Hello, IISPers!
Welcome to the centralized Michigan International Internship and Service-learning Program blog. You'll recall that as participants in IISP, it is a requirement that you will maintain a blog throughout your summer internship/service-learning experience. We chose Blogger as the host site, as many students are already familiar with it (and may even have a pre-existing blog), and also because it's user-friendly and therefore easily customizable. The IISP Summer 2009 blog will act as the site that binds all of your separate blogs together. We will ask you all to send us the URL to your blog, so that we can add the link to our blog list. This will display links to your individual blogs on the right-hand side of this main IISP blog (See example of a linked blog "Molly in Beijing"). Linking to our blog, rather than everyone posting onto one single blog, will allow you all to customize your sites as you wish while making it easier to follow your stories!
We acknowledge that you might not have regular internet access or the time to write daily entries, so we're asking each of you to write at least one blog entry per week while abroad, including a post written before you leave and another after your arrive back home. We hope that this will be enjoyable and ultimately very rewarding as it is a great way to document your thoughts and reactions to what you're going through.
In terms of the content, we'd like to give you considerable freedom to write as you wish, but we'd ask you to reflect on interesting experiences that you're having while abroad, what you're learning, differences in the workplace, etc.
Even though you may not be leaving for a while, we would like you all to create your account before our last meeting (Thursday, April 9th) so that we'll have your site linked to ours. It'll be one less thing you'll have to worry about the night before you leave! For those of you who have a Google account, your Gmail log-in doubles as a Blogger log-in as well!
Thank you - if you have any questions about the blogging requirement, please let us know!
Bill and Kelly