Okay so this week I’m away attending OpenEd 2016 but class is still going to go on as we harness digital tools to work together online this next week.

We are going to put two prompts into this week and generate two blog posts this week. The first centers around participation.

Reflection on Rheingold Chapters

We have just finished reading two important chapters from Rheingold on participation and social media. This first prompt is simply a reflection on those chapters. What was learned while reading them and what questions still remain? How do the chapters relate to one another and to the rest of the book. We are currently in the participation portion of the course. What does it mean to participate publically on the internet? What does it mean to participate privately? What responsibilities do we have to ourselves and to each other when participating online? What about these other terms like networking and collaboration, how do they compare to “participation”?

Participation Prompt

The point of this prompt is to write a post that puts you in a position of participating in a conversation in public. This is not just a reflection on your experience but engaging with someone else’s experience or thinking on a topic. You are to find a blog post (you can use your classmates’ post from previous weeks, perhaps some of the posts that were tweeted on the #fyschat chat stream, or other posts that you find interesting) on the web that you have something to say about and respond in a blog post. You should of course make it clear that you are responding to this post by hyperlinking to it and letting the author know that you have responded. This can be tricky. Depending on the post you may have to grapple with questions about how much you can understand about another person’s experience or where should you be asking questions rather than making statements. If you are struggling to find a post from a blogger that you would like to respond to I will allow you to respond to a current event in the news – again you will need to link to the article that you are responding to and you should be sensitive to how others may view this event and be fair to opposing views.

There are two due dates for these prompts but you can choose which you want to do first and which you want to do second. The dates are Nov. 2nd and Nov 5th.

Image Credit CC BY-ND 2.0 Intersect by Bill Ohl