Barking with the Big Dogs

Here's an exercise that can support discussion about the likely users of your blog and your blog's reach.

1) Reflect on your blog's key themes. You may want to refer to your creative brief and even take the opportunity to refine it. Try to think in both the specific and the general (i.e. Environmental Issues vs. Water Pollution in Philadelphia). Agree on a few key themes as a group.

2) Assign a theme to each group member (or work in pairs). Challenge your interns to identify the three most popular websites on these themes. Of these, have them identify the one that is most closely related to what your group has been or wants to be blogging about. Make sure they justify their selection.

3) Give them about 15 - 20 minutes to explore the website. It does not have to be a blog. Have the students open up a word document in google docs in order to take notes on what they find. Use the opportunity to mention the dangers of plagiarism in the online environment of cut and paste.

4) Challenge them to generate a blog post which introduces their readers to this website. Require that they not only briefly describe the site, but also evaluate and respond to the site. What is notable or valuable about this resource? Who is the intended audience? What information is left out? Is the site a reliable source of information on the topic?

5) If the website is a blog or allows feedback, have the interns leave a comment.

6) Introduce students to the "blog list" or "link list" gadget, which can be found by going to "Layout" and clicking on "Add a Gadget." (This is how I added the list of our intern blogs that you see on the side bar of this blog.) Have interns add the website they found to this list.

7) Discuss how the act of linking to and posting on the websites of the "big dogs" may help drive traffic to their blog.

The "how to drive traffic to your blog" articles I've read always include a point or two about leaving comments on other people's blogs.

Revisioning History

The news is a great place to go for inspiration on lesson plans and assignments, especially when you're working on media projects. Today was the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch, the first manned mission to land on the moon. This morning, NPR did a great story on the mystery of the original tapes, which were lost, or as the story explains, possibly taped over! (Yikes! And I thought it was bad when my mom taped over my old New Kids on the Block videos.)

Here are some thoughts about how you could use the Apollo 11 anniversary to lead a discussion about media representations of historical events. You can adapt these steps to any historical event captured by the media and then re-captured through digital enhancement or fictionalization.

1) Ask your students what they already know about the Apollo 11 landing and record these "keywords" on the board.

2) Then, use the "keywords" they generated to add context to the event through Internet research. For example, have them find out what else was happening in 1969. Continue to add information to the board as they suggest more keywords.

3) Listen to the NPR radio story, Houston, We Erased the Apollo 11 Tapes and/or the NPR video, Apollo 11 Landing: A New View, which shows the difference between the originally broadcast images and the digitally remastered version. Your students may even find these on their own through their Internet research.



4) Lead a discussion about the story. This could be a good opening to discuss the role of media in documenting history, the authenticity of digital enhancement and the importance of historical documentation and maintenance. (This is a great tie-in for our program at ITSRG, since many of our interns are working on projects about representing historical events, cataloging documents and creating media.)

You may pose the following questions:

What is the difference between the original and the digitally remastered video?
Which video is "the real thing?"
How do we evaluate media images for truth or authenticity?
Why is it important to preserve historical documents?
Who decides whose history will or will not be documented?
What role does the Internet play in documenting history?
What kind of digital footprint are you leaving behind?