Intro to Communication's Posts on *The Social Network*

Welcome to the first official assignment post for @cstrimel's English 114, Introduction to Communication course. This course is currently being taught online through Community College of Philadelphia. Using Steemit as part of the course is an experiment designed to help students learn more about their own thinking and writing with a focus on audience. To explain this a little, college writing assignments often occur in a vacuum, where the students are quite aware the only audience is the professor. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and it certainly allows students to work with their own ideas in relation to whatever is being learned in the class in a relatively safe and supportive way. However, there is clearly also an artificiality to writing in such a vacuum, and I am hoping my students in this course will experience a shift in their thinking, writing, and motivation to write, when they do so with a more public audience in mind.

I am also interested to learn more about how the financial incentive of Steemit might influence my students. On a very basic level, is it desirable, or even helpful, to a student to know they might be rewarded for their work? Most people posting on Steemit on a regular basis agree that the financial reward is a significant motivator, even when the rewards are quite small, and the chance of a large reward is slim. That brings me back to the primary purpose of this experiment that I mentioned above, which is to cause a shift in the writing process itself, and I believe, along with audience, the financial reward has a very positive influence on the motivation to write in the first place.

I am also hoping the financial incentive might encourage more student interaction. To this end, the class is using Discord to discuss the film and their papers. Hopefully these discussions will move beyond the writing process and actually help them to build a small but engaged audience for their work (i.e. group mates will be more likely to read each others eventual posts and comment on them). Online courses commonly use discussion boards to attempt to recreate the interaction of a traditional classroom, but such attempts are usually quite lame, as students typically use the discussions to complete the bare minimum for a grade. I have witnessed this as a teacher, and I am currently taking an online course myself and experiencing it first hand! We are all quite busy, and anything perceived as "busy work" in the context of a class is going to be treated with minimal engagement.

The actual assignment is quite simple; students are instructed to write five paragraph essays that identify a thesis that states something about a way communication is depicted in the film. The supporting paragraphs of the essay should then connect the film to specific topics or concepts in the textbook we are using for the course. Students are also encouraged to consider a third text, their own experience, as a form of support. I consider the idea of connecting multiple texts to be a primary learning outcome of the course.

Students have several options for posting their work. If they have a Steemit account they are welcome to post their papers to those accounts, where they can earn any potential rewards. If they do not have an account they are permitted to post to this account. If they post to this account, their options range from singing the post with their full names, just a first name, or anonymously. Students must post a link to their Steemit posts in the actual assignment in our private course page, so even if they post to Steemit anonymously I will be able to verify their work.

Please feel free to interact with the students in this course. It is a 100-level course, so please keep any feedback relatively positive. More important, if you are interested in any of the ideas being presented please leave a comment. And of course, upvote, especially if you are intrigued by the idea that blockchain presents the potential for students to actually be rewarded for their hard work.