an event score

 Yoko Ono, Snow Piece 1963, published in grapefruit 1964,
Wunternaum Press, Tokyo. Copyright of Yoko Ono

3 fundamentals of dialogue

A Rule of Three

(1) Address your interlocutor where they are. This does not mean you should talk "down" to them or "up" to them. Just forge a connection!

(2) Listen--with eyes and ears and your whole being

(3) Be generous with your interpretation of premises. At the same time, challenge the assumptions, claims, and reasoning when/if a sentence, paragraph, or idea on the page (or in the conversation) puzzles you.

Consider: how does dialogue differ from debate?

Whenever we argue, we argue in common. This is perhaps most clear when we engage in counter-argument. In our courts of law, we hear "objection!" as a request to introduce counterargument. Counter-argument engages with objections that a composer imagines will bother a reasonable reader. Counter arguments need not only come from the imagination, although the imagination is a fine place to search for them. Dialogue is another tool we can use to discover and work with counter arguments.

In class: Break into pairs or small groups of 3. Discuss the writing that has been posted on the wiki thus far. Design a brief "event score" or some similar procedural rhetoric for responding to or enacting the ideas you have discussed, and post it--both on this page, and on your own wiki page/hub. Then, you can reflect on this collaborative writing experience for one of your thrice weekly blog posts.

Writing to Explore

Our first unit assignment, "Writing to Explore," gives us an opportunity to explore on our own, and then share and combine our findings. Our collective knowledge base will help us divide into two groups; each group will use further develop the knowledge base we grow in "Writing to Explore" into a "problem statement" that addresses a critical need in Pinellas County.

see also: 31 August

Read and Respond: What is Service Learning?

read Blake Scott and Melody Bowden's "What is Service Learning?"

Post an analysis/response to the wiki. Tag your response "service learning" so we can compile our responses on one page, later. This process will create the spine of a collective essay about service learning, a "mixmaster blog," of sorts.