Your question about reading

On Monday's Open Thread, jd posted a comment:

I have a question. I can think of three types of posts that are encouraged by you in our class.

1) Posts on the reading
2) Class discussion posts
3) Posts with further research on the topic but not on the reading

What should our balance of these be? Our class participation grade is partly based on blogs about class discussion. Do these count even if the discussion wasn't about the reading? You encouraged a student in class tonight to blog on the program he uses to hear text being read, does this count?

Should we do 4 [blogs] a week on the reading and any class discussion or research beyond are extra credit? Should we do a majority of posts on the reading but a few on the other two? Please clarify. Thanks!

These are all good questions. You can do as many blogs as you like. As long as you meet the basic requirement of four blogs per week that respond to the reading, you can get extra credit for any additional blogs as long as they are directly related to topics discussed in the readings OR the class. Note that the requirement for being on-topic gets more lenient after you have met your basic requirement.

Look — it's a matter of common sense. How can I justify giving you an "A" in the class if I can't be sure you ever did the reading? I cannot give you credit for life experience.

When you become campaign professionals, you must be able to consider the campaign from the point of view of the voter. You must ask yourselves, what can we do inspire the voter to support this campaign? And how can we make it easy for them to do so?

Take this approach with me, your professor. I am the voter you must persuade. You are already halfway there. I am very much inspired by your work so far. If you give me direct evidence that you have done the course reading and thought about it, you make it easy for me to give you my full support.

It's not rocket science. If there are no exams, there must be some system of establishing that you didn't sail through the course without ever cracking a book. I want to give you my vote. Make your blogs user-friendly for someone who must assign grades for academic credit (that's me).

Keep in mind that it is EASY to refer to the readings if you have actually done them. For instance, you mentioned this example in your question: "You encouraged a student in class tonight to blog on the program he uses to hear text being read, does this count?" Yes, it would count if he framed his comments, for example, in the context of class readings on website usability. He could say:

I noticed in our class readings on website usability (Neilsen, Flanders, and Gahran), none of them even mention the importance of creating standards compliant websites that are able to reach more people — including the roughly one-fifth of Americans who have some form of disability. This is a serious oversight, in my opinion.

According to the National Organization on Disability, this represents "an untapped market worth over $220 billion in collective spending power."

While not all disabilities interfere with a person's ability to use the Internet, many do — vision and hearing are the most common forms of disability. What campaign can afford to disregard even 10 or 15 percent of potential voters?

Instead of posting 100 photographs of himself on his website, why doesn't Neilsen mention accessibility issues in his Top 10 Mistakes or his Usability 101?

Although he didn't mention accessibility in the articles we read for class, he did report in another article that when you design websites to be accessible for the disabled, non-disabled users also find it easier to use.

Notice that this post, although it discusses a topic that was not even mentioned in the class readings, shows that the author is thoroughly familiar with the required readings. Bingo! I can vote for that!

If anyone still has any questions about this, send me an email right away. I want your final grades to be the high grades you have earned so far.