Blogging in Academia: A Workshop
Blog Assignments from the UNC-CH English Department
- Stephanie Morgan's Blog Assignment (PDF format) for English 11. To see how this assignment has played out, please check out her English 11 LiveJournal and links to her students' pages.
- John Hannah's Unit 1 Assignment Sequence for English 11 and applicable lesson plans. This assignment sequence assignment might interest those who want to explore ways of incorporating blogs without having a huge amount of knowledge or experience, since it isn't completely blog-centric.
- Daniel Lupton's Unit 3 Assignment Sequence for English 11, which incorporates blogs into the Professional Communities unit.
- Katherine Shrieves's English 11 Unit 1 Assignment Sequence on blogging culture, including Feeder 1, Feeder 2, and the Unit 1 Project.
- Jennifer Connerley's blog assignment sequence and rubric. Jennifer describes her pedagogical approach here:
Creating a web page has been an assignment in my composition courses for several years. I feel that it's important for students, especially in English 12, to see that their research and their writing can have real-world consequences--and that it can be published immediately. I also hope that creating a web page as part of an assignment will help them both to think critically about sources on the web and to take the initiative to create their own web pages when they need or wish to. Initially, I taught students to use Netscape Composer and WS_FTP for creating web pages and placing these web pages in their own UNC network space. (An example of one of these pages is available here:) Unfortunately, the learning curve for this software (and for web design in general) meant that we were spending a lot of class time working on technical issues like uploading pictures and text placement, rather than thinking about writing and publishing. This year, I decided to attempt the assignment again using Blogger instead. To my surprise, I found that only two of my first-year students already had used Blogger. Despite their general lack of familiarity with the web site (and with blogs), the simplicity of using Blogger meant that we only spent twenty minutes of class time on setup and training. The end results were the same--students were empowered to use a new technology later, outside of class, and had the satisfaction of seeing their own work and the work of other groups live on the web.
Some of the projects created in Jennifer's class:
If you have an assignment that you would like to see posted on this site, please contact the English Web Development Committee. We're always happy to receive your submissions!
