If you find this post, and I’ve emailed you a message saying you are “authorized” to post on the site, good deal! Now you can relax and make yourself a space here on the PMSP dialogue and exchange blog.
A few Sunday afternoon items that can help you settle in:
1. It can be useful (and freeing) to write/edit your posts offline and then paste them into the blog. These public posts are open to the world. And be mindful that once you make a “comment” and post it to someone’s post on UO Blogs, you cannot delete it.
It is also helpful to paste your text into the “Insert as Plain Text” widget and that will publish it in the standard WP blog format.
2. Please plan to check the course site daily to keep up with the exchanges that will be happening. There are 25 of you, so expect conversations to get lively.
3. I will be reading and thinking about your posts during the week, but not responding via text. Instead I will look for a week’s worth of questions, patterns, unresolved issues and breakthroughs that you are generating. I will post a YouTube 3-5 minute video response early each week to offer my own summary of what I am hearing and noticing in your thinking and experiences through the work we are examining. My intention is for these video responses to be informal, improvisational and eclectic.
4. I just found this great article, called Bury The Hatchet, that writer Lee Siegel blogged on The New Yorker, and I want to share it with you. He talks about how critics behaved in the recent past (Post WWII era) and how the culture of review and critique is changing in this emergent digital era, which he calls a “critical age” and for reasons that may surprise you.
I think he captures the spirit of appreciative inquiry, clarity and illumination that I hope we can all strive for during our time together this quarter, especially as we look back into the deep legacies of our fields, and forward into an unknowable future.
I will post again on Wednesday with the Term Project Groups you are assigned to work within. (Thanks to Professors Sheehan and Kessler for placing you in groups of four and five for me!) They are all a blend of MMJ and StratComm students.
Thanks for sharing