Part of your individual work will be done outside of class in the form of a class blog. You will find one recent article relevant to the topics in our class and will present it on our class blog during your appointed week (listed on the class blog). You can find our class blog at http://customerandcompetitor.blogspot.com. I will be sending you an invitation to join, so please accept as soon as possible. This blog will be closed to those not enrolled in our class, so you will only be allowed to publish on the blog if you accept my invitation to join.
When you present your article, you will 1) provide a link to your article (or a full reference of the article if no link is available), 2) provide a summary of the article, including why it is relevant to our class, and share some interesting insights about this article, and 3) pose questions to the rest of the class to generate a discussion among your peers. You will be graded on your ability to find a relevant and interesting article and your ability to generate a rich discussion among your peers. Once the discussion gets going, it is your responsibility to maintain that discussion by answering questions, responding to your peers, etc.
In addition, you will also be graded on your responses to others’ articles. You will be responsible for reading the article posts of your peers and responding to their questions. There is no set number of articles you should respond to, but I will be keeping track of all responses and will grade them according to their richness. Responses such as “Good job!” or “I completely agree.” are not considered adequate. You will be graded on a 1-3 scale for each comment you make (3=insightful and critical, a real contribution to the discussion; 2=adequate and relevant yet not very thoughtful; 1=hardly an effort at all) to generate insightful comments in order to receive credit for your individual contribution. I expect all of you to make a habit of checking this blog regularly and engaging in discussions for the duration of the course (not only during your week). Not doing so will reflect negatively on your grade. More importantly, a large part of your learning experience depends on your interactions with your class mates. You should not miss out on this opportunity to learn from each other’s research and experiences.
