Learning in Public: Setting up your Invention Blog

To begin, you should create an Invention Blog by following these steps:

1.  Go to blogger.com and sign in with your gmail account.  All Hofstra student email accounts are gmail.

2.  Use this convention to name your Invention Blog:   

   Inventing  FirstName LastNameInitial                  

Note:  You will have much more flexibility choosing the name for your Portfolio Blog.  By naming your Invention Blog according to this standard, we will be able to more easily locate each others' Invention Blogs in Google Reader.

3.  Choose a template for your blog.  You can modify this later, if you like.

4.  Create your first blog post.  Your first prompt begins:  "So here I am at Hofstra and I am blogging.  Writing online makes me feel...."  Keep freewriting for twelve minutes.  Freewriting entails writing in a forward, nonstop approach.  Do not look back.  Do not edit.  Advance only.  Free associate.  Write copiously.

5.  By email, send me the url for your blog.  I will add it to our course Blackboard site.

This Invention Blog is in a public space, unless you elect to limit your readership to our class.  I encourage you to leave it open.  You can invite readers and commenters from other places, as you wish.  You may get interesting readers from some interesting places. I think there is a lot to gain from a far-reaching audience.  Oftentimes, writers write for a limited or protracted audience.  Blogging opens up the possibility of greater access.

What's an Invention Blog?

For this first course in Writing Studies and Composition, each student will be making an Invention Blog.  In this space, you will draft and comment on your pre-writing experiences.  You will collaborate with other readers and writers, reflect on their suggestions, read other material, and reallocate meaning.  This is a generative, messy, creative workspace.  Feel free to attach and link and respond liberally and generously here.  Inclass writing and freewriting activities should be created here also.  Revision practices go here, too. 

Remember that in the university, writing courses must fulfill two seemingly contradictory demands. Student writers must think critically and contribute their own ideas to an existing body of knowledge (or knowing), but they must also work within and strive toward a standard kind of presentation or respectability, one that follows the measured rules of presenting such information.  For this reason, students in this class will make two blogs.  The first space is this generative, process space, the Invention Blog.  The second space is the finished product space, the Portfolio Blog.  We will talk more about that after we have generated the written pieces that will be stored there.