A03 - Blog / Reflective Writing
An important part of learning about and understanding issues is to reflect upon them after reading and discussion. This gives you a chance to process the information, organize your thoughts, incorporate insights from others. To gain practice with this, you will write reflective blog posts related to our class discussions on social/legal/ethical issues in computing. You are given wide latitude in these posts to reflect/expand on some aspect of one of the reading/discussion topics that was of interest to you. Doing so on a public-facing blog encourages careful thought, precise writing and can provide evidence of your knowledge and abilities to prospective employers and/or graduate programs.
Assignment
Select a topic related to one of the class discussions that we have had and write a 500-700 word post on that topic to the blog that you created for this course. Your post should draw on the readings, including your extra source(s), and our class discussions, but it is not intended to be a summary of them. It should have a thesis. For example, you might:
- expand on a point you found interesting in one of the readings.
- pick up on a thread from the discussion that you want to further develop.
- take a position on a claim made in the one of the readings.
- make an insightful connection between the readings.
- connect something in a reading to something else that you know or have learned elsewhere.
- make a counter point to something from the readings.
You are encouraged to Look at this assignment as an opportunity to learn more about something that is of interest to you and to organize your thoughts about it. You should feel free to read a little more on the specific topic that you have chosen to help inform your thesis.
The best blog posts will:
- be approximately 500-700 words.
- have a strong thesis and focus on it throughout.
- be closely related to one of the reading/discussion topics.
- not be a summary of the readings/discussion
- be written such that it would be of interest to an audience beyond our course.
- be clear and grammatically correct.
- use contextualized links to external sources within the text (i.e. not a sources section).
- include multimedia (images, audio, video, etc.) only as appropriate to enhance the content of the post.
- use any external content in a way that is allowed by its license.
Resources
If you find writing blog posts challenging, some good advice on writing effective blog entries can be found at:
- Effective Academic Blogging from the Writer’s Web at the University of Richmond Writing Center.
- Blogs from The Writing Center at UNC-Chapel Hill.
There is no shortage of other advice, just google “How to write a blog” and find something that resonates with you and matches the goals of this assignment.
Grading
Blog posts will be assessed using the rubric below.
Click rubric to enlarge image.
Acknowledgements
This assignment builds from and adapts ideas and content from the following activities created by others:
- Some language in the rubric has been adapted from http://foss2serve.org/index.php/FOSS_Course_Syllabus#2._Methods_of_Assessment.
All textual materials used in this course are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
All executable code used in this course is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3 or later