Blog assignment

OVERVIEW OF ASSIGNMENT:

TOPIC: A TEDTalk recommendation for a talk you choose from the list prepared by your instructor for your team’s general topic (topics include Sports, Animals, and the Brain).

PROMPT: TED.com has been a popular website for decades for viewing the presentations of speakers who, for various reasons, are experts on the topics they bring to the original live audience and eventually to the viewers who watch the videos of the speeches. The topics are varied and interesting and highly worth a viewer’s time, yet some people are not familiar with TED. Others occasionally watch, but maybe they have missed a good speech here and there. That’s where you and your team will come to their rescue! Through your team blog site on the assigned general topic, you and your teammates will persuade the uninitiated in your blog readership to watch some TEDTalks related to the topic, particularly the ones you watched that you wish to recommend to them. So the general question is, Why should a person watch the TEDTalk you did?

PURPOSE of the Assignment: Applying what you have learned from Chapter 3 (Concept 3.4) and Chapter 4 in The Allyn & Bacon Guide to Writing about effective online communication, your team will create a blog site that expresses the team’s recommendations for watching TEDTalks on the team’s assigned general topic.

 The Home and About Us pages will cover the team in general and require collaborating with others to make the blog site attractive and consistent in flow and design. By working together with others on your team, you will gain experience in collaboration and discourse.

 The Individual Blog (one by each team member) will discuss and recommend a specific TEDTalk that you have found appealing, significant, and interesting. You will be exploring, explaining, analyzing and synthesizing.

 An effective blogger follows this process:

 Describes the blog’s area of focus and purpose with visual design and textual “hooks.”

 Uses images and supporting content (links, images, references) to further the exploration of the blog’s issue.

 Verifies that the blog is responsive to diverse audiences.

 Employs and maintains the team’s credibility as the publishers of the blog (includes copyright laws, fair use, absence of plagiarized material).

AUDIENCE for the Assignment: Diverse readership, including those who already know about TED.com and those who don’t.