Aging and the Arts

This is an abridged version of the full instructions posted on Quercus. See below for an overview of the purpose and learning objectives associated with composing Digital Posts for HLTD51, Aging and the Arts.

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One objective of this seminar is to practice composing public-facing writing as a way of enhancing your ability to communicate key issues raised by our seminar: namely, the intersection of older age and the aging process with the methods and materials of the arts and humanities. To realize this goal, a portion of your evaluation will involve composing Digital Posts (Blogposts, Podcast(s), and/or Video blogs/vlog(s)) that specifically engage our seminar’s themes.

Please read these instructions carefully and often, especially if this kind of work is new to you. As always, if you have any questions please visit me during office hours or speak up during seminar.

1) Rationale

Wait, what? I have to blog for this course?

Yep. But you’re going to have lots of control over what you choose to write about, and whether that writing is made public on our course blog. See “Evaluation” below for a summary of requirements and specifics, but in short: at least one of your Digital Posts will be posted on our course blog. Beyond that, it’s totally up to you (you can submit all the posts you create for public reading, or just some; but at least one). My role will be to help brainstorm and advise on what material you might write about, or consider making public, for each module of the course.

Why are we doing this? Can’t I just write a normal assignment?

The purpose of blogging (or creating any sort of spreadable Digital Post, like a podcast or vlog) is to present ideas in a more accessible way than is usually possible in conventional academic assignments. That doesn’t mean Digital Posts are sloppy, unstructured stream-of-consciousness ramblings; on the contrary. By integrating your personal voice and experience with careful analysis, we can create an open learning resources that engage audiences outside of our classroom. As you know, Health Humanities—especially in Canada—is an emergent field. Creating public-facing work allows us to demonstrate and promote the value of Health Humanities, and in this seminar Age Studies in particular, to a broad audience while embedding our work within our local community.

I’m not a blogger. This sounds weird (and a bit scary).

That’s okay! It’s new for me too; but I’ve had good success doing this in a past seminar (check it out: HLTD50, Toronto’s Stories of Health and Illness (Winter 2018)). The purpose of this assignment is to practice writing with an audience in mind – in other words, the kind of writing most of us will have to do (or might already do) outside of the university setting. Lots of postsecondary courses have integrated blogging into assignments, so there is a strong precedent for doing this in our Health Humanities seminar. See Quercus–>Syllabus–>Digital Posts – Overview and Instructions for a number of resources on 1) how to write an effective digital post, and 2) why it makes sense for university courses to encourage this particular analytical and creative skill set.

Do I have to blog about intense personal stuff for the whole world to see?

Absolutely not. I mean, you can if you like (but I will be giving you guidance as to what content may or may not be advisable to post publically; ethical writing and representation is something we’ll be thinking a lot about in this seminar). But blog posts can take a range of approaches: as one of our resources suggests, “posts will typically fall under one of the following four categories: textual analysis, personal experience, current events, or response to specific questions…Many blog posts will incorporate aspects of several categories, so use these types of evidence as you see fit.”