Weekly Assignment for a First-Year Seminar (Fetrow, UR)

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This assignment, written by Dr. Jacque Fetrow and implemented in her first-year seminar, “Women in Science,” describes a weekly(-ish) series of low-point, low-risk blog assignments. These assignments were collected into one location using the hub-and-spoke course model, and assessed using a rubric made available to students well in advance.

Blog Guidelines

What is the blog? You will write short blogs based on course readings, on articles you find in the public media and on class readings. You will be required to write your own blog posts, as well as respond to posts of their classmates. In these blogs, you are the author. Your audience is your classmates. These blogs are low-points, low-risk assignments.

What is the purpose of these blogs? The purpose of these blogs is to stimulate your thinking about issues, questions and problems raised in the reading and to help you begin to develop your ideas for the essays. By writing blogs, you will:

  • Learn to respond to papers as you read them—allowing you to think and share your ideas with others in the class, so that our class discussions will be more fulsome;
  • Learn to develop a perspective and support it with data or evidence;
  • Develop ideas that you will expand more fully in the comparative essays.

What are you required to do for blogging and responding?

  • Read the assigned reading (if you wish to write on an outside reading, read that, as well);
  • Your blog will be about 500 words in which you engage your classmates in thinking about the course material by doing one (just one) of the following:
    • Describe a question that the reading or article makes you ask: describe possible answers to your question and how those might be answered, based on the data and evidence (from the days reading or other articles);
    • Describe how the article made you re-think one of your ideas: evaluate the evidence on which you based your previous thinking and the data or evidence that made you re-think your ideas;
  • Within 48 hours of the due time, read your classmates blogs and respond to 2-3 of them.

Published by Ryan B.