Welcome to Telenovelas, Culture and Society!

You will practice the fundamentals of critical thinking via blogging about telenovelas. Your blog entries should reflect your thought process and your learning experience as you go through the course. In other words, your posts should be a thoughtful (and creative) expression of yourself. If you wish, you can complement the entries with images or other media.

Specifically, blog entries will be of two types:

• Open topic entries: With the exception of the post due on October 24, which will have a specific topic, you are free to analyze, comment and/or reflect on any of the topics and readings we will cover in class. You can also write about the telenovela(s) you are analyzing for your class assignments. Be warned that mere description won’t meet my expectations.
• Responses/comments to entries: A good blog builds a community. In that spirit, you should comment on the entries posted by your classmates or by me, be those open topic entries or responses to others’ posts. Your comments must be substantive and add to the conversation. In other words, merely stating “I agree” or “good point” is not nearly enough.

You must write at least six open topic entries and six responses/comments during our term. These entries should be spread out throughout the semester. Therefore, I expect to find at least one new open topic entry written by each of you by:

• August 29
• September 19
• October 10
• October 24* (topic set by me)
• November 7
• December 3

There are no partial deadlines for your responses/comments, just the final deadline: December 3. I highly recommend you also write your comments throughout the semester.