cel4145's blog

Change to Course Calendar and Blog Checkout Sheet

I just put up a Blog Checkout Sheet link in the course calendar for this week. Since I won't look at your work before the weekend anyway, I also changed the due date for your Final Portfolio to 5pm on Friday.

Revision Assignments and the Final Portfolio

By now, I'm sure that everyone knows that the revision assignments for the Exploratory drafts are not optional. You should know that you will not be permitted to revise further a sequence of Exploratory drafts for your Portfolio Draft unless you have first properly completed the revision assignment.

Revision Assignment for Exploratory D draft 2

Your revision assignment for Exploratory D draft 2 is a little different than what you've done before because it asks you to change the style of what you have written. With this in mind, when revising your story, you are to do at minimum the following five things:

Class Is Cancelled for Today

I've had to cancel class today. No meeting for Thursday, November 13. Instead, you should respond to your group members' drafts online.

Later today, I'll post the revision assignment for next Tuesday.

Napster, Penn State reportedly in music pact

Given our discussion in class today, I thought some of you might be interested in this news item from c|net:

Napster, the song-swap pioneer that's now an online music store, is expected to announce a deal with Penn State University to offer its newly relaunched music service for free to tens of thousands of students, sources familiar with the matter said Wednesday.

More information on it today from Yahoo! News.

Exploratory D: Short Story

As discussed in class yesterday, are next drafting assignment will be a short story. The only additional requirement for the draft, other than the normal length requirement, is that it is to be written in 3rd person.

Note that the draft is due on Thursday next week as Tuesday is a holiday.

Server Problem for this Website Fixed

Shortly after section B4's class meeting yesterday, I was able to discern that one of the sticks of RAM in the server had gone bad. It's been pulled and the server seems to be running fine now, although a hair slower because I haven't replaced the RAM yet.

So any other access problems you might be having to this site are courtesy of the FSU network

Revision Assignment for Exploratory C

Your revision assignment for Exploratory C draft 1 is to write another essay for draft 2 which argues well the opposite position from the one you took in draft 1.

If you are not really familiar with the opposite view point, you might want to do some quick research and find a few sources.

Correction to the course calendar

Note that a minor correction was made to yesterday's and Thursday's assignment. There is no draft due until Thursday

Your Grades and Posting Comments

I'm about half way through with your grades and will be giving them out on Thursday at the end of class. Meanwhile, I've discovered that many of you need to review the section on the site on Posting Comments.

2nd Half of the Semester: New Groups

Note that for the second half of the semester, you'll be working with new group members. Look to the Groups block at the bottom of the right hand side to find your new group.

If anyone finds that a link doesn't work in that block, please let me know.

Blog Checkout Sheet

The course calendar for Week 8 has been updated. It now provides a link to the Blog Checkout Sheet.

Conferences This Week and The Syllabus Has Been Revised

This coming week on Oct. 1-3, each of you will meet in my office (WMS 213) with me for a 15-20 minute conference. Everyone will sign up for conference meeting times in class on Tuesday. If for some reason you miss class, you are responsible for emailing me Tuesday evening with your availability for those days so that we can arrange a meeting time.

Anyone Like Smileys?

I've turned on smileys for the site. Whenever you choose to create a blog or story, you'll now see a smiley's table over on the right when you are using the input page. Feel free to use them in your posts

Improving Comments & Good Attribution

Now that everyone has become more accustomed to doing the writing assignments for this class, it's time for some of you to work on writing better comments. Consider the following which I see quite often in one form or another: