Presessional Blog Project

A week has passed since we invited presessional students to set up their own blogs.  The aim is to use these blogs as a starting point for online self-study, and we hope that it will encourage a useful process of extended reading and frequent writing.  In seven days, it is clear that some students have spent more time developing their blogs than others, but we can at least see that MOST students have completed their homework (finding a text to read and posting a summary of it online). 


Tamami was the first to post a summary, and her writing is very good (click here if you'd like to read it).  Note that she starts with a sentence to show what she read and she provides a link so that we can read it if we want to.  Turki also begins his summary well, by referring clearly to the writer and title of the text that he read.  Ahmad, Ghalib, and Mohammad all chose very interesting texts to read, but they need to adapt their writing to make it clear that their posts are summaries.


Sandra and I are leaving comments on blogs to encourage students to make improvements to their writing.  It's easy to edit anything you post on your blog, so you can go back and change or rewrite sections that you'd like to improve.  Let me know if you need any help doing this.  If you do make changes, you'll see the benefits as your writing improves.  Sultan has been working hard to make improvements to his summary, and already we can see progress with his writing.


We're not just interested in the way that you improve one summary, however.  Personally, I'm keen on seeing you develop the PROCESS of writing, and my comments reflect this.  Don't stop at one summary.  Find something else to read, and then produce a new post to summarise the main point of what you read, where you found it, and what you find interesting or surprising about it.  Keep your posts short, but concentrate on the quality of what you have written.  Last week, some of you wrote your first posts very quickly, but didn't pay any attention to spelling, punctuation, or small mistakes.  Miri and Turki, however, devoted time and energy to making their writing as clear as possible.  Look at their posts from last week, and you'll see how effective writing can be when the writer has taken care over it.


It's not compulsory, but there are things that you can do to make your blogs attractive and lively.  It didn't take Great long to find out how to embed videos from Youtube in his Blog.  You can add videos to your own blogs and ask readers to comment on them (I'm sure you can find a better song that Great did though!)  Saqer deserves an award for the number of links that he's added to his sidebar, although they might look even better if they were all in one place.


Finally, I'd like to nominate Arisa's blog as my "blog of the week".  I'm very impressed that she has managed to include a pun in her blog's name, and she's done a good job with both the content and design of her online space.  The picture above is a screencap of Arisa's blog.  Click on it to see the page itself.


I hope that you'll continue to develop and post to your blogs.  The more that you read and write, the better your reading and writing will become.  Any reading and writing that you do now is going to help you in the future...happy blogging!