See our Course Calendar for assignments & due dates. Note that assignments are due prior to our class meeting in any given week.
Element Overview: Your Integrative Blog will allow you draw connections among the various academic and professional pursuits in which you are engaged, developing insights and perspectives that would not be available from a single field or disciplinary point of view. The goal of this Course Element is to help you be more reflective, mindful, innovative, and holistic in your approach to thinking, learning, and problem solving.
Element Time Frame: Weeks 1 – 15
Writing Tasks – Integrative Blog: You will set up an account in CI Keys to create your own webspace for this class. You will use the “Posts” feature to create a new post every other week. Each post should be about 500 words in length, include a creative title that captures the overall theme/dominant impression of that particular post, and integrate (and properly cite) a relevant image. You are writing to your classmates, so strive for readable, absorbing, and thought-proving prose and effective integration of your relevant image.
Your first post will be an author’s profile in which you introduce yourself to the class and include a recent photo so we can connect names and faces. Your profile should include your own experience learning or thinking in an interdisciplinary manner.
Subsequent posts will focus on integrative thinking as described in the Module Overview. You may draw upon coursework or experiences from this semester or previous terms. your posts should include specific details, examples, and illustrations that convey how you are yoking together multiple disciplines/perspectives and what is revealed to you in that process.
In the weeks you are not posting yourself, will provide feedback to at least 4 of your classmates on their own posts using the Comments feature in CI Keys. (Make sure the Comments feature is enabled for this purpose). Comments will enable you to identify passages or details that you find noteworthy, intriguing, or thought-provoking in some way. Each comment should be about 25 words in length.
Assessment: This Course Element will be evaluated holistically, taking into consideration the quality, thoroughness, and timeliness of your posts as well as your peer comments.
Relevant Resources
Defining “Interdisciplinarity” (from CI’s Center for Integrative Studies)
“Blogging in the Composition Classroom” (from Writing Commons)
“Creative Commons Image Search” (for open source images)
“Flickr Image Coder” (for citing/licensing Creative Commons images from Fickr)
