Each of you will set up and maintain your own personal weblog using the Blogger service. Blogs are an exciting format for self-expression and community building and they serve as an example of a technology that is impacting society in ways that no one would have predicted.

Beyond the requirements for this course, you are also free (and encouraged) to use your blog in whatever way you want, though you should keep in mind that it will be read by faculty and other students in this class (and potentially by anyone in the world with a net connection). You are encouraged to think about your blog as something that you will continue to use after this course is over. Feel free to write about interesting (or mundane) things that you're doing that are unrelated to the course, and to express your likes and dislikes about TV, movies, music, food, relationships, politics... whatever moves you.

For grading purposes, some of your blog entries should reflect on the themes of this course:

• problem-solving (in everyday life, other courses)
• learning (how you learn personally, observations on how learning occurs in society)
• technology (your reactions to new technologies, your guesses about the future)
• society (specifically the societal implications of changes in learning and technology)

You will also be given some prompts from course content to reflect on in your blog. You may do this in your own personal blog, or you may choose a partner with which to share a second "dialectic" blog specifically to generate some discussion around the prompts.

Remember that we also have a shared class blog which you may also participate in (and your participation there will count toward your overall blogging grade). You are also encouraged to visit the blogs of your classmates and respond via comments.

By May 8, you will look back over your postings and nominate (by providing the URLs) five postings you made over the course of the semester that best represent your thoughtful reflections on these issues. You should also point to an additional five postings in which you have responded to postings made by others in the class. You will receive a grade based on this rubric.

This assignment counts for 15% of your course grade.