Blogs for Bibs? ... Or ...?

In my English 1121 class right now, we are beginning work on our annotated bibliographies for our major argument paper. One option I'm giving is to compose the annotated bibliography using Microsoft Office's PowerPoint rather than the "traditional" Word document.

To give credit where credit is due, or at least some credit, since my idea is a bit different:

A fellow classmate of mine, last year, when I was on sabbatical and taking courses at the U of MN, was Kate Peterson, a librarian at the U of MN, did her final project on "new" annotated bibliographies. If I remember correctly, she advocated using blogs for this, with one blog post for each source; the blog post would contain both the bibliographic citation and the annotation.

If you are interested, please read Kate's blog post about her final project.

I really liked this idea--for many reasons, including the use of a popular digital writing tool in place of a more "traditional" tool--but since I'm not assigning blogs (yet?) in my writing courses, I went searching for a way to modify Kate's idea. PowerPoint came to mind, not only because it is another digital writing tool that we studied and practiced last year, but also because one of its slide choices, "Title and Content," seemed to lend itself well to how an annotated bibliography is set up. In addition, another slide choice, "Two Content," might lend itself well to doing a summary annotation on the left side and an evaluative annotation on the right side.

I can also see students perhaps uploading their PowerPoint bibliographies into something like SlideShare or SlideBoom or SlideRocket and "publishing" it on the web.

I'll report back on how this works out.