sustaining engagement outside the classroom
TRANSCRIPT
Sustaining Engagement Outside the Classroom
Brian Porter‐SzűcsDepartment of History
Standards by which blogs are graded:1. Relevance2. Discussion3. Evidence4. Analysis5. Style6. Accuracy7. Punctuality8. Courtesy
‐ I hated blogging but other than that this was a really good class.
‐ Rather than having a blog post every single week, I would have really enjoyed doing one longer research paper and perhaps a post every other week. The way the course was set up was innovative and I know many people did like it, but I feel that it prevented me from going deeper into one part of Polish history and instead I got a more cursory knowledge.
‐ The blog posts were kind of a hassle, and I personally did not get much out of them. To me it seemed like most people did not put a ton of effort into them (I am certainly guilty of this from time to time). Maybe blogs with less frequency (like one every two weeks) would have allowed students to put the effort into the blogs that they deserved.
‐ While the blogs are a good idea, the fact that there were so many students in the class in was difficult for real dialogue or debate between posts to be started. In a class of 10‐20 people, it would've been easier for Prof Porter‐Szucs to reply to each comment, encourage further discussion, etc. But I feel like most students submitted their blog and never bothered to see if it garnered any responses.
‐ I've had other classes that demand "one post and two responses" with word counts on each. I think that trying to create a dialogue using only formal writing yet posting everything to a blog, was something I found difficult to master.
BLOGGING IN THE CLASSROOMFRIDAY, MARCH 9, 10:00 A.M.-12:00 P.M.GREAT LAKES NORTH, 4TH FLOOR, PALMER COMMONS
Co-sponsored by CRLT and the Sweetland Center for Writing
BLOGGING AS LOW STAKES, REFLECTIVE WRITING
Naomi SilverAssociate Director
Sweetland Center for [email protected]
SWEETLAND MINOR IN WRITING BLOG
WRITING 200 SYLLABUS GUIDELINES
Minor in Writing blog: Over the course of your semesters in the Minor, you will be contributing regularly to our blog […].
You will earn 80% of your grade for the blog [worth 10% of the overall course grade] simply by posting and responding regularly, according to the schedule indicated in the class syllabus and policies. The remaining 20% will be earned based on the overall thoughtfulness, rigor, and interactivity of your posts, comments, and responses to your fellow bloggers. We will together define the characteristics of a strong blog post and comment.
WHY LOW-STAKES?
Writing to learn
Finger exercises
Prompting thought
WHY REFLECTIVE?
Consolidates learning
Opens dialogue with peers and instructor
Fosters community, engagement
SAMPLE PROMPTS — READING RESPONSES Blog in response to reading: What in the Sullivan piece
resonates with you? (What do you find surprising, funny, silly, touching, boring, interesting, uncomfortable, confusing, true, etc?) Why? Is there anything in this piece that has relevance for your own writing? Why or why not? Or, alternatively, blog about something else writing-related on your mind.
Blog in response to reading: What in the Ong piece resonates with you? (What do you find funny, silly, touching, boring, uncomfortable, confusing, true, etc?) Why? What do you think he means when he claims that “writing is a technology”? Or, alternatively, blog about something else writing-related on your mind.
Read the reflective writing/reflective practice article you signed up for and blog about its main ideas, what struck you, etc. Be prepared to present your thoughts to your reading group and discuss.
SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSES, 1 Wordy Architecture and Rainy-Day Reading
Ong’s argument, more or less, is that writing restructures consciousness. How it does so is less simple. A starting point is that writing is detached from its source – like the Delphi Oracle, the writer is a non-entity, no more than a means for communication. Thus writers are freed from the everyday constraints of oral speech. Writing is in many ways subversive, disobedient to authority. That’s one of the reasons Plato hated writing and plays, because it can spread subversive ideas and falsehoods through the community and then gets in the way of societal order. Writing can’t defend its opinions. It is passive. With Wikipedia, or sources of writing that rely heavily on technology, one cannot directly criticize it without access to/know-how about the technology in question. These points are all very good ones to make. But I’ve heard this argument before. The idea that writing can influence other large areas of human life rather reminds me of a book I’ve read recently.
