Wednesday, January 21, 2026
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1
Blog Not Working Yet?
Watch the GitHub Video Tutorials. Link is on the course home page.
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2
This Is How Research Works
What we're building is a miniature version of how research actually operates:
- Individual people thinking about individual interests — each of you pursuing your own questions and angles.
- A system connecting everyone together — our dashboard aggregates all those individual voices into one place.
This is how library databases work. This is how the internet works. Our class network is a small-scale model of scholarly and public discourse.
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3
Check-In: Your Voice in the Network
Discussion question: How is this going so far when it comes to feeling like you are speaking from your own individual perspective in your blog?
Are the posts you've written ones you actually want to stand behind? What's helping or getting in the way?
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4
Using AI with the Network
Demo: Fixing a link in a student post using Gemini.
Key feature: The class directory shows all the GitHub repos — the original code for every person's blog and posts. Everything is public and open.
- Work on your own blog: Drop your repo into Gemini to troubleshoot, generate code, or make updates.
- Link to someone else: Drop in another person's repo to find the exact URL you need to cite their work.
- Research the network: Use AI to explore what others have written by giving it access to their repos.
Take advantage of the fact that all of this is open. AI can access each other's work and your own code.
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5
Building Toward 5 Posts — and Curating Your Blog
The target for the first two weeks: 5 posts on your blog.
But quantity is just the starting point. We also want each post to be something you genuinely want on your blog.
- If you put something up just to have it up there, you can go back and revise it — or delete it and replace it with something new.
- Because generating posts is fast, this is very doable. The process is: post, evaluate, keep or replace.
- Over time, this is how we build blogs we actually stand behind.
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6
Collective Practices
The focus of class time is making decisions about the network together. Dr. Plate facilitates, but everyone helps decide how we balance three things:
- Each student has four rigorous academic essays by the end that they can vouch for as their own work.
- Individual voices are accurately represented in the network.
- The network can be read as a whole — it hangs together as a coherent conversation.