A Successful Blog Workshop

The blog workshop given today for your term Group Project was productive. Poppy seed cakes helped. (Note: the wag who called them opium cakes - notwithstanding the admirable allusion to Rudyard Kipling - is a threat to my career.)

The information I presented on the features of an effective blog (yes: they're my own) can be summarised in three points:

1. Variety. Post from different perspectives; link to and express opinions on different ideas; look for inventive and even groundbreaking approaches to your literary subject.
2. Brevity. Be succinct. Verbosity and prolixity are vices in scholarly prose. The need for short, sharp expressions of ideas native to the blogosphere -- and online writing generally, is an effective training discipline for scholars.
3. Community. The force of the blogosphere comes from the accumulated exchange of the individual specialisations of the network of independent bloggers. The model is parallel distributed processing with its thesis that the aggregation of nodes in a neural network creates an emergent property: natural consciousness or artificial computation. Accordingly, create links to other sites in the blogosphere relevant to your approach to the work of fiction you have chosen for this assignment. All being well, you will receive links from some of them in turn, and the exchange of insight, questions, and, ultimately, knowledge will begin.

So, you are now well on your way with your Group Project. You have been given a head start and encouragement to make this a term-long effort, rather than (to cite an evil-Spock parallel universe nightmare alternative) a last-minute torment of all-nighter agony.