According to Erwin Panofsky’s landmark work Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, the Scholastic movement changed what Panofsky calls “mental habits” in 12th C society and in turn informed the evolution of Gothic architecture. Scholastics were engaged with theological writings and texts, but the way in which they wrote was drastically different from the movements before them, such as nominalism. This, according to no less than Thomas Aquinas, requires a change in thought – or, as Ong would say, a change in consciousness. Namely, this included a new focus on symmetrical ordering of arguments, and “clarification for clarification’s sake”. This same intricacy spilled over into another art, architecture, and the Gothic movement took off. While this may seem confusing, it’s a wonderful book and comes with beautiful pictures of churches and I recommend it highly for a rainy day.
SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSES, 2 Evaluation as Carrot
The Yancy article got me thinking, do we all need evaluation as much as this article says we do? Yancy quotes one woman, a housewife, who cannot quantify her success as a parent without grades or salary increases, but wonders if she knows she has done a good job if she is simply exhausted at the end of the day. Yancy finds this alarming and recommends the use of self reflection to avoid students “… dependent on external rewards, not knowing where to begin to consider their own performances” (Yancy 13). This made me wonder, how dependent are we on external rewards like evaluation? Is evaluation our “carrot” for doing things well, a motivation in itself? […]Deciding the worth of the things you do on your own is actually pretty important, for the sake of continuing to do things, and for the sake of learning after people stop telling you what to learn. This can be applied in anywhere in life. It would be super-helpful if the Grand Poobah of Life, the Universe, and Everything would just reach down from the clouds and inform you that your last relationship is going to making you fail “Interpersonal Connections” unless you fix your communication problems and improve your loser-spotting skills in the next one. However, this is not the case. Honest self-evaluation is absolutely necessary for figuring out what you are doing that works, what you are doing that doesn’t work, and why.
SAMPLE PROMPTS — PLANNING & EVALUATION Bring in the links to 5 websites and/or electronic portfolios you like, and
that might provide models for your own eportfolio. These can be popular sites or academic sites, news sites or game sites -- whatever, but try to select sites with different purposes and functionality, e.g., text-based, image-based, presentational, interactive, etc.
Blog about one or two of the websites you’ve identified: why did you choose it? What stands out to you? Or, alternatively, blog about something else writing-related on your mind.
Choose a platform for your “Re-Mediating an Argument” essay by today
This week, blog about your choices and how they relate to your goals for the project, and/or blog about anything else writing-related on your mind.
Blog about your portfolio – this is your final piece of reflective writing for the semester. What are you happy with? What do you still want to work on? What was the process like for you? How well did you achieve your purpose in presenting yourself as a writer? What are you thinking about as you leave this gateway class and go into the rest of the minor?
SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSES, 1 Showcasing Myself
After looking at e-Portfolios from college students across the country, I knew where I wanted to take mine. White backgrounds with simple, elegant text and a picture at the top (starkly mundane in black and white more often than not) are the default in a lot of e-Portfolios. They look aesthetically clean and eye-pleasing, but after you see this repeatedly, it starts to look like you’ve been sucked into an episodic rendition of 1984.
I don’t want my e-Portfolio to be predictable, but I don’t want it to be overwhelming either, especially for who I intend it to be made for, future employers or admission counselors. I want to have a warm, earth-tone background, inviting a viewer to explore the site further. This is crucial because my text—the writing itself, I mean—will not mirror this feeling. I want it to be formal and professional. The marriage between the design and writing will hopefully make me stand out while preserving my professionalism and employability. […]Putting it all together, I want my e-Portfolio to be intriguing and multi-dimensional. The writing is a part of it for sure, but it is not the only part. Presentation and a well-rounded use of technology matter, which is why I want to use a well-known site builder like Weebly or WordPress for my project. It shows that I am a serious writer, but I am also thinking about the full experience I am giving to a reader.
SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSES, 2 Sitting in a Library with Demi Lovato, Wondering Where It
All Went WrongHere I sit, writing this blog entry from the Grad Library, listening to Demi Lovato’s “Skyscraper” for the umpteenmillionith time. Oh yes, I’m at that level of hopeless. I think I’m starting to lose my mind…I just paid $3.75 for a bottle of juice. That’s ridiculous. But the bottle says it’s natural, and will help me think better. Lucky for the Naked juice company, I’m a desperate sucker, and it seems to be working. I predict more over priced juice smoothie beverages to come in the near future.
