Hey Everyone, your blog posts are so awesome...

...they make me want to slap my mama.

Seriously, I just spent an hour looking through your blog posts (see how I spend my friday nights?) and I can't believe how great they are. Some of you are finding really exciting resources, and I can't wait to show some of them in class.

I want to offer up a few thoughts about the blog posts that might be helpful...

• It's really hard to keep up with all of the posts. Keep them coming.
• The blog posts aren't formal writing - they aren't small essays, and I am certainly not grading on punctuation or spelling or grammar. They can be informal, they can be personal and they can even be in the first person. I guess I am as interested in your reflections on the material you found as I am in the information you are posting. Write in sentence fragments. Write in bullet points. Write in all lower case letters. Write in 733t-5p3ack. Just write your own material.
• To that end, it is really irritating when it is obvious that someone has copied and pasted material from another site, usually wikipedia. There are a couple of give-aways - when your type-face changes in mid-post, when you write with words that I don't hear you use in conversation, when your post contains most of the same language as a post from earlier in the day and when I can copy and paste a group of words into google and find the site you were looking at, I know that you weren't using your own words. Really, I am much more interested in hearing what you have to say than in hearing what wikipedia had to say - figure out how to summarize without copying, and then reflect on what you found. Why is it interesting? Why is it boring? Do you think I am a jerk for making you look this stuff up? Are you really glad you went out and looked at some of this stuff? Your grade doesn't improve because you sound erudite.
• A couple of posts that I think demonstrate what I am talking about in terms of an effective summary, in the writer's own words, that seem more like reflection thatn "Control-C/Control-P", please copy and paste the urls into a browser and have a look:
• http://rctc-photo-1.blogspot.com/2011/01/photographers.html
  
• http://rctc-photo-1.blogspot.com/2011/01/camera-lucinda-optics-reality.html
  
• It is an incredible pleasure to find the youtube videos and links to other sites that you are finding.
• I also really appreciate that some of you are going out of your way to comment on other people's posts. That kind of generous spirit keeps an interesting conversation going. Thanks to those of you who are reading and commenting on posts that aren't your own.