Saturday, November 25, 2006

Blog assignment: final grading

There are only two weeks left of blogging you must do for this class. Shortly after December 7, our last class day, I will begin the final grading of your blogs. I'll be looking only at your template design, and the blog posts you're written since the midterm point. This grade is worth 20% of your final grade for the course.

In terms of formatting, the requirements at midterm were that you have at least three links to other bloggers in this class, and at least three external links, arranged in some manner that makes sense (both to you, and to your readers). In the final blog grading, I'll be looking for improvements to your blogroll. In your weekly blog posts, what I'm looking for is quality of writing, relevance, and links.

Your final blog grade will be assigned on the following scale: A = excellent, B = goood, C = satisfactory, D = unsatisfactory, and F = failure.

Speaking of the last day of class, I really hope I'll see all of you there, since it'll be our last day together. I'm still waiting to hear who the winner of the campus-wide essay contest is (remember your Kite Runner essays?), and if it's one of you, there will be pizza, as promised — after the two presenting groups that day have finished with their presentations.

There's another reason I hope you'll all come on that last day. I have chosen you as my one class this semester to do a course evaluation on me. Faculty in the School of Journalism & Mass Communications are required to choose two classes per year to do these evaluations, and it was suggested to me not to do any in the first semester. I'm not sure why. Maybe they figure that freshman faculty never get good reviews. And maybe they're right. Hmn.

But the thing is, I really want to know what you thought of this course. The blog assignment was an experiment, and, from what I've seen from your blogs, it was a successful one — but I want to know what you think about that.

4 comments:

Kelley said...

I just thought I would give you some feedback on the blogs right now. I really liked the blog assignment. I know a lot of people felt it became tedious after the first couple weeks but if you really enjoy writing, this exercise was an excellent easy to express yourself. If writing two small posts a week is duanting, it might be a clue that you are in the wrong field. Plus, it gave us a good idea of what's to come after graduation. I keep noticing every journalist/writer I know has to write a blog for their publications website. It allowed me to consider other writing options that I had never thought of before like writing exclusively online. It seems that's the way the media is leaning towards and as long as there are readers I don't really care how its published. All in all, I really liked this class and although sometimes I didn't understand why you would assign some things initially, it always seemed to make sense in the end. I would recommend this class to other communications majors and I think learning more about online communications should be a required aspect of this department.

Jennifer Malulani said...

Hey Lilly, you left a comment on my blog asking what the prices were of some of the items that people wanted outside Best Buy for on Black Friday. Well, we had a laptop for I believe three or four hundred. We had a 42" plasma TV for 999.99 (normally 1599.99), a 50" for 1699.99 (normally 2999.99) and a 32" for 479.99 (normally 899.99). So the sales on those items were okay, but I could not imagine myself waiting out in the freezing cold just for a TV I don't need.

Lilly Buchwitz said...

Call me crazy but I'd rather wait indoors for a year for the prices to come down to those levels, than wait outside a store overnight in the cold. :-)

Jeff Macias said...

I was proudly outside Toys'r'us @ 4:40am, the day after the big turkey dinner! I arrived to a line 50 people long already. The hunt is part of the fun. Anyhoo, I love the blog assignment! This was a new medium to me, and I now embrace it. I plan to keep "The Edutainer" going, well past graduation.