WA01 - Drafting a Reflective Blog Post

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 be writing reflective blog posts related to our class discussions on technical and 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.

You will be completing one blog post in the fall semester and several in the spring semester. In the fall semester we will break the process of writing and revising the post into three separate assignments. In this assignment (WA01), you will write a full, polished draft of your post. In the second assignment (WA02), you will be giving feedback to your peers on their posts and receiving receive feedback from them on yours. Ultimately in the third assignment (WA03), you will revise your post based on that feedback and post it on a public-facing blog.

Assignment

The following links to later sections of this document provide the details of this assignment:

1. Select a topic about which to write.
2. Familiarize yourself with the expected style of writing that is expected.
3. Write your blog post.
4. Submit the Assignment.

Additional Details

Selecting a Topic

You are given wide latitude to choose a topic for your blog post and you are encouraged to use it as an opportunity to learn more about something that is of interest to you. However, the topic you select must:

• have a clear connection to one (or more) of the readings / discussions that we have had in class.
• allow you to discuss both technical content and connect it to at least one social, legal and/or ethical issue associated with the topic.
• provide the opportunity for you to expand on or delve more deeply into the topic by incorporating information from sources in addition to those we used in class.

Expected Writing Style

The expected writing style for your blog post is exemplified by the blog posts in the Science + Tech section of The Conversation. You should familiarize yourself with the expected style of writing by reading a few of these posts and then try to emulate their style in your writing.

Blog Posts on Blog Posts

You can also go meta and read some blog posts about writing blog posts. Here are a few that are pretty good:

• Tips on How to Write Your First Successful Technical Blog by Hannah Prate contains some good advice.
• The Ultimate Guide to Writing Technical Blog Posts by Rizèl Scarlett is much more detailed. She provides a number of “Outlines” for blogs with different purposes and gives some advice on using AIs such as ChatGPT. The “Outline for thought leadership/opinion blog posts” is probably most appropriate for this assignment.

If those don’t work for you there is no shortage of other advice, just google “How to write a blog post” or “How to write a technical blog post” and find something that resonates with you and matches the goals of this assignment.

Using AI for Revision

Recall that the AI Use policy in the course Syllabus allows you to use AI to revise writing you have already completed as long as you retain a copy of your original work. The following sites have some useful suggestions on how to use AI for revision that are compatible with the course policy:

• How AI can help proofread and edit your essays
• Five Ways AI Can Help You Edit Your Work

Writing the Blog Post

Well written blog posts that receive high scores will:

• have a clear connection to one or more of the readings and discussions from the course.
• have an engaging, descriptive and accurate title.
• incorporate a discussion of both technical information and its relationship to at least one social, legal and/or ethical issue.
  • The chapters that we have been reading from Ko’s SWE text are good examples of how to combine these elements.
• be accessible, interesting and engaging to a generally tech literate audience.
  • Imagining that your writing will be read by your friends, classmates, similar students at other institutions, potential employers, classmates and other professors may be helpful.
  • Use the topic to motivate your post in a way that is independent of this course. The reader should not know from reading the post that is was written as a course assignment.
• demonstrate thoughtfulness and insight by providing a well organized, original synthesis of ideas built from multiple sources.
  • Your post must do more than summarize the content of the sources.
• include numerous specific details drawn from multiple sources including some not assigned for this course.
  • These sources must be reputable and may include news articles, opinion pieces, other blogs, videos, formal academic sources, etc. They may include sources assigned in other courses.
  • When details are drawn from a source, a contextual link should be included within the text. See the posts in the Science + Tech section of The Conversation for examples.
• be of an appropriate length. You should target 800-1200 words (1.5-2.5 single spaced pages).
  • There will be some leeway for slightly longer posts if the writing is concise and compelling.
• be grammatically correct.
• include embedded multimedia (e.g. images, audio, video, etc.) only as it is directly related to the topic and enhances the reader’s experience.
  • Any embedded content must be used in a way that is compliant with its copyright and/or license.
• be compliant with the AI Use policy in the Syllabus.

In addition, you should consider explicitly licensing your content using a Creative Commons License so that others know how they may and may not use your work.

Submitting the Assignment

Submit your assignment as follows:

1. Ensure that your Dickinson WiD Repository on GitHub is well organized.
   • There should be one folder for each course (e.g. COMP132, COMP256, etc…)
   • All content should be stored in the folder for the appropriate course.
2. Create a COMP491 folder in your Dickinson WiD Repository.
3. If you used an AI to help with editing and revision of your blog post, you must upload a PDF of the original (pre-AI revision) version to your Dickinson WiD Repository. Name this file using a filename that ends with -preAIHelp.pdf.
4. Ensure that your draft blog post does not contain your name. This is important for the peer review process in (WA02).
5. Create a PDF of your draft blog post with a filename that ends with -draft.pdf.
6. Place the PDF that you created in your new COMP491 folder.

Acknowledgements

This assignment builds from and adapts ideas and content from the following activities created by others:

• A similar assignment from fall 2023 written by Prof. John MacCormick

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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