Welcome!

Welcome to "Reading, Writing, Telling, Feeling"! This blog was created by me, Ben Fink, as part of the course "Reading, Writing, Telling, Feeling" I am teaching at the University of Minnesota this fall (CSCL 1401W-001, Fall 2009).

Students in this class will have specific weekly posting and commenting assignments, which will be posted here each Thursday. In addition, anyone is welcome to post or comment at any time -- I simply ask that everyone, students and non-students alike, follow the four rules for cooperative conversation set down by the linguist H. Paul Grice...

1) QUALITY. You are free to express any viewpoint on any issue, but you must back any statement you make with sufficient evidence. This will often mean citing a page in a book, or other relevant sources.

2) QUANTITY. Express your viewpoints thoroughly, with good argument and evidence, but avoid writing unnecessarily long or repetitive posts. I recommend keeping posts between 300-400 words and comments between 50-100 words. (As a benchmark, this posting is 293 words long.)

3) RELATION. Keep your posts and comments relevant. No debates about the Obama health care plan (or the Michael Jackson Memorial Childcare Plan) during a discussion of the fine points of Aristotle -- and vice-versa!

4) MANNER. Write as clearly as possible. The point is to make yourself clear to the rest of us, and to convince of the truth of your arguments.

...as well as one fifth rule of my own:

5) RESPECT. Respect all participants in the discussion at all times. You are encouraged to disagree, and even to disagree strongly, but please always disagree respectfully. No flame wars, please!

If you have any trouble posting, or any other questions, feel free to contact me at ben.fink (at) gmail.com.