MaxLighthouse

This is a big and difficult assignment and I don’t want anyone thinking they don’t have to do it. But I do think some people are having trouble understanding it, so I’ve written some more about it.

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WEEK SIX: The Assignment:

How do you think blogs happen?

They don’t just grow out of the ground like palm trees.

People write and create blogs. I write this one. You write yours. No one creates a good blog by just pulling words out of their left nostril. They have to do study and research in order to be able to do their job.

• If you are still not clear on what a blog is, you need to read a few more blogs. Here’s a good example to look at: http://mediamatters.org/items/200610030010
• Notice that in the the blogger’s summary, he states his observation (that the news media are using the misleading term “overly-friendly” to describe Representative Foley’s messages) and his opinion (that it is wrong to downplay a seriously offensive and possibly illegal action by calling it “overly-friendly.”)
• Then he writes a much longer essay about his observation, giving the background on what has happened, explaining it in more detail, giving many examples, providing links to other sites, quoting newspapers, letters, TV programs – all to support his point.

(This is basically the same way you write an essay for an English class, but on a blog you can add links, it’s easier to do research, you can do a lot of copy and paste rather than writing out everything, and most importantly, you have many readers – not just your English teacher.)

On almost any topical, informational blog (like the one above ) the person creating it goes through the following process for each and every major post they make.

THIS IS WHAT A BLOGGER DOES:

1) select a topic (actually, I am assigning it in this case)

2) read about it, get to know the whole topic, find the facts, become something of an expert by reading about the topic and the background, and gathering ideas from many different writers who have written on the subject – newspapers, on-line news, other bloggers, websites

3) keep track of all the information and usable quotes —  and the URLs because you will be linking to them for your readers

4) form an intelligent, informed point of view / opinion about it, based on facts and good, clear critical thinking. Critical thinking is the most important thing of all.

5) write about it (blog about it.) Remember that yout goal is for the reader to gain a better and broader understanding of the topic.

6) include quotes and excerpts from your sources, with words linked to the URL of the original site

7) your blog post should make a strong case — so make it well written, well thought-out, and well supported by carefully chosen sources, quotes and excerpts.

• This is the rubric I’ll be grading you on.
• Did you do enough research to have a good understanding of the topic?
• Do you make a strong case?
• Did you use critical thinking?
• Did you do your best writing to state your case clearly and compellingly?
• Did you use evidence and facts?
• Did you organize your page in a way that made it easy for the reader to read and understand the content?

• Can you see that the blogger I referred to above went through those seven steps? And he would do very well on this rubric.
• Obviously, step #2 is the hardest – you have to read a lot, and find things with google, and keep reading until you understand what your topic is about. BUT THAT’S OKAY! You’re supposed to read! You’re supposed to learn!
• The information you’re looking for on this assignment is not difficult to find. It’s not exactly some obscure, buried bit of unknown trivia from the 11^th Century. It is on every front page of every newspaper in America. It’s on the news on every channel. You can’t avoid knowing about the Mark Foley scandal. The difficult part is figuring out what it all means. It’s sort of like being a detective; you have to look carefully at what you’re finding and ask yourself “What does this mean? What does this show me?”

Got it?

I decided to take something from today’s headlines and relate it to the propaganda and spin page ( http://maxlighthouse.edublogs.org/political-propaganda-reader/ ) or see “political propaganda reader” at the top of the right-hand column) You will need to read and study that page and its links thoroughly.

YOUR BLOG TOPIC: How much truth / how much spin?

• In reference to the Mark Foley Scandal, Tony Snow said, “I hate to tell you, but it’s not always pretty up there on Capitol Hill. And there have been other scandals, as you know, that have been more than simply naughty e-mails.”

• Your job as a blogger is to take that little two sentence quote and analyze it in terms of truth v. spin. In order to understand it, you have to understand much more than those two sentences.

How can you understand it?

Go to Google and start doing some detective work. You don’t know who Mark Foley is? Find out. You don’t know what “scandal” means? Find out. What’s Capitol Hill? Find out. You never heard of Tony Snow? Now’s the time to find out. Maybe you find out he’s “the press secretary.” So what? Do you know what a press secretary is? Do you know what a press secretary’s job is and how he does it? Whose press secretary is he? What did he do before he was a press secretary? Does it matter? (Yes, it does) And that’s all before he even opens his mouth and speaks the two sentences I quoted. What does “naughty” mean? When you use the word naughty, what do people think or imagine? The word naughty was chosen by Snow for a very specific reason. What was it?

If you don’t know all that, and much much more — word by word and meaning by meaning — you don’t know enough to write about it.

You’re still on #2, gathering pieces of information — everything you can find out about the Foley scandal — and questioning that information and seeing where that information leads you. Those pieces of information will lead you to a place where you can look around you and see all those little pieces and suddenly it will form a complete picture. When you see that picture, THEN you’re ready to write.

• Once you’re there – once you know all the little pieces of information and can see the big picture — start putting together your blog post. You may want to put it on its own page (click on “pages’ on your blog dashboard rather than “posts”)

What should you write?

Discuss this quote, giving the background and the context of the “scandal” Snow is referring to, looking at who Tony Snow is, who he was talking to, under what circumstances this remark was made, Snow’s possible intent, what message he was trying to send, what he wanted people to think and feel as a result of his statement, the accuracy of the statement, why he chose the particular words he used, the ways in which the quote is true, the ways in which it may be misleading — and draw a conclusion about the Truth or Spin factor.

Write about this in such a way that a person who knows nothing about all this could get the whole picture from reading your blog entry. All that work you did to understand the quote and the spin involved? You did all that for your reader, so that when the reader comes to your blog they can understand what that quote was all about. You are the reader’s guide and teacher.

• This is your entire internet/blog assignment for Week Six. If you do it well, it will take many, many hours of research, thought, learning, writing and editing.

Why is this important?

Because politicians lie to you.

You know that.

But that’s an easy thing to know, and it doesn’t help you much.

Maybe you think half of what they say is lying. Maybe that’s true.

But which half? How do you you know what’s true and what’s not?

Politicians lie because they can get away with it.

And they get away with it because Americans think that finding out the truth is too hard.

It’s easier to just sit in our ignorance, half-believing and half-disbelieving everything. And that’s how trillions of dollars and thousands of lives are thrown away.  And we may grumble and sneer, but we don’t do anything because we don’t know what to do. We don’t even know who to vote for. We vote for whoever fools us best. And we don’t know because it’s too hard to find out. They fool us because we’d rather be fools than go find out the truth. It’s too hard.

So we just say “I don’t care” and we don’t vote and we don’t read and we don’t think.

Trillions more dollars, thousands more lives.

Certainly your dollars. Maybe your life.

It is hard to find the truth and to think critically about the things you read and hear and see.

But that doesn’t mean we’re not going to learn how to do it.

It means we must learn how to do it.