What to do with your blogs and other questions

You all created blogs on Monday (while I was at meetings) => good job! I am still in the process of linking your blog to my blog. By next class we should all be connected - so that we can keep an eye on what we are writing.

Reading through your summaries, I noticed that many of you are not familiar with MLA format. If you did not create your summary in MLA format, and / or are not sure how to do so, check out the Purdue OWL's presentation on MLA format.

In addition to reviewing what Woolley, Heim and Grusin and Bolter have written about cyberspace and new media "writing," we will use today's class to begin to put together a list of topics of interest. I will keep an ongoing version of this list -here- on my blog, so you can refer back to it. This list can be a starting place for your ideas about what to write about for your web essay, or for your entry on Wikipedia.

So as you can see - we will be using the blogs for a variety of purposes, and the way you use it will evolve over the course of the semester:

• to summarize & reflect on readings
• to find a topic for the web essay + wikipeida entry
• to find out what classmates are thinking/writing about
• to communicate with classmates
• to gather and develop information on your topic (once you find it) for your web essay

For this course, your blog will be like a journal in that you will use it as a place to think - and as a place to develop writing. But a blog is not like a journal in that it is a public space - and that is a point to think about as you develop your entries.