Guidelines for responses/comments

I really enjoyed our interacting through blogs today in class. You all took some of my pointers on posting responses to heart, and offered meaningful insights/suggestions/questions to your peers. Below is a copy of the handout I read in class regarding guidelines for posting/responses etc. Just posting it here so you don't have to go to the class website.

How to Respond to a Blog

Goals:

- To engage the blogger on the intellectual/logical/argumentative merits of their blog posting
- To analyze the blogger’s post based on current themes / lessons being presented in class
- To add meaning to the class conversation – always, always, look to add meaning
- To offer more questions / points of analysis when possible (these ideas may be useful for other
classmates as they read the blog responses)

Expectations:

- You will spend some quality time considering your response before writing it
- You will write no less than 50 words per response
- You will find opportunities to be creative, energizing:
- Perhaps you will point the blogger to another web resource (hyperlink, video, article)
etc., explaining why that resource might be valuable to their thinking / approaches as
well as linking the resource in the body of your post

- Perhaps you will connect this blogger’s ideas to those of another class blogger
and suggest they communicate if they are not already doing so

You may employ images in responses as a way of answering more than the verbal /
linguistic attributes of any conversation.

These are merely three suggestions; there are many other ways to make your blog response a
meaning-making, community-building exercise

Some possible questions you might ask yourself when composing your response:

- Have I read the material this blogger is referencing?

- Is the blogger speaking from a particular point of view? Can I offer other points of view and
defend their merits?

- Who did the blogger write this for?
Classmates are not the only audience; perhaps he/she wrote in a way that would appeal
to another audience; i.e. young men, Catholics, people with more than three children,
mechanics, ballet dancers – have they expressed an opinion/idea that translates beyond
the artificial borders of our class?

- In espousing a certain interpretation / argument, has the blogger conveniently or perhaps
unintentionally avoided bringing up certain obvious points that would undermine their
interpretation / argument? If so, what are they? How do you defend their need to be included
in the conversation?

- Are the blogger’s ideas / opinions similar to those you’ve read elsewhere? If so, point them in
the direction of this thinker/writer who seems to have a similar worldview to them.

- Did you find something the blogger said to be of particular use to you? How? Why? What will
you do with that new outlook?

There are many more questions you might respond to, and you will get a better sense of the questions you should be asking yourselves any time you read or view any constructed work as the semester progresses.

Technology requirements:

An understanding of how to embed video, audio, or text in a posted response ; also, how to name hyperlinks and employ them in a response.