About tonight's class

You're reading this tonight because I'm confined to the house with the dreaded H1N1 virus. My son came down with a very bad case of this over the weekend. Within a half-hour of us getting off the bus from Ottawa, I was in the ER with him. He finally got released yesterday afternoon, but will be home for the rest of the week. I've been hit with flu-like symptoms for the last couple of days, so I'm forced to cancel our class tonight. The last thing I want to do is get any of you sick.

What we were going to do tonight is talk about Ottawa and look at the video you filmed. This presentation was going to count for 10% of your final grade. We're still going to go ahead with your presentation, but it will just take a bit of a different form. It will now be a special posting on your blog.

Online group presentation assignment

Here is the group presentation assignment:

Your job in this special blog posting is to work together to write a joint posting that will talk about your experiences in Ottawa. This posting should touch on many of the things you did and observed. Use it to tell us what you learned about Canada and Ottawa, both through what you were told by tour guides and your professors, but also through what you observed on your own.

Your blog posting will be at least 1200 words long. It will include pictures and video. It will be written by everyone in the group and you will be graded for this assignment as a group. So, it is everyone's job to make sure that you all collaborate equally and that the final product is as good as you can possibly make it. This assignment counts for 10% of your final grade.

DEADLINE: Friday, November 6

Some tips for your assignment

As I mentioned above, this posting will include the video clips (or some of them) that you shot in Ottawa. In our class on November 4, we will have a short blogging workshop that will show you how to add the videos you took with the iPods into your blog posting. So, you may want to review those videos tonight and think about what you might say about them.

Tonight, you will want to spend some time as a group to talk about the things you'll write about and how you will do this. Writing your sections independently and then combining them later will not be very effective, as you don't want to wind up repeating yourselves. So, at the very least, your goal tonight is to spend some time reflecting on your Ottawa experiences and then work on an outline for your blog posting. Then, you might want to take some time to figure out who is going to be writing what.

By next class, you need to have a full draft ready to go. So, between tonight and next Wednesday, you should spend some time collaborating electronically on the draft of your blog posting. You might want to use something like Google Docs to work on this together. Or you could simply send everything back and forth to each other via e-mail. By next week, you need to have a full draft complete. On November 4, you will be adding your video and doing a final revision of your blog posting. The completed posting needs to be posted on your group blog by November 6.