Guidelines for publishing in a collective (collaborative) students’ blog on topics related to Academic writing

Work in groups of 5. Your responsibilities are as follows:

One of you is in charge of administering and publishing the results as well as combining verbal and visual elements.

Another one is in charge of editing the final versions of the texts prior to posting them.

Three of you are responsible for finding, selecting and preparing the materials which the post is built on.

The aim is for you to form skills to cope with webwriting and webediting, online editing and using social networks for academic purposes.

First set of tasks:

1. Find definitions of Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0?
2. Find definitions of social networks and social media.
3. Find definitions of a virtual library, electronic library, electronic resources.
4. When preparing the information for publishing, please site the electronic resource you have used correctly.

Second set of tasks:

1. Find out what the requirements for including in an electronic resources bibliography is.
2. Find out what the requirements for citation of electronic resources in students’ research papers are.
3. Prepare a bibliography list of useful electronic resources.
4. Prepare a text, in which you quote electronic resources on a topic formulated by your tutor.
5. When preparing the information for publishing, quote the elesctronic resources you have used correctly.

Third group of tasks:

1. Find out what the requirements for writing web posts are.
2. Present them in short blog posts.
3. Follow the requirements for contributing to a blog below:

Don’t include more than one topic in a paragraph.

Use short sentences.

Include visuals.

Include links to social networks.

Prepare your post as a self-contained product.

Observe the basic spelling and punctuation rules.

Think of a short title for the post – up to 10 words. It should be informative, readable and attractive.

Write 5 to 7 lines (in Word) parapgraphs.

To create and edit your final posts, we suggest you use the following web-based collaborative tool –TYPEWITHME (http://typewith.me)

DESCRIPTION of the tool

Typewithme is a free document sharing tool which has a low technical requirement and is easy to access, as there is no registration process. Once the user is connected to http://typewith.me, a new document can be created immediately.

Typewithme features a basic word processing tool with various editing, exporting and saving options. Sharing the document is very easy through the sidebar: a unique URL is created to sent to contributors via e-mail or instant messaging or by using the inbuilt e-mail form if you so wish. On the sidebar there is also a chat window, for further synchronous communication.

It has a feature that highlights the content added by each separate user, assigning a different colour to each contributor. So users can view what has been contributed and by whom at a glance, which helps to pinpoint changes in content and avoids repetition, while working on the document synchronously.

HOW TO USE IT

RESOURCES

Resources to run the application are basic: a desktop computer or laptop with Internet connection and an active e-mail account.

SET UP

After clicking on Create a New Document, you type the name for each contributor in the box provided in the sidebar.