Welcome to our course blog! I’m Stephen Siperstein, the instructor of this course, and I am excited that we will be using a blog as a way to explore the topic of climate change fiction and to communicate with each other. One purpose of the blog is to widen our discussion beyond the classroom. The realities of climate change confront us daily, and a blog will provide a forum for bringing the questions we discuss in class to bear on a wide range of media, texts, and other conversations that we all encounter outside of class. We’ll also use the blog to seed our discussions in class, and to open new directions of inquiry that are not necessarily on the syllabus.
Here are a few examples of blogs from other environmental literature courses. Before you write your first post, I would suggest taking a look at some of the posts on these sites to get an idea of the many possibilities for different kinds of blog posts (a blog post is its own kind of literary genre):
http://blogs.uoregon.edu/environmentalliterature230/
http://aml24101614.wordpress.com/
If you ever need help with technical questions relating to the blog, email me (siperste@uoregon.edu), or contact the Information Services Help Desk at 541-346-HELP or helpdesk@uoregon.edu.
Welcome to the course and looking forward to a great term.