Photo by T. Smith, 2009, with subject's permission

Contents 1 Assignment purposes 2 Two assignment components 3 Draft 4 Recruit Contributions 5 Individual blog 6 Submission 7 Editorial Coordinators 8 Special criteria 9 Resources

• Learn the basic technology of WordPress blogs
• Begin to learn principles of website design and editing.
• Begin restructuring and editing text for the web, considering rhetorical principles and the ethical boundaries of your role as a summarizer, editor and publisher of inherited work.
• Think critically and rhetorically about WordPress technology limitations and opportunities

Two assignment components

1. Required draft with blog setup and initial content learned in labs to date -- due at end of January: see course calendar.
2. Individual blog -- with high quality editing and publishing of inherited content, and appendices which demonstrate your efforts. For deadlines see course calendar.

Draft

A required, but ungraded draft, means that a late penalty may be applied to your individual blog if you have insufficient content and features by the deadline.   Blog drafts will simply be spot-checked for completeness and for your ability to have organized and executed the basic design according to principles learned in the class to date.

Early in the term you will learn skills and technology to set up your own WordPress blog.  

 

Your draft will be based on the theme/template chosen by the instructor.  It will have your own customized titles, headings, navigation structures.  You will have practiced many of the features we have talked about in class and labs, such as choosing and adapting a template, putting up images, and tools and gadgets, heading levels, privacy levels, etc. 

 

Your draft's edited content does not need to be complete yet, and it does not require citations yet, but the final version will require them.

Recruit Contributions

Before the draft is due, we will be preparing packages of material to edit and will give this to each Editorial Coordinator. 

Would you like to assist in obtaining any co-authors' or community partners' permission? 

Please use the attached Copyright Waiver document below.

Individual blog

• By the deadline you will have completed the editing, revision and reformatting of borrowed content.  
• 3-4 blog posts with edited/summarized borrowed material averaging 700-1500 words each, with a total of between 2000-4500 words, formatted and organized for online readability according to Redish, within the constraints of Wordpress blogs. 
• The original work should be published as attachments to each item so that a comparison can be made between the original and your edited work.
• The original authors must be prominently named at the top of the blog entry, and the community partner name as well if their identity is revealed and we have permission to reveal their name.  Ethical use of images, privacy, etc. should be taken into account.

After the final blog deadline you must not edit the blog again until it is graded, but you may add comments to your posts like a viewer would.  Your instructor, as a blog editor, will have access to view the record of date-stamped revisions, but she will primarily rely on the revision history's dates.  If you even decide to add a period or a space, it will change the latest editing date and will make your blog look like it was submitted late.  Your next assignment will be submitted as a Google Site to prevent the need to edit this blog while grading is in progress.

Feel free to borrow material from this blog and post it on your Google Site, where it can be further refined while you learn Google Sites technology and recruit people for interviews.