blogging instructions

Okay, I could use some feedback, if you don’t mind. Do these instructions lack anything? I’m asking my comp students to do some blogging this semester. Any suggestions for revision?


Blogging Instructions
Go to http://www.blogger.com and log in under the username and password you previously created
You will then be presented with an interface that will allow you to write new blog entries.
If you have forgotten your username and password, you will be able to have blogger email you that information when you try to log in.
Your participation online and in-class counts towards 15% of your final grade. Your online participation will take the form of blog entries that you write using the concepts you learn in this class to analyze the writing of others. You have already written a definition on your blog.
You will write a minimum of 5 additional blog entries between now and the end of the semester. What you write about is up to you. However, you must use one of the concepts from class to frame your blog entry: for example, you might use the concepts exigence, tactics of definition, audience, the rhetorical appeals, logical fallacies, or the stases. And you must link to another piece of writing on the web somewhere by a blogger (not one of your classmates or me) or by a news reporter or columnist. Each entry should be no less than 200 words.
The way to create a link is to use the following HTML code

Consider the argument made
/a href=”http://www.address.com”/by this writer//a/ about the upcoming election.

Look specifically at this part of the above. This is how you make a “link” to another document on the web:

/a href=”http://www.address.com”/word or phrase//a/

For further formatting information, re-read the intro to HTML:
http://www.mith.umd.edu/teaching/tutorials/html/index.html
Do not wait until the last minute to post your blog entries. Technical problems with the website will not be acceptable as an excuse if you miss a deadline. Get your entries done sooner rather than later.
You can post sooner than the deadline, but you will get no credit for any entry that is posted after the deadline. The following dates are the deadlines for each of the five entries.
1.Friday, September 24
2.Friday, October 8
3.Friday, October 22
4.Friday, November 5
5.Friday, November 19

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7 thoughts on “blogging instructions

  1. Maybe for revision require them to comment on each other’s blogs, and then to address issues in comments in further posts? You’d have to specify that comments can’t just be “good job!” or whatever, but would have to actually try to offer a difference of opinion or interpretation. Respectfully, of course…

  2. When I use blogs again in the spring, I think I’ll emphasize links (perhaps even requiring one active link, no matter whether links to a peer or some other site) and blockquote tags to make the entries more conversant, dialogic, etc. Might be a value, too, in turning links and blockqoutes to one’s own entries or opening that up as a possibility. Not sure whether rules about these issues are necessary, though.

  3. George, if you wanted to insert the angle brackets into the code example, but not have the strings recognized as code, you could type & lt ; for left angle bracket and & gt ; for right angle bracket (without the spaces).
    Other than that, looks great. I wrote up a longish how-to-blog thing recently, but it’s largely WordPress-specific and probably of no use to you.

  4. Just be aware that blogger, like most webmail clients, can mess up on long entries. Encourage them to save in process or write long entries in a text editor and cut-and-paste it in…I got complaints about losing entries during the save for the whole semester I used blogger.

  5. Vika, you should post that to your blog to people who use WordPress for teaching could use it (if you want to share).
    Thanks for the tip, Brandon: I added a note to the instructions after reading your comment.

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