Welcome, everyone, to our class blog! This semester we will focus on real-life contexts for conversation and persuasion, and this blog is a reflection of that. It is a place of conversation for us, but it is also public because rhetoric isn't something that we should discuss in the classroom and then forget when we leave that space: it has the power to affect change in the world around us.
Each week, one group will serve as the discussion leader for the blog. It is your job to post questions to generate discussion and prompt critical thinking about the week's readings. Your questions should be open-ended rather closed-ended (yes-no) questions. Post your questions by 11:59 PM on Sunday.
Every student should respond to the questions posted; this equates to being "present" for the online course discussion. Your responses should not be vague, surface-level statements. You must demonstrate that you have read and understand the concepts in the readings. Post your responses by 11:59 PM on Wednesday.
One ground rule: make sure to use your ASU Google ID for your blog posts. This will ensure that you get credit for posting. It's also a good idea to "follow" the blog so that you know when new questions have been posted.
It's easy to get to Blogger from your ASU gmail. Simply click on "More" in the toolbar along the top and choose "Blogger." You may be prompted to set up a profile.
To start off with, I'd like you to view a couple of blogs that I've set up for other courses to get a feel for the blog expectations. The questions are posted by and answered by students, so you will see some fantastic things and some not-so-fantastic things. Learn from both!
Thinking Critically about New Media http://thinkingcriticallyaboutnewmedia.blogspot.com/
Writing Center Internship Course http://uawcinterns.blogspot.com/2010/01/welcome.html
For this week's discussion, choose one thread in one of the above blogs to comment on. Your job is to look for what you can learn from either strengths or weaknesses in the posts. For instance, you might comment on how a particular discussion question was really effective and then explain WHY you think so (be specific!). Or, perhaps, you might comment on a particular student's response to a post and critique why it was weak (and why you won't do the same thing :) ).
I don't want everyone to comment on the same exact thing, so make sure you all don't just look at the first post on one of the blogs. If you see others have spent a lot of time commenting on a particular post, look for another one to talk about.
Feel free to disagree and challenge one another (in a respectful way, of course). If you think that the post your peer thinks was great wasn't, then talk about it!
