Summary of What We've Done So Far.

A student wrote asking, among other things, for a summary of the assignments you've completed so far for the class. In writing my response to her, it occured to me such a summary would be a useful post for everyone. Find it below:

Taking an online course, you'll need regular access to the internet to successfully complete the class. Each week, I'll post assignments which are due the following week, and almost all the assignments will be due on Sunday. You can find all the assignments posted to the class blog: eng111spring2008reynolds.blogspot.com, not on blackboard.

The assignments for the first three weeks were foundational assignments. You read the first three chapters of the text, The McGraw Hill Guide: Writing for College, Writing for Life, and you set up the tech necessary to complete the rest of the class. This last means you set up a google account, and you added gmail, documents, and blogger services to the google account. Documents will allow you to do online, collaborative word processing. Blogger will allow you to keep a blog, that is, a web log, and gmail will allow you me to get in touch with you if need be and is the basis for the other two services. For right now, you should be able to check and send gmail, create a google document and add folks as collaborators, and create a blog and post to it. Since you mentioned expenses as a concern, all these google services are free.

All of your assignment from now on will be posted on the web site:

www.eng111spring2008reynolds.blogspot.com, not on the blackboard site.

If you enter this address in any internet brower, it will bring you to a class blog. You'll want to read it all, and you'll want to set up time to read this blog each week on a regular basis, as--in addition to the reading in the text--you'll find much of the content of the course posted to this blog, and much of the learning you'll do is based on what you read here and in the text.

As to your written assignments, I've had you:

1) Set up a google document called "writing inventory." The writing inventory represents a major aspect of the work for the class. You'll update it every week as your knowledge grows. It is based on the "WPA Learning Outcomes," which you'll find published just before the first chapter of the text. These outcomes describe what you are to learn in the class, and what is taught in most 111 classes worldwide.

Each week, as you do the reading and as you do the assignments, you'll update your responses to each learning outcome. Learning outcomes are the bulleted items in the "WPA Outcomes Statement." For right now your the responses you write should be simple. In them, you state in your own words what you know about each outcome and heading. As your knowledge grows through out the class, you'll return to the learning outcomes and update your response with the new information you've learned from the reading, discussion, and my posts to the class blog. For right now, think of these responses as notes on what you know about each outcome. Since you've created them in google documents and shared them using the collaboration feature, everyone else in the class--including me--will be able to read and learn from what you've wrote.

2) I've also asked you to set up a personal blog for the class using the blogger service of google. You'll use this blog for a number of purposes through out the class. For right now, I've asked you to use what you learned in chapters two and three of the text to write summaries and responses to the reading you did in these chapters. For right now, you can think of these posts as reading responses or specific kinds of notes you take on the reading. You'll be posting such responses each week to your blog.

3) Third and finally, I've set up a "class list" document, where you'll leave your gmail address and blog address. You can use the addresses you'll find in this list to look at the blogs of everyone else in the class, and add them as collaborators to your own documents. Like the writing inventory you'll create for the class.

If you've done all of the above, you're caught up and ready to go for the rest of the class, which will focus more on writing and much less on tech.

Write with specific questions about any one aspect of the assignments. You can contact me at prof.brandon@gmail.com.