Welcome to SPAN221! It’s good to have you in the course, and I’m looking forward to what should be a productive and fun semester.

A core part of this course is the weekly blogposts that you will write in response to the reading.

You will set up a blog and, each week, in response to some aspect of one or more of the texts, you will write c. 200-300 words on a blog, in Spanish. You will also, on a weekly basis, write comments on at least two of your classmates’ blogs posts.

You can set up a blog on just about any platform (except for Tumblr or, it also turns out, WiX). I recommend one of the following: UBC Blogs, WordPress, or Blogger. Feel free to customize your blog in any way you fancy: make it pink! Upload cat pictures! It’s all good.

Note that these blogs will be in theory at least visible to the world. If you want you can be anonymous or adopt a pseudonym. That’s fine by me, so long as I know who you are.

If you want to use a blog that you have already set up earlier (whether for personal reasons or for another class), that’s fine, too, though you will have to a) tell me that this is what you are doing and b) mark your posts for this class with the “tag” or “category” “span221.” (See below for more on tags and categories.)

Ideally today (January 11), you will have 1) written a short post introducing yourself to the class and 2) sent me (at jon.beasley-murray@ubc.ca) the address of your blog. Beyond allowing me and your classmates to get to know you a little, the main point of this is to ensure that you have managed to set things up OK. By some magic of the Internet, I’ll then arrange things so that your blog posts show up here, on this site.

Then by tomorrow night (January 12), you will write your first response, to Octavio Paz’s “Cifra.”

You should write your weekly blog posts, commenting on the reading, by Tuesday night at 11:59pm (Pacific Times) at the latest. Your aim with these posts is to spark discussion. Tell us about what you noticed, what you found interesting, what you liked, what you disliked, what you found puzzling, what you want to talk about in class. Make connections with other weeks’ readings if you wish, or with other examples of things that you have noticed about literary texts, Hispanic or otherwise.

Each blog post should also include one question that you want us to discuss collectively.

These posts and questions are not graded for quality, or even for grammar or spelling etc. I am not looking for perfect Spanish; so long as I can understand what you are trying to say, that is fine. Write them quickly, as soon as you are done with the reading ! The point is to get some first ideas and impressions down, while the texts are still fresh in your mind, and to begin preparing for in-class discussion.

I would like you to use “categories” and/or “tags” on your posts: you should use categories according to the author’s last name (e.g. “Paz”). You are encouraged also to you use tags to indicate the themes or topics that you are highlighting (e.g. “gender” or “allegory” or “modernism” or whatever).

After our Wednesday class, you then should write comments on at least two of your classmates’ blogs posts. These comments should be added by Thursday night at midnight.

One more thing…

Comment moderation

It will make everything immeasurably easier if you remove comment moderation from your blog, so that you do not have to manually approve each comment as it arrives.

On WordPress blogs (wordpress.com or blogs.ubc.ca), this is how you do it:

a) go to your Dashboard
b) go to Settings > Discussion
c) click “E-mail me whenever Anyone posts a comment”
c) unclick “Before a comment appears Comment must be manually approved”
d) unclick “Before a comment appears Comment author must have a previously approved comment”

That’s it! Good luck!