Making Up The Rules As We Go Along: Discovering New Media Grammars

Class observations on blog features

This week, Digital Literacies students examined "award winning" blogs and deconstructed them to do a little "reverse engineering" to discover just what made these blogs so well-regarded. In doing so, students employed a tool that can be useful when engaging a new medium or new genre. (And in the brave new digital world of the 21st-century, this will happen often!)

The students composed a list of features, qualities, and characteristics identified in these top blogs. (See photo) Now they will work to articulate design principles for making a good blog. By identifying "best practices" of awarded blogs, students will work together to compile a list of principles, rules, or guidelines to make a great blog.

(The final composite list will become the rubric for grading the blog design for student blogs.)

Bonus: You will shoot and post SIX NEW photos illustrating what you know from our composition tutorials and lecture. Below are a few pics I shot as I was preparing this term's course work:

Get CLOSE to the subject! I shot this outside my dining room window. I got really close and he didn't fly away! I didn't have as much luck with the hummingbird.

Several principles: Structure in background is placed by using Rule of Thirds; diagonal line of wall connects foreground to background; sculpture fills the frame left to right; experimented with reflection.

An example of finding natural or existing frames and windows when shooting.

An example of filling the frame.