A central feature of this course will be the writing we do on this site.  In what follows, I will outline three things:

• a rationale for why I ask you to blog in the first place, rather than write traditional essays
• a quick primer on how to create your first post
• a simple rubric to guide your writing + an example of a good-looking post

First things first: why blog?

1. Blogging is sharable: rather than have a private circuit between you and me, we have a much more dynamic conversation across the entire class.

2. Blogging is public, sort of: I like the idea that we are responsible for our ideas in front of broader audiences.  In practical terms, I doubt anyone is listening in most of the time, but I think it’s important that we roll up our sleeves and defend our arguments in an open and public forum as often as possible.  And of course, you can show your family/friends/pets what we’ve been up to in class.  For those who have reservations about privacy, note that a) I’m happy to help you get a username with some anonymity, so you have relative privacy beyond our class; and b) you are free to delete your posts at the end of class.  If anyone has serious reservations despite all this, feel free to contact me.

3. Blogging is sturdy: rather than forget the piece of paper once it’s been handed back, we can link back to prior statements or observations, or to each others’. If you like, you can leave your posts up for future students to see.

4. Blogging is responsive: rather than only getting comments from me, you’ll comment on and get comments on each other’s work.

So how do you post? Here’s a quick guide to posting on WordPress for newbies. It’s super easy once you figure it out the first time. So here goes:

1. Make sure you’re logged in: if you’re logged in, you’ll see your avatar in the upper-right-hand corner of the window. If you aren’t, you’ll see the text “log in.”

2. START A POST: there are several ways to post. Here’s the easiest: click the <+ NEW> icon in the top middle of the screen and select “post.” It looks like this:

3. WRITE SOMETHING: “New Post” will take you to a basic text editor. So write something. If you want to get fancy, you can add italics, bold, indentation, insert images or other media, and whatnot. But most of the time you’ll just try to write some reasonable sentences. When you’re done, click PUBLISH on the right (see image below). Or, if you’re not quite ready, you can save it as a draft and reopen it later, via the “POSTS” section of the dashboard. Helpful hint: WordPress autosaves your work every few seconds, so it’s very, very rare to lose stuff. Nonetheless it’s not a bad idea to compose posts on a word processor and then paste them into WP just in case. I personally live dangerously most of the time and have never lost anything, but your call.

If you want to get really fancy, add a tag or two or some media. In the right-hand column, you’ll see a bunch of options. Most of the time you can ignore most of them, but “tags” allows you to add, say, the name of the author you’re writing about or a topic that you hit in the post. So for a post on Du Bois, you might tag it “Du Bois,” “SOULS,” and/or “double consciousness.” If you want to add media, for example a relevant image, click “add media” in the top left-hand part of the window and follow the prompts.

We’re good, right? Happy blogging.

What makes for an excellent post? For this class, posts should:

• be between 400-800 words (use word count in WordPress or your word processor)
• explain a given text’s argument (for secondary readings) or analyze its form and themes (for primary readings), using quotations and paraphrases of the text with page numbers in parentheses
• engage a text critically, noting its limitations, its links to other texts we’ve read, its unstated assumptions, etc.

Here’s a simple rubric, adapted from Mark Sample, that I will use to evaluate your work (see how the academic blogosphere encourages sharing and exchange? I told you so!):

Last but not least, here’s an example of a good-looking post.  I’ve linked to it in a Word doc so you can see some marginal comments that explain why it’s good.  And remember: it’s not an exercise in cookie-cutting: your results may vary, and there are lots of ways to write an excellent post.

This is just a link to a doc we’ll use tomorrow to record thoughts about the term. I’ll post the list in the blog after cleaning it up: I think it’ll be a fitting end to the term.

Greetings 494 students. I’m excited to meet you and work with you this term. The first step to doing so will be joining this site, which we’ll use (along with a related “group”) to share and comment on informal writing and other assignments over the course of the term. There’s a two-step process for joining: a) join the CUNY Academic Commons, a free/open resource for CUNY faculty/staff/students to collaborate on the web; and b) accept the invitation I’ll send you once you’ve joined the Commons.

Here’s how to join the Commons:

1. Head to the CUNY Academic Commons: https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/
2. Click “Register” in the top right corner.
3. Create a username. I prefer first name+last initial: mine would be jeffa.
4. Use a CUNY email address to register. This can be changed later through “My profile”. (see next section)
5. Enter your full name. You can make this private later.

6. Some other fields are optional but please DO indicate your College.
7. Indicate your Role as an Undergraduate Student
8. Other fields can be filled in later in your profile.
9. Agree to the Terms of Service (You own your own data!)

Two notes: a) you can skip the prompt that asks you to create your own blog, though if you want to play around with this functionality, feel free; and b) if you want to change your email from your Hunter email to a different account that you check more frequently, here’s how you do it:

To edit a Commons profile:

1. Sign in to the Commons with your newly created username and password
2. Click the arrow in the upper right-hand corner of the page
3. Select “My Profile”. This takes you to your public profile
4. Use the “Edit Profile” button to make changes.
5. Change the contact email, picture, and other information here.

Finally, you’ll sign up with hypothes.is, an annotation platform (also free/open) that allows you to comment on materials on our site (and just about anything else on the web). To sign up, navigate to hypothes.is, click on GET STARTED in the upper right corner, and follow the prompts. You can add the extension to Chrome (or the applet to other browsers) if you like, but I’ve enabled it for our site such that you don’t need to do this.