Blog Post 1: What's Your Problem?

image source: https://openclipart.org/detail/244714/brainstorming

 

PART 1 : Minimum 300 words.

Follow the below steps, either in order, recursively, or however you want to approach them, and post a minimum 300 word blog post that communicates your thoughts, findings, and experience moving through this topic invention process. This post should reflect writing in response to all four of these prompts.

1. Look up the different definitions of the word "community", and then synthesize all these findings into a single, sentence definition of your own words that defines the term in a way that makes sense to you and this project.

2. Brainstorm and list all the communities that you belong to based on your definition. Everyone will approach this differently, but generic examples include: Miami, Florida, U.S., earth, college student, F.I.U., major, field, occupation, gamer, programmer, vaper, ethnicity, race, religion, culture, sexual orientation, gender identity, athlete, sports fan,  music, dance, arts, abilities, disabilities .... the list keeps going.

3. Choose 2-3 communities from the list (or how many you want really) that interest you the most, in which you have a stake somehow, and for which you think there might be some significant issues worth looking at.

4. Conduct some background research about each of these communities, looking for what the issues and arguments are within that community or issues with how the community interacts with others. This will help to get you thinking about a problematic discussion you can join or start to eventually help make things better.

Keep in mind that this is not a personal journal; rather you are talking about your topic invention experience informally to your classmates--tell them the story of how this activity went down and how you arrived at your list of community problems you could potentially explore.

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PART II : Minimum 400 words

Write a minimum 400 word blog post (or add to the first post) discussing these aspects of your current process:

• What is the main, problematic research question that will drive your initial research? This is still tentative, meaning you may change it in the future, but it's time to start getting more concrete with your plan. Also, this shouldn't be an explanation of a topic--this should be a single question ending with a question mark.

• Why did you choose this question? Why do you think it is important to research, both for the community and you personally?

• What is your current opinion in response to this question? Why? Before you start objectively researching opinions, it's a good idea to think about your own perspective and bias going in. Also, if a fact seems to answer your question instead of an opinion, your question may need to be revisited! There should be multiple possible viewpoints in response.

• What kinds of sources do you foresee accessing to formulate a working answer? Your reading is Chapter 22 from Everyone's an Author--look at all the kinds of sources discussed, including field research, and hypothesize a little about what kinds of information you will need, and what kinds of sources might work best to find it. Again, you classmates discussion posts from unit 1 also provide information about types of sources.

Again, you need not answer these questions directly in order--your blog post is about discussing these things with your audience. And as always, interesting but relevant titles, images, and links will help draw them in even further.