Honestly, this paper is bummin’ me out. I can’t seem to get it right. When I start, I hate what I’ve written, and I do the worst thing you can do – delete everything on the page. I have little fragments that look like they’re starting to come together, but I’m underwhelmed with my progress, and overburdened by the task at hand (which is totally my fault…writing on zombies? seriously?). It’s funny, I had the exact same problem with the first iteration of this paper; it was the most difficult writing assignment I had done in college up until now. I was hoping to know how to navigate my way around it better a second time, but here I am, struggling just as much as I remember. I’m satisfied with my idea, the audience I have in mind, and the sources I’ve got to back up what I want to say. So why can’t I seem to write this damn thing? Why is writing about something interesting always so much harder than it should be? […]
SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSES, 3 What if we could write whatever we wanted?
[… ] Not only am I enjoying the ability to choose my topic and the research that I do, but I am actually really enjoying it and am finding myself reading through a book for this project instead of doing other homework. It could be the history buff in me, or it could be that this topic is just really fascinating. […] What if all the writing we did could be like that- the kind of writing that makes you never want it to end. The kind that not only lets you learn more about the topic of interest, but also about yourself and your writing abilities. The kind that you feel such an emotional attachment to, you actually forget it’s not really part of your life. The kind that you really just enjoy, and doesn’t really feel as if it is a homework or job assignment. […]
BLOG GROUPS
Syllabus statement: Throughout the semester we will have “blog groups” that will change periodically. Each week, please read the posts of the members of your group, and comment on at least two of them.
SAMPLE STUDENT RESPONSES reading is introspection.
The blog post I liked best was my response to the ong article where I talked about texting. This is a surprise to me because what I find more enjoyable is open ended blogging where we don’t have a topic. In this type of format, I think it is nice to be able to explore whatever interests you. Yet my response to the ong article was far superior to my other responses. So what does this tell me? I personally respond best to directed topics; however, I can still be creative in my response. This is not what I thought I would find.
A tearful goodbye to my first blog group!!When I posted my first blog, I read through the other three or so that were up and was blown away by the great writing that I saw. This immediately made me want to up my game. I’ll admit this competitive streak lasted about 2 weeks before other classes set in and my writing level decreased substantially in formality. That being said, I still feel like I achieved the same level of insight writing informally that I would have had I been required to write formally.
In with the NewLooking back at my blog posts, I noticed I sounded way more professional when there was a prompt to write to, but I also found myself liking those writings less. […] Prompts are nice for giving me a jumping off point, but ideas flow far more easily when I’m “writing out loud,” as Andrew Sullivan would call it. I love writing with one point in mind and letting it spiral out in to places I couldn’t have ever seen it traveling in my most vivid imaginations. […] I’ve found blogging is a really nice way to turn on the tap and get the faucet running.
Q&A
Workshop: Assigning and Assessing the Blog
At your tables, individually and in small groups, draft a plan for blogging in one of your courses –seminar leaders will circulate to answer questions and offer feedback
Please see “Some questions to consider” on your handout
Group discussion
What did you come up with for your own courses and what questions remain?
Q&A and evaluations
Thank you!
Intro to Wordpress.com
Lauren [email protected]
LSA Instructional Support ServicesInstructional Consulting
www.instructionblog.comG333 Mason Hall
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The Wordpress Administrative Panel Interface
This interface will become very familiar to you as you get further into blogging. From this panel you can add, edit and manage posts, pages, links, comments, users and themes. Take a moment to look carefully over every menu option available to you. Wordpress has many options. While it may seem overwhelming at first, the key to being fluent in the application is to first know where to find things.
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We will cover the basic settings that you really need to know about in order to get started with a Wordpress blog. Later when you have the time, look through the other options so that you know what other features are available to you.
General:You can change your site title or tagline any time.
The tagline is basically a short motto or slogan. It appears in the header under the blog title. Leave this field blank if you prefer.
