On our second day, we finished the introduction to the online tools we'll be using this semester: blogger and netvibes. The goal of blogger is to write a lot on a topic we're interested in and the role of netvibes will be to make it easy to read our classmates' writings and also other bloggers and people who are interested in the same topics as we are. Reading is essential for building up our knowledge on a topic, and writing is important for clarifying our ideas concerning that topic. So Blogger and Netvibes complement one another in reaching our goals.

On finding other blogs to read concerning your interests, use "blog search" at google. You can also search blogs at technorati.com. Usually, blogs will have certain icons (usually orange-colored) to click on to find their subscription feeds like these:

If you don't see those icons, then just put the address into Netvibes anyway and see if it can find the feed.

On our first day of class, we got acquainted with the course goals and a little with the technological tools we'll be using this semester, one of which is a blog.

To learn to write well takes a lot of practice writing. So, one purpose of the blog is to let you write a lot on a topic you're interested in. Writing well also requires a lot of reading. While writing on the topic you like, you'll need to do some research, find out others who are writing on your topic, read their blogs, respond to their writings, and learn more about the topic.

Because we will subscribe to each other's blogs, we'll learn more about writing because we'll see what others do when they write, and so on.

Of course, we'll still write academic essays, four of them. Academic essays will focus more on academic writing, while blog writing will help you make your writing skills more automatic, letting you think more about your ideas and your organization when writing the academic essays. Each type of writing will re-inforce the other type, and so you should see your writing improve a lot over the semester.