A weblog for Pete Ellertsen's mass communications students at Benedictine University Springfield.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

COMM 317: In class today

Busy day, if we get to half of what I've got planned ...

If you don't have your own blog yet, it's time to start one. We'll take a couple of minutes at the beginning of the hour to do that. Blogger, the website that hosts my class blogs, is relentlessly, determinedly, aggressively user-friendly.

If you have another blog for another of my classes, feel free to use it. I want all of my 300-level masscomm students to have a blog for classwork.

If you don't, there's no better time to start one than now. We have several experienced bloggers in the class who can help you.

Next ... once you've got a blog, you want to post something to it. Right?

(Maybe "want" isn't the word we're looking for? How about "assigned to" or "ordered" or "commanded?" Better?)

Post your thoughts on this issue. Due process of law is one of the fundamental principles of the Anglo-American legal system. It goes back at least as far as Magna Carta in 1215, when King John of England pledged he would not imprison anybody "but [except] by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right." I just Googled ... uh, performed a Google search on ... keywords "due process of law" and got 1.09 million hits, beginning with Wikipedia (By the way, you can use Wikipedia in my classes. In fact I encourage it. Be careful, for all the reasons you've heard in your other classes. But be careful with any information you didn't get by personal obdservation.) Anyway, start today's exercise by doing your own search and reading up on due process.

Next, with that background in mind I want you to answer the following question(s) on your blog: Who was Walter Burgwyn Jones? What kind of a guy was he? What did he do for a living? What did he write? Who was T. Eric Embry? What did he do with something that Jones wrote? What did Jones do in response? Is that surprising? What does it tell you about the climate of public opinion in Alabama during the 1960s? What does it tell you about due process of law? Would King John of England have approved? Try to have some fun with this one. (Yeah. Right.) Post at least 500 to 750 words. Show me how you can write. Show me how you can think.

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About Me

Springfield (Ill.), United States
I'm a retired English, journalism and cultural studies teacher at Springfield College in Illinois (acquired by Benedictine University and subsequently closed). I coordinate jam sessions for the "Clayville Pioneer Academy of Music" at Clayville Historic Site and the Prairieland Strings dulcimer club, and I sing in the choir and the contemporary praise team at Peace Lutheran Church in Springfield. On Hogfiddle I post links and video clips for our sessions and workshops on the mountain dulcimer (a.k.a. "hog fiddle"), as well as research notes on folklore and cultural studies, hymnody and traditional Anglo-Celtic and Scandinavian music. I also posted assignments and readings in my interdisciplinary humanities classes. The Mackerel Wrapper (now on hiatus), carried assignments and readings for my mass comm. students. I started teaching b/log when I chaired SCI-Benedictine's assessment committee, and reopened it as the privatization of public schools grew increasingly troubling and closer to home.