Guide #1: Writing your blog posts

Account Setup

Before you can begin writing your blog posts for the class, you obviously need to have a blog set up. While there are several blogging services available, it's recommended that everyone uses the Blogger service for consistency. If you are new to using Blogger, then follow the steps below to set up your own blog on Blogger.
  1. Go to the Blogger site and log in with your Google account credentials. If you don't have a Google account, you have bigger problems to deal with.
  2. On the home page, locate and click on the link labeled Create a New Blog.
  3. Follow and complete the instructions to create your blog specifically for use in this course.
  4. Locate the Profile widget on your blog and post your personal details. At the minimum, include your real name so that students know whom are the owners of their respective blogs.
Note: If you can't find the Profile widget, first click on the Design tab, then click on the Page Elements sub-tab, and finally select the Profile widget.


Post Format

In order for the TA to provide speedier assessment of your blog posts and for the other students in the class to better understand the content of your blog posts, your posts should adhere to the following format below. A graphical representation of what and where to place your sections and the content details regarding what you should put in each section are given below.


Title
Each reading given to the class is enumerated, and so the title of your blog post for a particular assigned reading should reflect that enumeration. Prepend titles of conference papers with Paper Reading #, and books with Book Reading #.  For example, if your third assigned conference paper reading is titled:
  • "LADDER, A Sketching Language for User Interface Developers"
then the title for your blog post should read:
  • Paper Reading #3: LADDER, a Sketching Language for User Interface Developers


Comments
Blogger allows you to comment on other people's blogs, and for your class blog you must write comments on two other classmates' blog posts for that same assigned reading. The purpose of this comments section is to list the names of the people you wrote comments for on their corresponding blog post, and then provide a link to their blog post to confirm that you wrote comments for their blog post. For example, if you wrote a blog post for Reading #3 and also comments for that assigned reading for your classmates Jack Johnson and John Jackson, then your comments section will list those classmates and link to their corresponding blog posts.

Regarding the content of your comments, they should consist of at least 2-3 sentences that give your opinions and insight of your classmate's discussion section. Try not to be dumb by leaving flaky comments, or else your blog post will not be considered complete.


Reference Information
The following is required in the reference section.
  • Title of paper, book, or presentation
  • Names of author
  • Presentation venue
    • Paper: which conference; when and where
    • Book: who were the book editors; when and where
    • Presentation: where and when was the presentation given

Summary
The criteria for what you should put in the summary section of your blog post is listed below.
  1. Brevity: Writing should be as short as possible, Length should be appropriate: between a paragraph and a page.
  2. Clarity: Writing should be clear and understandable to someone who hasn’t read the paper.
  3. Completeness, pt. 1: Writing should include main/significant/important concepts from paper.
  4. Completeness, pt. 2: Writing should function as a reference: If you later need to access information .from the paper, it should be in the summary.
  5. Completeness, pt. 3: Writing should include information necessary to implement ideas.
In addition, be sure that your summary posses the following characteristics:
  • Effort is shown.
  • Does not include opinionated information.
  • Is useful and follows the above five requirements.

Discussion
The criteria for what you should put in the discussion section of your blog post is listed below:
  1. Why is this paper interesting or significant?
  2. What are the faults of this work?
  3. What is the possible future work extending from this work (i.e., if you had implemented this work, what would be your next steps – either continuing or fixing this work, taking some of these ideas and applying them to others’/your work, or starting new work from some of these ideas)?

Overall
Lastly, be sure that your blog adheres to the following:
  • Contains a useful picture.
  • Insightful and interesting discussion (if you have to ask, it's probably not insightful or interesting).

Grading Criteria

Please refer to the section titled Blog Grade: 20% in the Grading Policy page for exact details on how your blogs will be graded.