Participation Porfolio 1

2) Organize the material you have posted on your blog to support your statement about what you learned. 

When including a blog entry, write some significant words, such as the title of the entry or the reason you are including it in your blog, and turn those significant words into a link. (Avoid using neutral words like "click here" or "Chapter 2 homework" for the links... make your words communicate the insight contained in your blog entry: "Emily Dickinson is a sick cookie" or maybe you could use a few words from the text you discuss as your link: "Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!")

Sort and organize your entries into the following broad categories:

• Coverage and Timeliness
  
• Did you blog something for each assigned text, with a link back to the course website? (Example: Maddie G.'s "Bittersweet Victory")
• Did you write some of your entries early, or at least on time? (Pretty much every entry you wrote that doesn't belong in some other category could go here, if it was written on time.)
• Depth (Did you occasionally blog at greater length?)
• Discussion (Did you spark and contribute to conversations that took place on your own blog?)
• Interaction (Here are some suggestions... if you don't have any entries that meet these categories, you could try to demonstrate interaction in some other way.)
• On your own blog, did you occasionally mention -- and link to -- valuable things that your peers wrote on their blogs?
  
• Do you include links from your blog entry to the course web page?
  
• Have you done outside research, and posted links to what you found elsewhere on the internet?
  
• Would your blog entries make sense to a stranger who happened across your blog?
  Some ways you can help your blog make sense to an outside reader:
  
• Do your entries say what book you are quoting from?
• Would the reader know that your posting is part of a classroom discussion?
• Would the reader be able to follow a link from your entry to a place where other bloggers are discussing the same text?
• Xenoblogging (Think of this as good cizenship. Xeno means "foreigner" or "visitor."  So xenoblogging is the blogging that you do away from your own blog -- in the comments you post on a peer's weblogs, or the course website.)
  Note: what follows is a menu of helpful suggestions, not a to-do checklist.  If you have some commenting to do, keep these possibilities in mind.
  
• The comment primo (Be the first to post a comment on a peer's blog entry, and take credit for getting a conversation started and keeping it gong.)
• The comment grande (Maybe your peer wrote, "I wonder what Hawthorne's family life was like," and maybe you looked it up and posted the answer in a long, informative comment on your peer's blog.)
• The riposte gracious (Respectfully disagree with something a classmate has said, by providing and explaining a quotation that seems to support a different interpretation.)
  
• The revision elegant (Give credit to someone for raising a point that led you to rephrase your statement or rethink your position.)
• The reversal elegant (A stronger version of the "revision elegant" -- give credit to someone for bringing up a point that led you to change your mind.)

• Wildcard (Did you use your blog to publish anything important to you, something that is related to the course material, but not something that was specifically assigned by any professor?)
  
  • You could write an alternate ending to a story we read.
  • You could write your own parody or tribute; you could write about how the Griffin Technology Advantage program has affected your learning.
  • You could write about almost anything at all, so long as you can, in your portfolio, connect it to the material we are learning in class

3) Submit your portfolio by posting a link to it here, on this page. ("This is my portfolio" is far less engaging than "I learned about X and Y, but I'm still struggling with Z."  The words you post along with your link are your first chance to get your reader thinking about your main point, even before he or she clicks your link.)

4) Blogging Portfolio Rubric

• F:   No blog portfolio submitted on this page; or portfolio is a list of unsorted links, without being organized to defend a claim about what you learned.
• D:  Good-faith effort to identify and reflect on your online contributions, though those contributions may have significant gaps, may show signs of being rushed, and may not be present in your portfolio in the form of working links; a stranger who came across your portfolio entry might be confused as to what's going on.
  
• C:  Useful and informative summary of what you have learned from your online discussions so far, with working links that the reader can follow in order to find evidence; a stranger would have some idea of the purpose of your blog portfolio.
  
• B:  Thoughtful and well-organized explanation of how your online discussions have contributed to your learning so far, well-supported by links to relevant blog entries; a stranger who comes across your blog would be informed and perhaps even enlightened, getting some sense of how all this blogging contributes to your understanding of the bigger issues we have been studying.  

The Bs would be even more useful and informative than the C submissions, an also include  more informative linked text (that is, instead of the merely functional "Click here for my homework" or "Read my opinion of Emily Dickinson," a B would be more likely to say "I quoted from 'The Chariot' to argue that Emily Dickinson is a sick cookie.")

• A:  Portfolio cover page is not merely a collection of related links, but a persuasive and insightful exploration of the relationship between your online work and other modes of learning (papers, class discussion, the readings themselves), carefully supported by relevant links (both to your own blog entries, and those of your peers, the course website, and -- where relevant -- other sources on the internet). 

The A submission contains all the strengths of the B submissions, including informative linked text and a brief but helpful explanation of the blog portfolio assignment, for the benefit of random visitors.

The higher As would include links to blog entries that show more depth, more interaction, more links, and overall more evidence of engagement and insight than the Bs or the lower As.