T Blog

In the noon section of the class on Wednesday, the agenda was:

1. Attendance
2. Introductions (Tell us your name and what was something fun you did on the computer recently, or something not fun)
3. Announced HW 5 deadline extended–since it requires you to provide links to your classmates’ blogs but so many students need to create new blogs, we’ll wait until more of them have been created.
4. Returned HW 1. Explanation of anonymity, demonstration of how to create a new blog and import your old posts. Students who are creating new blogs asked (preferably) to email Tracy the new address as soon as possible, or at the very least bring a printout to the next class.
5. Each student shared which of Burstein’s 12 key ideas they wrote about in HW 2 and how they related it to themselves. Students were reminded to bring printouts of their blog posts to class.
6. Break
7. Broke into small groups to discuss the reading, David Kline’s “Toward a More Participatory Democracy.” Students were asked to point out what they found most interesting about the reading and to pick the best quote from the reading.
8. Watch YouTube video of The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart on Crossfire. This appearance was referred to in the reading, and includes an argument for real debate in journalism. As Kline puts it, “newspapers and television in practice now routinely define objectivity and balance to mean nothing more than allowing two partisan spokespeople from opposing ends of the political spectrum to scream at each other for two minutes or two paragraphs–as if that has anything to do with getting at the truth” (Kline 9). (Watch the Crossfire clip here.)

Check your calendar to see what assignments are due Monday.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 4:13 pm and is filed under Home, What We Did in Class on ___. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.