As there seems to be some confusion on the blog, Citation, and annotated bibliography, I'll try to clear it up here.

Citation is like a container with 3X5 cards. You keep everything there. You can put notes there: notes on your readings, notes on class information, notes on articles and books you read, notes on anything related to the class. You're required to make at least 3 entries a week in Citation.

The blog is our way of sharing with one another what we are doing and reading. In this way, we can learn from one another. Every week, you must make at least one post to your blog. Sometimes, I'll ask you to make a specific post on your blog. That counts for the one that is required. Where does the information for your blog post come from? Citation. Remember that you are putting everything into Citation. So, once a week, you look at your notes in Citation for that week, choose one of those notes, and post it to your blog.

The Annotated Bibliography is a list of sources, each source with an abstract or summary of the source. You will be putting the information for your sources into Citation. So, when Annotated Bibliography assignments are due, you simply Generate Bibliography from Citation (in MS Word) and email it to me. If you want, you could take one of those sources in the Annotated Bibliography and post it to your blog for the weekly posting.

Citation will be used as a combination note-taking tool and also research tool in which you put all your sources (all the information on them including abstract, quotations, and comments). You should make 3 or more entries in a week in Citation.

For Bloglines, you will take your favorite entry in Citation (perhaps it will be the most useful entry to you that week or for some other reason) and post it to Bloglines. This way, other students can see what you are doing and thinking in your writing and in your research.

So, each week, you should have 3 entries in Citation, and one of those should be posted to Bloglines each week.

In Citation, when you summarize an article in the abstract or comment on it in a note, all the information about the author and source is already there, it's not necessary to put that information into your abstract or comments. When posting a summary online, however, you will need to include that information, and if the information was found online (not including those in the library's database), then there should be a link to it. Here's an example for an article about text-messaging in the NY Times.

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Almost everyone under the age of 20 text-message. Why? According to Charles McGrath in his article "The Pleasures of the Text" (The New York Times), text-messaging is

"a kind of avoidance mechanism that preserves the feeling of communication - the immediacy - without, for the most part, the burden of actual intimacy or substance."

Besides writing about the why of text-messaging, McGrath's article covers the nature of text-messaging, giving examples of how users achieve efficiency and style, and writes about its greater use outside of the U.S.

McGrath's main claim about avoiding intimacy and substance is interesting. Is this a byproduct or a subconscious desire? Is it even an accurate description? I can imagine that when one is constantly text-messaging, not much is new, and so not much is of substance. Actually, when I ask my 6-year-old son what he did in school today, he almost always says, "I don't know." Is he avoiding intimacy? Certainly not when he climbs all over me, trying to get my attention. Similary, when someone asks me what is new, I generally respond, "Not much." Rather than an avoidance of intimacy, I imagine it's simply the reality of much being the same. Yet people ask the same questions every day as a matter of keeping social contact. It's not clear why text-messaging should be considered different from normal conversations.

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Note that in this example, the first part is summary without any of my opinion about the article. The second part is my thoughts, my opinion, my response to the article.

In using Citation to create a bibliography, it's important that you first open MS Word and through MS Word open Citation. Here are the specific details:

1. Open MS Word (or Wordperfect).
2. On the menubar under "Tools", click on Citation 9 to open it.
3. Open the datafile (under File) that you wish to use.
4. In Citation, under Generate, click on Bibliography from Datafile.
5. Put check marks in Alphabetize and Include Abstracts.
6. Find the style you want. (If you don't know, just take the first one.)
7. Click on OK.

This will put the bibliography into your MS Word document, which you can then print out either at home or at school, or email as an attachment.

Today in both of my classes, we continued to get our blogs and RSS feeds ready on Bloglines. It seems that when we set up our blogs, we have to give it a title. Otherwise, we continue to get a message to set up our "clip blog." I've inputted all of the blog addresses so far and can read what the students are writing.

Citation is our bibliography and note-taking application. It's pretty easy to input the information. Plus there's a "tutor" to follow and remind us how to do it. Perhaps the difficult part will be to download and install the program. It's a large program and takes some time to download. The second difficult part will be to print out the bibliography and notes. We need access to a computer that has the program, so it has to be done either on our own computer or on one of the computers in CAS 304 or 306. Probably these will have some open times, especially Monday and Wednesday during college hour (3:30-5:00 pm). But there may be other times, too. One good thing about Citation is that I can keep all of my notes in it and search for them when I need to re-read them.

This is the last day that we take the entire class for these electronic tools. If we have questions, we need to ask our classmates or the teacher (either by email or in his office). Next week, we start reading our textbooks and begin our path to better writing.