It would be great if you added some writing by students in your Chuo Law classes. To do that, you will need an invite to join the blog; please email me at mikenix1 at mark tamacc.chuo-u.ac.jp for an invite (if you haven't already had one)
(At the moment, the blog only has examples of the issues overviews written last semester by my Improving Research and Writing class, that I talked about in the previous post.)
As well as providing different examples of compositions by students, the Research & Writing by Chuo Law Students blog is a first attempt at making students' writing available as a research resource for other students. The idea is that if a student wants to do some research on, for example, nuclear power in Japan, they can use the blog to find writing on that topic as a starting point for their research (as an alternative or complement to looking for, say, a BBC article on that topic).
This is how the blog is set up for students (or teachers) to find writing on different topics and issues:
1. Each post to the blog shows the title of one composition, a one paragraph summary of the content (could be the introductory paragraph of the composition or an abstract specially written for the blog), anda 'Read more...' link to download a pdf file of the composition.
2. There is a search engine, at the top right of the blog, that searches in the titles and summary paragraphs (but not in the full pdf of the composition).
3. There is cloud of topics and issues tags (e.g. developing countries, environment, welfare state, etc) below the search engine. Click on a tag to go to all the writing on that topic or issue on the blog.
4. There is a list of types of writing, below the tag cloud. Click on a type of writing to go to all the examples of that on the blog. (At the moment, the only type of writing on the blog is 'issues overviews' from my IRW class, but as we add different types of writing, we can add more categories to the list.)
Have a try at with different ways of finding writing and let us know what you think.
To keep these systems working, we need to follow some protocols when uploading writing to the blog. I'll make a step by step guide for this and put it on the blog, but some key points are:
• compositions can only be uploaded as pdfs (not word.docs);
• the person posting the writing to the blog needs to identify key words for the content of the writing and add these as tags for the post;
• the type of writing (e.g. issues overview, essay, research report, summary-response) also needs adding as the category of the post. We may need to co-ordinate on the categories we use for different types of writing.
A final important point: students can upload their writing themselves if they have an invite to the blog. In fact, my aim is to move to an open-access system where students do all the uploading of their writing themselves (with guidance from their teacher). If you want to students in your writing class to have this access you need to do two things: i) send me their email addresses so I can invite them on to the blog; and ii) make sure they know how to register themselves for the blog, make a post including putting up a summary of their composition (abstract or introduction); make a pdf file of their work and upload that, add topic and issue tags and the type of writing category to their post.
If we can move to making this a kind of wiki for students' writing as examples and research reosurces that would be wonderful, I think. But, please let us know what you think by commenting and posting on this yourself.
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