Reading:By default, the blog home page shows a reverse-chronological list of your posts. If you prefer, you change this to make the homepage a static page.Remember to create a new page for the posts to appear on instead.
Discussion:Moderating means that any comment a reader leaves on a post or page will not be publicly visible until an administrator approves it.
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By default, all blogs are public but this setting is easily changed. The other two options are basically:-Search engines will be asked not to index the site so it will not show up in search results but anyone with the link could still access itor-The site is private and readers need to be specifically added by an administrator in order to access it.
If you choose the private option,you will need to explicitly give access to readers by adding in their email addresses or Wordpress account names.
You can do this with up to 35 people.
It is important, and confusing, to note that these “users” are really “readers” and not the same type of “users” that you can manage through the User menu in the sidebar (see page 5).
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This menu helps you see and manage all the users of your site. You may be the only user of your site. Or you might be a member of a group blog with many users.
These users have some sort of editing capability on your blog. That is, at the very least, they can access some parts of the administrative panel and create posts.
These are NOT the same as the readers you might add through the “Privacy” section of the Settings menu. Those users are essentially just “readers” and are unable to access your blog’s administrative panel.
Admin Editor Author Contributor
Can do any and everything including delete the blog and add other users.
Can publish, edit, delete ANY post/page; moderate comments; manage categories, tags, links and files.
Can publish, edit and delete their OWN posts and upload files/images.
Can edit posts but not publish them. Cannot upload files or images.
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You will spend a lot of time trying to perfect the look of your blog. Most of that time will be spent here, in the Appearance menu.
Under “Themes,” you can select a theme, either by browsing through each page or using the “Feature Filter” to narrow down the themes with features or styles in which you are particularly interested. You only have the themes in this library to choose from. You cannot upload a new theme and you cannot edit the CSS of these available themes without paying a premium for that ability.
Some themes will, however, allow you to upload or change the header image, background, or other items within it. This is dependent on the theme. Each theme’s features will be listed as a “tag” underneath its description.
Tip: Avoid choosing widgets until you have settled on a theme as widgets are theme-dependent.
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To add a widget:-Find a widget you’d like to use in the Available Widgets section. -Click it and drag it onto the available Sidebar, Footer or Available Widget Area (on the right). Most widgets have some options that can be customized and saved. However, once a widget has been dragged onto the side bar area, it is active and live on your site.
If you change your theme after selecting a widget, you may find that your widget gets “thrown off” and put in the “Inactive Widget” area. Just click and drag it back to turn it on again.
Widgets are little pieces of code that give extra functionality to your site. They can generally be added to the sidebars or footers of your blog IF your site allows for them.
Note: Particularly useful widgets include the Links widget and Categories and/or Tag Cloud.
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The links in this menu refer to links that you want visible all the time in your blog’s sidebar, NOT links within individual posts.
In order to be visible, after adding links here, you must turn on the Links widget under the appearance menu (see page 7).
To add a link:-Click “Add new”-Put in the link title-Paste or type in the link URL-Give the link a description-Choose a category-Choose a target window-Click “Add link.”
Note: What’s a target?Target refers to the window in which the link opens. -If you are linking to an external site, you want to choose “_blank.” This will open the link a new window, so that your reader has access to that link but still maintains contact with your blog.-”_top” will open the link in the same window, causing readers to leave your blog entirely.
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You can upload images and other file types (PDFs, .docs, .xls, etc) to your Wordpress blog. Anything that gets uploaded is stored in your Media Library, which can be accessed from the menu in the Administrative panel, or from the Edit Post/Page interface.
Wordpress allows you 3GB of media file storage. More space can be purchased.
See page 13 for more details on inserting media into a post or page.
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However, pages differ from posts in that pages are relatively “static,” and are not included in the chronological index of posts that make up the archetypical “blog.” Pages also cannot be given tags or categories.
Pages are especially good for posting information that is not subject to change often, or that you’d like to have readily available (whereas eventually posts get pushed further and further from the main page). You can turn a page into a “subpage” by giving it a “parent page,” thus creating a structure similar to other types of websites, if you choose.
The Pages menu allows you to manage the list of static pages in your blog. By default, you will have an “About Me” page but you can choose to add more.
