Weekly Journal/Blog

Every student must maintain a journal for this class, with entries made on a weekly basis. Writing a journal is a way to improve your communication skills. The journal also serves as a record of what you have accomplished in this class. We will use a blog as the medium for these journal entries.

Being able to write well is an important skill in most disciplines, but especially in computer science and especially in open source projects. People who would look to hire you make judgments based on such things as your ability to write well and speak well. Your ability to communicate in writing and in speech is an important part of your skill set. Countless recruiters have said as much to me personally and in their public writings about this. Many software professionals and open source pundits have stated as much in their presentations and writings.

You will be given a public repository for this course-related blog. The fact that it is public implies that anyone in the world can read what is put into this blog. The exact instructions for how to set up the blog are in the README.md file in the blog repository on GitHub that I have created for you. The blog template is in the class organization at

https://github.com/hunter-college-ossd-spr-2020/weekly

Your individual blog is named

https://github.com/hunter-college-ossd-spr-2020/gh-username-weekly

where gh-username is your GitHub account name. The blog repository is set up in such a way that your blog serves as the source code for a web-page hosted on GitHub, using GitHub Pages. For information about GitHub Pages, see What is GitHub Pages. Because GitHub Pages has been activated for this repository, you will automatically have a webpage at the URL

https://hunter-college-ossd-spr-2020.github.io/gh-username-weekly/

where gh-username is your GitHub account name.

Requirements

Your blog entries must be written using Markdown. It is very important that you make them as professional-looking as possible, and using Markdown will make this possible. Because the blog files are hosted on GitHub, you can use either the standard Markdown syntax or GitHub-Flavored Markdown. Help with Markdown can be found at the following sites:

There is directory in the repository

https://github.com/hunter-college-ossd-spr-2020/gh-username-weekly

named _posts. This directory was populated initially with three files, named

These files are named in this way for the following reason. A semester in Hunter has 14 weeks and you will need to write 14 separate blog posts for this course. Our classes meet on Mondays and Thursdays, and our first class meets on a Monday. The first week starts on Monday January 27 and ends on Sunday evening, February 2. The second ends on February 9, the third on February 16, and so on.

Therefore, each week, by Sunday night, a new post should be added to the blog for the week ending that day. The blog post for the first week is created by editing the first file, for the second week, the second file, and so on. You will need to create new files by copying the initial ones and naming them using this naming scheme.

The only exception is that the period from April 6 through April 26 will be treated like a single week since the Spring recess falls in it. For this reason, when you create the file for week 11 you must name it 2020-04-26-week11.md. Also the last post will end on May 17, which is after the last day of class.

Guidance on Content

The blog post for a given week should be based on the following conditions:

Rubric and Assessment of Blog Posts

Blog posts are a component of your grade in the course. I have never found a good way to assign a numerical score to narrative writing, like a blog post. Nonetheless, these posts must be assessed. Therefore, I am using the following ordinal scale for assessing the posts. "Ordinal" means that it is linear but that the numbers have no arithmetic properties other than one being larger or smaller than one another. For example, a score of 3 is not three times as good as a score of 1. A score of 2 is the score given for an average quality post; 3 is reserved for excellent work, like the grade of "A" or "A+".

The posts will be graded on the quality of the mechanics and on the quality of the content. Mechanics includes formatting, grammar and usage, spelling, and visual and graphical appearance in general. The content includes coherence, interest, creativity, insightfulness, organization, relevance to the blog prompt and to the class in general, and completeness with respect to the blog prompt. For example, whether or not the post answers and addresses all questions posed for that week is content.

The grades for mechanics and content will be recorded separately.

Grade Content Assessment
3 The post is thoughtful, well-written, satisfies the stated objectives and requirements for the posts for the given week, and demonstrates a significant amount of effort.
2 The post is adequately-written, and satisfies the stated objectives and requirements for the posts for the given week, but it does not go beyond that and only demonstrates a modest amount of effort.
1 The post does not meet the requirements in one way or another. It may not satisfy all stated objectives for the posts for the given week, or it barely does but not adequately. There may be little thought given to it, and almost no effort.
0 The post was not written or was written sufficiently past the week in which it was supposed to be written that it does not qualify as a journal entry.
Grade Mechanics Assessment
2 The post is of appropriate length, is formatted properly, is easy to follow, and multimedia use (if any) is appropriate.
1 The post is very brief, formatting is poor, and/or there are so many spelling and grammatical mistakes that it is hard to read.
0 The post is of trivial length.

If you find writing blog posts challenging, some good advice on writing effective blog entries can be found at:

Valid CSS! Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional