Assignment Overview

This semester we will be creating a collaborative blog using WordPress dedicated to the information architecture-related issues that we discuss and read about in class. The goal of the blog will be to present informed, insightful, curious, authoritative, and in-depth multi-modal posts on these issues, much as former students have done here at Rowan at Let’s Get Visual, Visual! and Texual Arousal, and students at the University of Texas at Austin have done with Viz.

If you are not familiar with blogging, please see “What is a Blog?” by Jill Walker-Rettberg, which is available on the Readings page and see me so we can discuss blogging in some detail.

Assignment Specifics

Starting Week 3 and over the rest of the semester, one or two students per week depending on the week will serve as the blog’s Weekly Blogger.

As the Weekly Blogger, that student will compose two posts:

1. 1 post that discusses, challenges, problematizes a reading from that week in depth
2. 1 post that is informed by 1 of the #iamonday links your classmates have tweeted; the link you discuss cannot be your own and should link to the tweet as well as other links to the article, and so on.

The posts should be posted during the week before or just after the Thursday class meeting for that week. Your posts should have alphabetic and visual texts and should be around 750 words long. They should include links to various related places, including but not limited to the articles you discuss and the tweet from which you learned about it. They should be written with the tone of someone thoroughly engaged in the subject-matter and is learning more about it. All posts should have at least 5 meaningful tags and be located into at least 1 of the following categories that we as a class will come up with.

The goal of these posts is to start discussions with your classmates outside of class about the course topics. As such, try to write them in a way that encourages open discussion. Consider them important essays for the course. They will be assessed in terms of how well they start discussion, how well the ideas from the course texts are incorporated (yes, quote and paraphrase), how well they incorporate multimedia (images, videos, and so on), and how well they show you thinking critically about the issues you discuss.

During the weeks when students are not the Weekly Blogger, they are required to:

• reply to 2 posts in a way that pushes the conversation forward and makes reference to the class readings or things discussed in class
• each reply should be at least 100 words long

All students should keep a log in a Word or GoogleDocs document that contains for each post:

• the title
• the date
• the URL for the post

And for each comment:

• the date
• the post you’re responding to
• the full text of your comment.

I’ll be collecting these at the end of the semester so they can be assessed.

See the course schedule for who the blogger is for each week.

Update: WordPress has a very good Support page, and I encourage you to spend some time with it, especially the sections for Getting Started, Creating Content, Manage My Profile, and Customize My Site. Please check these areas before emailing BW with questions.