The interface for creating a page is almost exactly the same as the interface for creating a post.
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Note:Posts can be saved-as-drafts, published immediately, scheduled to be published at a later date and updated after having been published. They can also can be added to multiple categories or given multiple keyword tags.
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The WYSIWYG editor = What You See Is What You Get
Media editor
Basic word-processing
Add or edit a link
Insert a “Read More” link or
Full Screen
“Kitchen sink” button(Toggles on 2nd row)
Special charactersRemove Formatting
Undo/Redo
Spell Check
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Inserting Media
Images can be uploaded from your computer
Images can be linked from online
Hotlinking is the act of embedding an image from one site into another by linking it. It should be avoided for two reasons:
1. Bad netiquette: hotlinking steals bandwidth from someone else’s site.
2. No control: control over that image belongs to the person hosting it. They can take it down or worse, replace it with a different image and that may be very detrimental to your blog.
Please also keep in mind that all of the copyright issues that exist in an offline space also exist online. If you do not own it and your site is public, you run the risk of violating copyright law by using someone else’s work.
To insert an image from the library, click on the “Show” button next to the image.
Then click “Insert into post” at the bottom of the next menu.
Images can be added from the media library (if they were already
Add Media menu (from L to R): Media, Poll, Custom Form
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While the Add Video menu makes it look as though you can upload videos, you actually cannot unless you buy a Video Upgrade for your site.
You can embed videos from other, trusted sources online by using the “From URL” tab in the Add Video menu.
You can ONLY embed video from these trusted sources. Videos from other sites must be linked to, not embedded.
becomes
when published
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Comments are an important part of blogging, because part of the point of an online journaling experience is to engage in conversation with your readers. In the Comments menu, you can view, approve (if moderating), reply to or trash comments.
Comments generally appear on the published post’s page, at the bottom.
Settings related to the commenting function can be found in the Settings menu, under Discussion (see page 3).
Resources!
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This document is just to help you get started.
Beyond this, the first place to go when you have basic questions is Wordpress itself. The “Help” link on the top right corner of the interface is a great resource.
I also suggest looking at some of the resources I’ve compiled on the ISS wiki:http://bit.ly/ISSblogging
Finally, please feel free to contact me with any questions about Wordpress, blogging in general or other technologies you may be interested in.
Lauren [email protected] Instructional Support ServicesG333 Mason Hall734-274-7348http://instructionblog.com
Did you know...?
Small grants of up to $15,000 are available for LSA faculty for instructional technology development: http://sitemaker.umich.edu/itc/home
Funding for student assistance is also available. Contact [email protected] for more information.
Other Resources:Center for Research on Learning and Teachinghttp://www.crlt.umich.edu/Faculty Exploratory http://www.lib.umich.edu/exploratory/
Effective Blogging
(Excerpt from the Syllabus for History 331, “Poland in the Modern World,” Winter 2012)
Every student is required to post approximately 500 words a week to the course blog. This can be in the form of one post of 500 words, two posts of 250 words, etc.
Questions for discussion will be posted on Thursdays; you may either respond to these questions, comment on a post by another student, or launch your own new discussion thread.
Your posts will be graded based on the following qualities:
Relevance: The posts must relate directly to the assigned course material. We stronglyencourage you to introduce material from other classes, to ink to relevant websites, or to utilize multimedia resources whenever appropriate. However, the main argument of every post must deal with the topics discussed in class.
Discussion: The main goal of this assignment is to create a space for debate and discussion, so you will be expected to read the posts from your fellow students and express your disagreements and agreements. Posts that build off of other posts with a rebuttal, elaboration, qualification, or some other form of response are strongly encouraged. You may certainly launch your own new topics if you wish, but if you always do so, we will suspect that you are not reading your colleaguesʹ posts, and this will be reflected in your grade. If you launch a new discussion thread on a topic that is already being debated in another thread, we will similarly assume that you did not read the earlier posts.
Evidence: You should use verbatim quotations from the assigned texts whenever possible. For historians "evidence" consists mostly of textual analysis, so to prove a point you must quote or summarize the assigned documents or secondary sources. Those who restrict their comments to generalities and fail to demonstrate a good grasp of the assigned material will not receive a good grade. The use of supplemental outside material is great, but if you do not use the assigned sources we will suspect that you are not reading them thoughtfully and carefully, and this will be reflected in your grade.
