DEMOCRACY

During the course of this year we will be examining the nature of democracy in a number of different ways. There is a great deal written about democracy and it will be important to identify, collect and think about a significant portion of it. And of course "democracy" is "happening" every day and in a variety of ways that we can pay attention to. For example, democracy is richly represented on the Web and it will be one of our tasks to "capture" those representations: scholarly articles, news pieces, lectures available via YouTube, political cartoons, and the websites of others that are doing what we seek to do. We will be using Evernote to collect and organize information and Viviti to produce websites that display selected parts of that information. Your mentor (Megan Bucknum) and I invite you to begin working on a website of your own. You will find that Viviti supports the production of attractive sites, is easy to use, and fiexible in what it allows you to do.  The developers of Viviti are continuing to add new features; thus even more design possibilities will be in place before your year's inquiry is completed.

As you can see, I have begun tracking down sites whose focus is the notion of "deliberative democracy" (there are a variety of ways democracy has been conceived: thin democracy, strong democracy, agonistic democracy, liberal democracy, aversive democracy, and participatory democracy among others). I have added a page for that focus and added several links with a bit of commentary about them. I have also created pages for organizations that study democracy, journals that publish scholarly articles about democracy, and videos of various sorts (primarily lectures). I also thought it was important to create a page that will eventually provide links to important and relevant news articles.

Also, I have experimented using Viviti in conjunction with Scribd as a way to show one's work (an essay or data table, for example).  Simply click the Scribd link in the menu bar to see how Viviti displays a document.

Finally, I should note that this site will be undergoing modification before and after classes begin.  Because Viviti is so simple to use, you will find that there is every reason to modify your own site as your inquiries suggest new ways to portray what you are finding in your investigations of democracy.  Just as you will be learning more about how to revise your writing (e.g., formal essays, research papers), I think you will come to see that revising the website is an important (and easy) thing to do.