The Ugly Part of Education

I promised you all that I would work toward devising some reasonably transparent method of letting you know how you are progressing in the course. I further said I would start assigning the dreaded letter-grades to all blog assignments beginning with your reviews of Network, and would send each of you an individual e-mail with my review of your review and a grade. What was I thinking? C-Doc hereby renegs on part of that pledge. Since most of my comments on this assignment apply to most of you, below is a general statement about the criteria I used to evaluate this bit of work to substitute for individual e-mails. As to individual grades, I'll note yours on the bottom of the quizzes to be returned Monday. How we proceed for subsequent assignments we'll figure out. As always, if you want to talk to me in depth about any course- or assignment-related matters, let's meet during office hours (or other mutually convenient times), and we'll look at your blog and blog posts together, and talk about them. I'll do this as often as you'd like. C-Doc belatedly realized that his first plan (the whole individual e-mail thang) would mean him writing no fewer than 100 separate e-mails to you all each week. In an ideal world, that's still probably the best way to do this, but C-Doc notes that he does not live in an ideal world.

Here are the things I was looking for in "rating" your posts (most of these criteria will also apply to subsequent assignments):

Were they:

• posted on time?
• responsive to the assignment?
• produced in a polished, well-shaped essay (with clean, properly-formatted links and quotes and paragraph breaks, and free of spelling, punctuation, or egregious grammar errors)?

Do they:

• offer more than mere summary or description, and present thoughtful analysis, extended argument, or sound critique?
• do more than merely raise questions (though that's all to the good) and try to answer some of them (or explain where you might look for evidence to answer them in some practicable and satisfying manner)?
• connect to our readings, demonstrating that you have read and comprehended the material, and have also sought to apply it?

As always, I'm grateful if you make me laugh, but that's not a requirement here, and is no substitute for those expectations above (you know who you are).

Here are two links to two of the posts that I thought particularly good (but not perfect, by the way), by way of example:

• "Thus spake the evangelical Mr. Jensen to his chosen one, Howard Beale. . ."
• "A prophetic film. . . . "

FYI: Grades ranged from "F" (for those who failed to post, or post by the deadline) to "A" (very few, but you'll get better at this and there will be more of these down the road), with most in the "B" and "B-" range.