Analysis: Good discussion threads will always be open-ended, focusing on issues of interpretation. The goal is to get you to think about the readings and the lectures, not to parrot back what you've been told. This class will cover a lot of extremely controversial material, and I expect there to be a great deal of debate. Your ability to persuasively defend your positions is very important.
Style: Although these are somewhat informal on-line commentaries, you will still be assessed based on style, grammar, spelling, etc. In fact, one of the goals of this project is to help you learn how to compose persuasive and eloquent commentary in an on-line environment. Since this has become a prominent form of communication (and will only be more important in the years to come), it is vital that everyone cultivate the skill to write effectively in this context.
Accuracy: Mistakes regarding material presented in the readings or the lectures will be penalized; errors about items not covered in class will not lower your grade, but will doubtlessly be corrected (politely and graciously, of course!) by a fellow student.
Punctuality: You must post something every week, no later than the start of class on Monday. If all of your posts are bunched up around the grading periods, you will be penalized accordingly
Courtesy: Rudeness, aggression, or ad hominem attacks will not be tolerated. Debates are encouraged, but you must express disagreement in a polite and professional manner.
You must post every week, but for grading purposes we will divide the term into three parts. On February 6, March 12, and April 16 you must assemble all the posts you have made during the previous weeks, paste them into a single document, print them out, and submit them to your GSI. Each set must consist of at least four posts of approximately 2,000 words. Please note that these due dates are for collecting your posts, not writing them. The deadline for composing and posting your weekly comments will be each Monday at 4:00.
Excerpt from the syllabus for WRITING 200.001: Introduction to the Minor in Writing, Fall 2011: Minor in Writing blog: Over the course of your semesters in the Minor, you will be contributing regularly to our blog, which lives here: http://writingminor.sweetland.lsa.umich.edu/. We will begin using it this semester for reading responses, and more. You will receive an email from WordPress containing only a username and login; follow the link and login, and you will be taken to your “Dashboard” where you can create your first post. You can also click on “Visit the site” at the upper left of your screen to go to the blog main page. We’ll be learning together how to use the blog over the course of the semester. Throughout the semester we will have “blog groups” that will change periodically. Each week, please read the posts of the members of your group, and comment on at least two of them. You will earn 80% of your grade for the blog [worth 10% of the overall course grade] simply by posting and responding regularly, according to the schedule indicated in the class syllabus and policies. The remaining 20% will be earned based on the overall thoughtfulness, rigor, and interactivity of your posts, comments, and responses to your fellow bloggers. We will together define the characteristics of a strong blog post and comment. Sample blog prompts:
• Blog in response to reading: What in the Sullivan piece resonates with you? (What do you find surprising, funny, silly, touching, boring, interesting, uncomfortable, confusing, true, etc?) Why? Is there anything in this piece that has relevance for your own writing? Why or why not? Or, alternatively, blog about something else writing-‐related on your mind.
• Blog in response to reading: What in the Ong piece resonates with you? (What do you find funny, silly, touching, boring, uncomfortable, confusing, true, etc?) Why? What do you think he means when he claims that “writing is a technology”? Or, alternatively, blog about something else writing-‐related on your mind.
• Bring in the links to 5 websites and/or electronic portfolios you like, and that might provide
models for your own eportfolio. These can be popular sites or academic sites, news sites or game sites -‐-‐ whatever, but try to select sites with different purposes and functionality, e.g., text-‐based, image-‐based, presentational, interactive, etc. Blog about one or two of the websites you’ve identified: why did you choose it? What stands out to you? Or, alternatively, blog about something else writing-‐related on your mind.
• Choose a platform for your “Re-‐Mediating an Argument” essay by today
This week, blog about your choices and how they relate to your goals for the project, and/or blog about anything else writing-‐related on your mind.
• Read the reflective writing/reflective practice article you signed up for and blog about its main ideas, what struck you, etc. Be prepared to present your thoughts to your reading group and discuss.
• Blog about your portfolio – this is your final piece of reflective writing for the semester.
