What is a Blog?
A blog (short for web log) is an easy-to-modify website that lets authors (you all and me) post short entries. Blogs also offer the ability for viewers or authors to comment on blog posts (a feature that we will be using extensively). On the blog, the most recent entries appear at the top of the screen. Check out this video by Common Craft for further explanation of what a blog is and why they matter.
Blogs can be private (only authors and invited others can read the blog) or public (anyone with the internet can read them by going to the url). This course blog is PUBLIC, which means anyone can read our posts and follow any links that we embed.
Following this blog:
In addition to your posts on course material, I'll be using this blog for course announcements and information, so you should make sure to check it regularly. There are 2 main ways to do this:
1. Save this blog to your "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" in your web browser. Then make sure to check the blog on a regular basis. The problem with this option is that you must remember to check it.
2. Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed in an RSS reader of your choice. For a very short and thorough explanation of what an RSS feed is, check out this video by CommonCraft. I use Google Reader as my RSS reader, and if you don't already have one, I recommend this one only because it is very easy to navigate. The video shows you how to link a blog to Google Reader too, which is helpful.
What constitutes a good blog post?
You'll be posting a blog entry in response to a prompt that I will post at the end of each course unit. Your blog entry should address all parts of the prompt and draw together material from our course readings, cultural productions/visual media, and class discussions.
While posted online, blog entries for this class should be written in a professional tone and include complete and syntactically correct sentences as well as academically-appropriate spelling, punctuation, and citations (in other words, the same things as if you were turning in these posts as papers in class).
In each blog post, you will link to one visual cultural production online that you find on your own--this may be a youtube video, a blog post from another blog, website, news story, photograph, etc. You should make sure to explain in your post what that visual cultural production is, who produced it (proper citations, remember?), and how it relates to the prompt and the rest of your post. In other words, integrate that visual cultural production into your post and analyze it, the same way you would cite and analyze a sentence from a scholarly article.
To get an idea of blog posts that follow all of these instructions and serve as great examples of what you'll be doing, check out a course blog that I set up for a previous course at UC Berkeley: Feminist Film Studies.
If you have any questions about using the course blog, just let me know. Happy blogging!
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