Categories
- Please tag each post with at least one category.
- Feel free to add categories as necessary. But please try not to add superfluous categories.
Conduct
- Play nice.
- I will give 3 warnings for incivility. After the third warning, the offending person will be banned from the blog. They will thereafter receive zeros on all remaining blog grades.
- Uncivil posts/comments will receive no credit. They may be deleted at my discretion.
- All posts and comments should be treated as the author's intellectual property. Thus unauthorized copying or reproduction outside of the context of course materials constitutes theft of intellectual property.
- I will not be constantly monitoring the blog. Thus if a problem arises, please alert me via email (regardless of whether you are involved).
- Keep in mind that when I grade the blog, I see all comments and posts, including those that have been deleted.
Content
All posts/comments should be related to the topics of the course. Material related to topics that we’ve finished discussing or topics that we haven’t gotten to yet is fine.
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All posts/comments must be within the limits of good taste and in accordance with all relevant anti-discrimination policies.
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Topics can be reflections or comments on material we’ve covered in class or in the readings. They can also be snippets of articles or other materials found on the web. However, your original commentary/thoughts/contributions are the most valuable.
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Clips from other websites should be edited for relevance and (usually) put within some discussion.
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Everything must be cited in the proper ways to avoid plagiarism or copyright infringement or other offenses. You are just as liable for any offenses on the blog as you are for any other assignment. I will report any and all suspected offenses to the Dean of Student Affairs.
Grades
- At 5.00 PM on the scheduled due dates, I will assign each student a grade for their blogging in that period. Your blogging grade at the end of the semester will be largely determined by these grades.
- Comments are counted for date they are posted, not the original date of the post. Thus comments on past threads are acceptable (though less desirable since they aren’t likely to contribute to discussion).
- Posts/comments which are time-stamped during class meeting hours receive no credit.
- One contribution is either one substantive post or one substantive comment.
- At the end of each grading period, I will read all of the posts and comments.
- Each post or comment which counts as a contribution will receive one point.
- Posts or comments which do not count as a contribution will receive zero points.
- I will assign grades by totaling the contributions and fitting them to a normal statistical distribution. This has two caveats:
- If a student has at least four contributions in that grading period, they will receive at least a C.
- The total number of contributions is not the sole determinate of a grading period's grade. For example, a series of particularly high quality contributions can raise a grade.
- Grades will be posted on WebCT. If the grade in my records and the grade on WebCT conflict, the grade in my records will trump the grade on WebCT.