What are you happy with? What do you still want to work on? What was the process like for you? How well did you achieve your purpose in presenting yourself as a writer? What are you thinking about as you leave this gateway class and go into the rest of the minor?
Blog group reflection activity: As we transition to our new blog groups, and as we reflect as a class on the best ways we can use blogs, let's review the blogging we've done, the comments we've given and received, and think about where we want to go. Here are some steps to guide us: 1. Reread all of your posts this semester and the comments you've received. 2. Take some notes on the following: Posts: What themes do you notice, if any? How would you characterize your blog persona? Which posts did you find most satisfying, and why? Least satisfying, and why? Comments: What kinds of comments did you receive? Which comments did you find most satisfying, and why? Least satisfying, and why? What kinds of comments did you leave on others' posts? 3. Write a paragraph or two reflecting on what you've noticed, on what kinds of blogging you'd find most beneficial, and on your current goals for your own blogging in the next several weeks. 4. Talk with your current blog group about what you wrote. What do you all notice about your corner of the blog? 5. Post your paragraph(s) on the blog as an introduction to your new group!
NRE 501.114 Biofuels and Bio-‐Based Carbon Mitigation
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Assignment Description: Investigative Reviews
William S. Currie, School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan
Assignment description
This course encompasses a broad set of interdisciplinary topics that are rapidly changing. Technological research is proceeding rapidly. Policy is changing rapidly. New information is rapidly being gathered and
applied to address complex questions that are now just beginning to be appreciated – exemplified by the “carbon debt” paper (Fargione et al. 2008 Science 319:1235-‐1238) that just came out within the last year.
Your assignment is to complete and submit two Investigative Reviews that will be posted to our course blog on Biofuels and Bio-‐Based C Mitigation. The blog will be publicly accessible; it may be read by the other
students in the class and by anyone else who finds it.
For each investigative review, pick a topic or question that is relevant to the course. (If you are not sure, ask the instructor or GSI for feedback on your idea.) Then do some combination of literature research and review, current-‐developments research, critical thinking, and quantitative analyses or comparisons to gain
understanding or insight into your topic or question. Finally, write a report that reviews what you found and explains the new understanding or insight you gained on your topic or question.
In lecture and discussions, we will point out ideas for example topics as they arise.
The charge for this assignment is broad because we expect that each student will approach it somewhat differently. Be creative and thoughtful. Challenge yourself intellectually. Pursue a topic that you think is
relevant and worthwhile and conduct some interesting type of review or critical analysis.
These assignments are about questioning, reading, thinking, analyzing, and writing. But they are also about marshalling facts, using evidence, and citing your sources. Each review should contain some type of original quantitative analysis or quantitative comparison and an interpretation of what that analysis means for the
topics related to this course on bio-‐based carbon mitigation.
What not to write
Do not write an opinion piece that has few facts and little or no analysis to back up the opinions.
Do not write an article that is simply an explanation, or discussion, or criticism, of what another article is about. For an example of this, see this Huffington Post article about a Wall Street Journal article about carbon footprints.
Do not write an article completely structured around the interview of a person. (The idea is to read your thinking and analysis, not the thinking of another person.) However, it would be fine to interview a person and weave the results of the interview into your broader investigative report.
NRE 501.114 Biofuels and Bio-‐Based Carbon Mitigation
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Do not simply draw on the assigned readings for this course. One of the purposes of these assignments is to have you critically explore additional sources of information. It is OK to draw on the ‘Additional readings’
listed on the syllabus – that is one of the reasons they are there. To clarify: It is OK to cite the assigned readings if you need to and if you used them in your analysis and review, but don’t write an entire article that focuses on or draws only on the assigned readings.
Do not re-‐use writing that you did previously for another course or for a MS project, thesis, dissertation, or
article. The analysis and the writing that you turn in here should be original for this course.
Writing style
Use your best professional writing. The writing style should be articulate, well crafted, polished and professional. If you want to turn in academic research-‐style writing (i.e. peer-‐review journal writing), that is perfectly acceptable. But it is not necessary here because these assignments are not meant to emphasize
that style. Colloquialisms, sentence fragments, and single-‐sentence paragraphs are allowable and acceptable, to some extent, because that is the style that has developed in professional blog articles. But be very selective with them. It is still important, for the most part, to craft well structured paragraphs and
grammatical sentences.
