The Club Car

Information about the Weblog for HIST 382

"The Club car" is the name of the weblog, or "blog" for short, for Professor Isern's course in the history of Canada. This virtual meeting place, framed into the home page, is where we will talk about Canada and the business of the course. Why is it called "The Club Car"? Well, old-timers in the Canadian Historical Association have recounted to me how they all used to ride the Canadian Pacific Railway to their annual meeting. En route they would gather in the club car to conduct, informally, the business of the association and to argue about the history of their country. So, we’ll have a similar journey. Our Club Car is where we’ll discuss Canadian history and conduct business.

Participation in the weblog is required of all students. This is where all assignments are submitted; where announcements are posted; and where discussions, supplementary to what we do in class, take place. It is a general forum, too, for all matters having to do with history and life in Canada. The blog makes all work submitted in the course, including every individual assignment, part of the common discourse of the class; we see it all. It also meets another mandate in that both the NDSU general education program and the History program's learning objectives call on students to learn to communicate effectively in a variety of formats. Blogging has become a pervasive medium in digital communications.

What Is This Thing?

If you haven't been part of a group weblog before, let me explain what happens. You, as a student in this course, are subscribed to the blog. As subscribers you, I, and all the other students can post to the blog. It's like a big bulletin board, where announcements and assignments can be posted, only it's better than that; on this bulletin board we can interact, talk back and forth. (You may wish to keep in mind, too, that this course operates on world-readable websites; it might affect what you write!) The weblog operates via a free blogging service called Blogger.

What Are We Going to Do With It?

Here I'll spell out what I just mentioned above. There are three functions for the blog in this course.

1. Posting announcements. I will post announcements, and you may have occasion to, too.

2. Most important: submission of assignments. This is where you send your work.

3. General discussion—of other people's submissions, of text and lecture, of all matters having to do with history and life in Canada.

You need to go to the home page frequently and see what's posted in the blog. You need to note announcements; you want to see what others are doing; and someone else may well be writing back to you about something you have posted.

House Rules

Let me ask you, as you participate in the blog, to observe three requirements: literacy, civility, and discretion.

1. Remember that what you write to the blog is part of your participation in the course, not some note you're sticking on the refrigerator. So be literate. Clean up the grammar and punctuation and write clearly.

2. Treat others with respect. Disagreements are cool; disparagements are not.

3. Don't post things to the blog that have no business there. No junk mail, no irrelevant forwards. A little fun is OK, of course.

Posting to the Club Car

The first day of class I'll ask for your e-mail address. Right after that you should receive an e-mailed invitation to become a member of the weblog. Please respond promptly. (I’ll demonstrate this in class.) Here's a hint when you do: instead of just clicking on the link in the invitation, copy and paste the URL into your browser. (Clicking on the link sometimes causes problems with your Internet provider.)

When you're a member, you can post to the blog. Learn to navigate the Blogger interface, so that when you need to post, you can. Try sending an introductory message to the blog—just tell us who you are, something about your interest (or not) in the course, that sort of thing.

Now, here I'm starting a list of suggestions for use of the weblog. Suggestions welcome! Help me make this useful.

· When you open a link given within the framed weblog, it's best to right-click on it and use the option to open a new window. Sometimes the linked document, especially if it contains images, won't fit nicely into the frame.

· Blogger software doesn't seem to handle the coding for quotation marks or apostrophes imported from other programs. What this means is, if you compose your message in Word or Word Perfect and then paste it into the posting form for Blogger, your quotation marks and apostrophes will come out with some weird coding when they appear on the web. So, after you paste in your message, you need to replace the quotes and apostrophes manually before posting.

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