Group Project Guidelines

This is a guideline to get you running with your blog project. We will follow up in a couple of weeks with more specifics (i.e. what part of the grade is associated with which tasks etc.) This should help you continue to move in the right direction.

You will be graded on your blog, and the criteria will include:

• The focus and quality of your entries, and the frequency of entries (1 per week is a minimum)
  
  
• relevant links within your entries and included in your blog template. These links will include related resources, related blogs (from outside this class), other bloggers from your group etc.
  
  
• community you develop. this will be measured by the quality of your comments, and the 'traffic' you can generate (if you include sitemeter or similar so this can be measured.) We will cover more about developing community on your blog as the semester unfolds, but suffice it to say identifying and linking to other related blogs is a first step.
  
  
• your bloglines subscriptions will also be reviewed, minimum suscription = this class and your group members. we will look at other resources to which you are subscribed.
  

You will be graded as part of your group, and the criteria will include your participation in other group members' blogs (and class memebers' blogs). This can be satisfied in 3 ways:

1. your thoughtful (value adding) comments on your group membersblogs
   
   
2. your support to help your group members make their blogs as good as they can be (i.e offering technical / design support when appropriate). We will survey you at the end of the semester to determine your level of support in this area.
   
   
3. your thoughtful (value adding) comments on non-group member blogs (but blogs of real interest to you) will also be evaluated for this part of the grade. You should link to these blogs from your blog.
   

What should you be doing at this stage ?

1. have your blog set up (and linked to this blog).
   
2. first post accomplished.
   
3. links to outside resources (either within a post or / and on the template.
   
4. set up an account on bloglines.
   
5. subscribe to your group members blogs (need to e-mail each other what the URLs are OR get them directly from the class site)
   
6. subscribe to the class blog.