Responding to Your Blogmates

As an exercise in small group communication and collaboration, I will be having you comment regularly on the blog entries of your own small group (set up by me—more info coming soon).

While my larger goal is simply to have you in communication with a couple other classmates on a regular basis, I will, nevertheless, give you some specific guidelines to help you avoid both writer’s block as well as vague and mostly meaningless generalities. In other words, I am expecting your comments on your blogmates’ blog entries to be serious and substantive engagements with the issues, insights, questions, and so on that your blogmates express in their posts.

Finding Your Groupmates

• First, go to the “Blog Response Group” link in the side menu on Blackboard and see which students are in your blog group;
• Second, go to the “Individual Blog” link in the same Blackboard side menu and find the blog entry links posted for each blog assignment by your groupmates (you should have two group members);

Where to Submit Your Comments

In order to receive credit for your comments on your groupmates’ blogposts, you will need to respond in the BLACKBOARD “Comment” section (after clicking the “Comment” button to get there). This gives your instructor a centralized place for finding everyone’s comments.

I had originally asked you to comment directly on your groupmates’ external blog post pages, but in the end it is too complicated (due to your varying time schedules) to keep track of for grading. While I still encourage you to comment directly on your blogmates’ blog pages just for the public online experience, these comments will not count towards your commenting grade.

Guidelines

So here is a list of guidelines for you to keep in mind as you respond to each other:

• Read each entry carefully;
• Provide meaningful responses to their meaningful statements;
• Be honest but respectful if you feel your blogmate has not taken the blog assignment seriously enough;
• Write at least 200 words in response to each post.

Things you might comment on:

• Points you agree with or might have even written in your own post;
• Points you respectfully disagree with (and why);
• Things in the post that you might suggest as topics to explore more fully (perhaps in their essays, for example, or future blog posts);
• Things you think they might benefit from considering.

My goal is NOT to set you all up for debates or arguments, although you might find this one possible outcome. I am mostly looking for small groups of students meaningfully and mindfully engaged in conversation with one another as you make your way through the semester together.

My Role

My role in your blog commenting cycle is mostly as an observer. My primary goal is for you to interact with each other. That means, then, that my own comments will likely be brief unless I have reason to go on at greater length.