Audiences for Blog Posts, Building One's Ethos

Commercially-oriented blogs, or those blogs in which a person or organization is consciously trying to create and maintain a brand or a public presence -- these blogs already have a very clear sense of their public. Academic blogs, blogs created in and primarily for education -- these do not.

But I want my students to practice their public presence, much in the spirit of Renaissance sprezzatura (but also as a practical matter of learning to be more publicly oriented when posting online).

Here is a teacher's short video about how audience gives educational technology rigor. I heartily agree. Watch the last minute or so, starting at 2:13:

Katie McKnight Podcast Series #9: Where is the Rigor in Educational Technology? from TeachHub.com on Vimeo.

Okay, if we want our blogging to address real audiences, we need to avoid only speaking to ourselves. How is this done? Well, by avoiding "in-speak":

Giving Attribution for Images: Some History and a How-To

I want to show my students how to find, use, and give due credit for images in their blog posts. And I also want to tie this into the history they are learning.

Giving Attribution in History

We can see the origins of giving credit for creative work within the European Renaissance. Of course, authors and creators were given attribution for their work prior to this time, but some things happened that changed the culture of attribution starting from about the 15th century.

Preliminary drawing of Michelangelo's "Libyan" 

For one thing, the secular shift that began at this time put focus increasingly on human ability and accomplishments, not just on divine activity or the work of great people of the distant past. The flurry of creative work in the Renaissance (painting, architecture, poetry, philosophy, etc.) was also accompanied by a medium that made it more possible (and desirable) to give or receive credit for one's accomplishments--the printing press. Individual achievement could be accompanied by individual fame. And so we began to have a Brunelleschi, a Michelangelo, a Petrarch, a Shakespeare. In a period when self-fashioning was in fashion, it became fashionable to achieve notoriety as an individual artist, author, or creator.

This focus on the identity and increasingly, the originality of the individual creator would be amplified in future centuries, especially in the 18th century (where regular, inexpensive newspapers created a market for celebrity), and in the 19th century (when Romanticism idealized creators and creative genius). 

Recognizing the achievements of individuals was not a feature of medieval society, by and large, but over the last few centuries this has become enshrined in western culture (less so in the East), and has been codified in law by way of intellectual property concepts and regulation.

This means we must respect and attend to intellectual property, especially in this, our digital day. How do we do so?

Welcome to Rhetoric and Civilization!

This blog is for students of English 212, "Rhetoric and Civilization" held Fall semester 2018 at Brigham Young University, taught by Dr. Gideon Burton.

Blog Purposes

• Responding to readings
• Exploring the themes for a given historical period
• Raising topics and bringing in sources from self-directed learning
• Developing content regarding a focused topic for an end-of-semester, "finished" post
• Learning to use a 21st century communications platform, especially to bring in social and multimedia aspects of education.

The blog is not a digital dropbox by which an individual student delivers homework to the instructor. As detailed below, students will be required to read an respond regularly to one another's posts, providing an opportunity to profit from fellow student's independent learning and to refine their own thinking.

Regarding the specifics of the blogging assignment...