog service before they come to class. Most students will have no problem doing this but they will need several reminders.

Have a Discussion
Discuss and establish guidelines for students going public with their writing. Suggested readings, A false wikipidea ‘biography’ by John Seigenthaler or a handout on online reporting and law and ethics from Tim Harrower's Inside Reporting .

Example discussion points:
1)Who is John Seigenthaler and why and how is his story problematic?

2)What do you know about the wikipidea and why is this a controversial site?
What issues does Seigenthaler raise about the wikipidea?

3)According to Harrower, what is a blog? How does he define it?

4)What’s our relationship to an audience and what are our rights?

5)According to Harrower, what should we consider when it comes to libel, copyright and privacy?


Model blogging
Discuss criteria for blogs. What makes a good blog?

1)Bring examples of effective and ineffective blogs to class. Here are some:
Froggie’s Lilypad
The very official best worst blog ever
Damn I’m cute
Pie of the tiger
silver in sf
my life in food

2)Ask students to study blogs in relation to the following:
Audience
Content
Message
Visual

Recap with students on fundamentals of blogging
1)Ask students to edit and then copy and paste their original blog drafts to the new class blog

2)Have students add images to their post

3)Show students how to add links to text

3)Discuss the virtues of tagging content for organization

4)Ask students to leave comments on the posts of their classmates

What we learned from the blog assignment

1. Strengths of the assignment

It created a focus to the writing assignment

It was a familiar medium, practical and relevant to students. Students got to think critically about writing publicly.

Students really enjoyed it

2. What we would do next time

Create more of an accountability system and build this into the assignment. The blog is collaborative and so everyone's post affects the collective blog. So, if the post is riddled with spelling errors or is not complete, we will remove it until it is finished.

Talk more about copyright issues and sites like creativecommons.org, where students can access content that is not copyrighted

This post was written in collaboration with Dr. Nathalie Kuroiwa-Lewis

You Can't Read this Blog from China

Censorship in China means that much of what we take for granted is not available to internet users there. For example, since this blog is hosted by Blogger, which is owned by Google, if you are in China right now, you won't be able to read it.

Here is a chart that shows which Google owned services are blocked in China. Click on it to make it bigger.



This brings me to some wisdom gleaned this morning at breakfast, while reading The Stranger's Last Days piece about the R-71 controversy of whether names on a signed petition should be protected political speech or public documents.

Justice Antonin Scalia: "You can't run a democracy this way, with everybody being afraid of having his political positions known... The fact is that running a democracy takes a certain amount of civic courage, and the First Amendment does not protect you from criticism or even nasty phone calls when you exercise your political rights to legislate or to take part in the legislative process."

Scalia's statement rings true. Democracy relies on public debate and we should not be afraid to express our political views publicly. Civic engagement is our right and privilege. Relating back to all of the discussions about Facebook and privacy on the Internet, we should not forget about the benefits of publishing publicly. Sometimes it seems that we get overly protective of our content, acting as our own censors, worrying about ways to block people from seeing it. So I guess, the question to ask is what of our content could really serve as a contribution to the public sphere?

No Privacy on the Internet

Today's news bring more grievances of Facebook privacy bugs. Not too long ago, you might have read the story about a sociology professor who misunderstood her privacy settings and inadvertently posted some careless (and obvious to most of us, facetious) comments about looking for a hit-man. As a result, she was put on administrative leave.

A recent article in Inside Higher Ed, titled Professors and Social Media points out that professors are increasingly turning to social media to supplement their teaching and mentions a Pearson report that "suggest[s] that 80 percent of professors...have at least one account with either Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, LinkedIn, MySpace, Flickr, Slideshare, or Google Wave."

Social Media is a whole new form of communication that is increasingly integrated into our social lives. It is approaching, if not already there, the primacy of a phone or email for communication. However, unlike a phone or even email, it is much more public...or as the Facebook example illustrates, we have much less control over what we publish via Social Media. That's the whole point -- these media are social.

When I was a kid in the Soviet Union, my parents couldn't speak freely about politics in our home unless they turned the dial and stuck a pencil in it on the rotary phone. There was always fear of the KGB listening in, and for good reason. My aunt, Luba, went to a gulag for poking fun of Stalin. Maybe I am a little paranoid as a result, but I always assume that whatever I put on the Internet may be used against me, no matter how private it seems.

So when I hear professors discuss whether to friend students, I say YES! friend them...or at least friend some and always act as if your students can see and read whatever you post. The internet is inherently not private, and any sense of privacy is only an illusion. It is only sensible that we should always act as if all of our musings on the internet are public and only post stuff that we don't mind anyone reading, be it students, parents, friends, bosses, the Man, etc. Don't be surprised if a potential employer finds your blog post on the internet or if Facebook suddenly decides to make your "interests" public for the sake of targeted advertising. This is a capitalist country after all and Facebook is a business, not a social service.

Having said that, we live in a relatively free country and have the luxury of speaking freely. I am proud of the fact that I can participate in the public discourse about culture and politics without being afraid to say what I think...for the most part. The Internet is an awesome public forum. If you want privacy, just buy a notebook and keep a journal. But be sure to put it somewhere safe.