Do not make too extensive use of either short quotes or long quotes from people or from other articles. Use these sparingly. Be sure to put direct quotes in quotation marks. If a quote will run close to two lines or more, offset it with increased margins and a blank line above and below. All sources for quotes must be
clearly identified, either as a person and their position or title, or as a citation of a source that is in the list of citations.
Avoid plagiarism: do not copy and paste from any source or reproduce any source verbatim without putting
it in quotation marks. Plagiarism can also occur any time the ideas of another person are used without attribution. It is OK to draw on the ideas of others—but they need to be clearly attributed.
Be sure to proofread, spell-‐check, and look for errant commas and so on. Be sure to edit and revise your work. In other words, do not turn in your first draft.
What to turn in
For each investigative review, turn in the following things:
1) A title.
2) A 100-‐word lead-‐in. This will be placed on the course blog, with a link to your full investigative
review. (The lead-‐in may be the first 100 words of your review, or it may be a synopsis—your choice. The idea is to give a sense of what the article is about, but also to draw the reader in to get him or her to want to read the whole article.)
NRE 501.114 Biofuels and Bio-‐Based Carbon Mitigation
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3) The full investigative review, which should be between 1,200 and 1,600 words when checked for Word Count in MS Word. (The citations list, appended at the end, is not included in the word
count).
4) References cited in the text (Author, year) with the list of citations appended to the end. Do not use footnotes – footnotes do not lend themselves to the blog format – and do not simply list references at the end without referring to them at specific points in the text. Use as many as needed, but at
least three that are from peer-‐review articles, IPCC documents, published reports, or sources of equivalent reliability. Beyond these three, web pages, blog articles, wikipedia pages, and magazine and newspaper articles can also be cited if they are appropriate and needed.
5) You can include web links in the text of your article if you like. This is optional. But don’t include too
many, because if they don’t copy and paste properly into the blog we’ll have to re-‐enter them. Best to limit the number of web links to three or four. If you do include web links in the text, the preferred format would be to highlight a word or phrase in the normal text and use Insert /
hyperlink in MS Word to make that the hyperlink (so that the http://www.examplehyperlink.org does not show in the text).
6) Graphs and/or tables can be included, but these are optional and should be used sparingly. (Using no graphs or tables at all is perfectly acceptable if they are not needed). You may use up to either 1
graph (showing quantitative information) or 1 table that derives from an outside source and is clearly cited. (We make this limitation because these assignments are not meant to be about hunting and gathering the best graphics … they are about doing your own questioning, reading,
thinking, analyzing, and writing.) Any additional tables or graphs are limited only to those you create yourself, e.g. from information you gather from multiple sources and create your own table
in MS Word or your own graph in Excel. If you do this, clearly indicate that you created the table or graph by putting your name in the caption or subtitle, e.g. “table created by John Smith,” as well as citing the sources for the data.
How to turn these in
The elements in #1 through #5 (above) can be assembled in a single MS Word file for turning in. Please do
not turn in a .pdf because these are harder for us to word-‐count and to post to the blog.
Each table or graph (#6 above) should be turned in as a separate .jpg file so we can easily post them to the site alongside your article. (You can easily save as a .jpg on any machine with Adobe Photoshop ; ask for help if needed.) Please do not turn in graphs or tables in Windows files (Word, Excel, Powerpoint); these are
not web-‐friendly for posting to the blog site.
Please do not include any photographs or other images.
NRE 501.114 Biofuels and Bio-‐Based Carbon Mitigation
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Due dates and grading
Turn in two investigative reviews during the term, with due dates based on the last digit of your Student ID#, as follows:
Last digit Investigative
Review 1 due:
Investigative
Review 2 due:
0, 2, 5, 7, 9 March 6 April 10
1, 3, 4, 6, 8 March 20 April 17
You may turn these in earlier if it is more convenient for you. Late assignments will also be accepted, but subject to a grade penalty (as described in the Grading, Rules, and Expectations document).
The rubric that will be used to grade these assignments is available on CTools.
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