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.

Previously, I emailed to everyone a list of Bloglines addresses to subscribe to. As a reminder for how this works, here are some guidelines for subscribing and reading.

To subscribe:

1. Click on "Add" under "My Feeds" (which is to the left of "My Blog" and "Clippings")
2. After the right windown changes, put your classmate's address (one at a time) in the box that says "Blog or Feed URL" and click on "Subscribe".
3. Another window comes up. Click on "Subscribe" at the bottom. (You can also click on the "Private" button next to "Access."

You should now be able to see the subscription in the left window. To read your subscriptions, do the following:

1. Click on either "Updated Feeds" or "Show All." ("Updated Feeds" have only those subscriptions who have posts that you haven't read yet.)
2. Click on any of the "feeds" and in the right window, you can see what they have posted.
3. If you see nothing, look to the right of the sentence that says, "Display items within the last," and you'll see a button saying "All items." (You can click on this button to change it to just items in the last month, week, etc.) Click on the button to the right, saying "Display."

You should now be able to read what your classmate (or someone else) has posted.

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.

Here's one more example of summarizing an article in a newspaper:

Tara Bahrampour and Lori Aratani's article "Teens' Bold Blogs Alarm Area Schools" (Washington Post) write about schools "warning students [and parents] that their online activities may affect not only their safety, but also their academic and professional lives" and also even taking disciplinary action against students, including suspension and expulsion. The author quotes teenagers and parents about the youngsters' writing on the Internet.

As the article noted, teenagers have always kept diaries in which they wrote their inner thoughts, including derogatory and discrminatory comments. But now these thoughts are in the open for millions of people to read. Not too long ago, schools had the authority of parents, but no longer today. Although schools can control use of school-owed computers and resources, computers at home are private property. How schools will tackle comments by students that target others at the school is still uncertain. This topic is a new arena in which old theories of psychology and sociological can be tested.

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.