UWC2101H: Writing and Critical Thinking: Power, Space and Pleasure

Presentations of paper proposals: Collaborative blogging

Background | Instructions | Timeline and Expectations

Background

One purpose of our collaborative blogging with students from Stanford and Örebro is to provide you with feedback on your ideas for Paper 3: think of this as an extended peer review using new-media technologies. Another purpose is to offer you the opportunity to interact with other students taking writing modules, to see what they're doing and thinking, and to offer them feedback on their ideas for papers.

• Each of you will be a member of a collaborative blogging group. Each group will, together, present their ideas for Paper 3 on the Stanford Cross-Cultural Rhetoric blog. Each group will prepare a 250-350 word post due latest Friday 2 November, 5 pm.
• You will, in turn, as individuals -- or, indeed, if you like, together -- be reading the Stanford and Örebro students' posts. Some of these will relate directly to their ideas for papers, and you will be commenting on them.

Please note this replaces the previous requirement spelt out on the Policy page to present formal paper proposals: the requirement has been replaced by one asking you to participate in this collaborative blogging exercise. There have also been some changes to the Schedule and the due dates for Paper 3 with which you should familiarize yourself.

This is a great opportunity both to receive feedback on your ideas for Paper 3, and also to give feedback to other writers engaged in similar projects. The students with whom you will be engaging are, like you, currently taking writing modules and working on papers. Of course, their writing modules are by no means the same as ours, and their topics may be quite different. But they share an interest in writing and rhetoric, as well as more broadly issues involving culture and, indeed, space.

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Instructions

Each UWC2101H student will receive a username and password to access the blog. This will give you full posting and commenting rights.

• To post: Go to the Stanford Cross-Cultural Rhetoric blog at http://cgi.stanford.edu/%7Egroup-ccr/mt/mt.cgi.
• To read and comment: Go to the Cross-Cultural Rhetoric blog at http://www.stanford.edu/group/ccr/blog/.

Full instructions can be downloaded from the IVLE Workbin. Go to the Worksheets folder and download bloginstructions.doc.

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Timeline and Expectations

You participation in the case of this collaborative blogging will be graded S/U.

This is an outline of what will happen, when it will happen, as well as what will be expected of you:

1. The first step will be for us to form collaborative blogging groups of 3 or fewer persons. To this end, on Tuesday 30 October 2007 you need to come to class with a good preliminary sense of your topic for Paper 3. You will be assigned to a blogging group on the basis of some of e.g. the following factors:
• shared interest in a topic;
• shared focus on a primary source;
• shared / similar / overlapping theoretical lenses, i.e. secondary sources;
• focus on common key terms.


2. Once you've been assigned to your collaborative blogging group, you will need to start working with fellow group members to prepare your cowritten post. The post is due on the blog latest Friday 2 November, 5 pm--no formal class meeting on this day. Instead, you will have the Cyberart Studio (located Blk ADM level 5) at your disposal during these times. Please bear in mind the requirement as to length: 250-350 words. Your collaborative post must consist of the following:
• a brief introduction of your group members, including a brief general indication of the topic of this module, as well as of your own ideas for Paper 3 topics and how they intersect with one another;
• a minimum of three short paragraphs (or two, if your group has only two members) in which each of you offers an indication of her or his topic by informing the reader of some or all of the following:
• your motive or rationale for choosing the topic, the problem you are posing or question you are asking: this needs to be related to one or two particular texts/sources, whether image, story, article, film, etc;
• your initial ideas for a thesis: your working thesis, the argument you think you might be making;
• the sources you're thinking of using as you develop the argument: are you thinking of particular lenses or other secondary sources you might be using?
• other issues you want to highlight.


3. During the week of 5-9 November, when we were scheduled to have formal in-class presentations, you will now be blogging! You will be reading feedback on your ideas from other students -- both classmates and overseas students -- and you will be offering them feedback as well. This means you will be reading posts from Stanford and Örebro students as well as from other UWC2101H groups, and you'll be commenting on them; and of course you will also be reading others' comments on your group's post.
   • Each person needs to post an individual comment to the blog that reviews the ideas of at least one other person from the same collaborative blogging group by latest Tuesday 6 November, 5 pm. It's up to each collaborative group to decide, as a group, which member will provide feedback for which other member of the same group (obviously, where there are only two group members, each member will simply provide feedback to the other).
     
   • Offering feedback initially within your collaborative blogging groups makes a lot of sense since you already know something about each of your fellow-group members' ideas: after all, you've been working with these other writers on your collaborative posting. What's more, there will be at the very least some overlap in interest, which should make commenting a little easier.
     
   • In your feedback, try to draw on your experiences peer reviewing drafts at the end of Unit 2. Maximum word limit for this feedback is, as with the initial group posting, 350 words.
     
   • Aside from offering feedback on the ideas of at least this one other person, I would of course also like to encourage you to provide comments, however brief or lengthy, to other people: whether they're taking UWC2101H or Stanford / Örebro classes.
   
   We will be meeting as a class on Tuesday 6 November in the Cyberart Studio:
   • Gr 1: 9 - 10 am; Gr 2: 12 - 1 pm. >
   • In addition, the Cyberart Studio is available for your use Wednesday 7 November, 12 - 7 pm.
   
   
4. On Friday 9 November we'll have a final class meeting during which we'll take stock of and reflect on the collaborative blogging experience. Additionally, you will spend 30-45 minutes evaluating UWC2101H.



5. During the week of 12-16 November, when we'll be conferencing, you should continue reading the blog and commenting on student posts, specifically from Örebro.

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