General guidelines
Write as much as you feel is necessary to grasp the week’s readings, viewings, and concepts, and move you toward your web analysis and final project. Posts minimally should be around two typed pages, double-spaced, in order to develop some kind of sophisticated assessment and/or development of the ideas in these readings. I recommend that every week, even in posts that are not direct responses to the readings, you weave references to their ideas and examples into your blog posts. This is going to help you keep up with the class’ conversations and will ultimately be most rewarding.
The procedure for blog posts is as follows:
- After doing the readings, write up your piece and post it in your blog.
- Make sure that the class can access the post. You can use the Digication ePortfolio to house your blog posts, although this semester we have another option (the SB You blog). Guidelines for setting up an SB You blog are available here. A WordPress or Blogger blog (other platforms are fine as well) will need to be published (publicly accessible). I recommend that you create a blog using SB You, a new Edublog blogging site managed by DoIT. This site allows you maximum control over privacy and also features excellent blogs, with the blogger's permission of course. Privacy can be regulated in a variety of levels of visibility:
Site Visibility - Link your blog URL to the Discussion Board forum I’ll set up in Blackboard.
- You may comment on any student’s blog at any time, but everyone is required to comment on some blogs during the week after the post is due on the calendar. That means you’ll write and post, move on during the week to the Discussion Forum, then read and comment on the other blogs as well during that week. The goal is to, of course, create interesting conversations so that everyone forgets this is an assignment and just connects to the greater benefit of all. (I’ll be right there with you, commenting and being a general nuisance.) Make sure that during the semester, you comment on every student’s blog at least 3-4 times.
- Optional commenting prompt
- Here's an example of my posts from last semester.
- Here's an example of a student's blog (in Wordpress) from last semester.
- Here's an example of a student's blog in the ePortfolio from last semester.
Blog post 1: Creating your blog and making your first post
Due: Jan. 30 (11:59 pm)
Set up a blog in your ePortfolio (with guidelines provided). (If you prefer, you may create your blog in a blogging site such as WordPress.com or Blogger, and link it to your ePortfolio; see my ePortfolio for an example of this. Introduce yourself in your first blog post. Write something about your interests and background and go read everyone else’s posts. Create an avatar and insert it into your blog post; this can be a regular photo of yourself, or you can use one of these applications and get something else going…and it’s a good chance to learn how to use new apps.)
The first blog post is due on Feb. 1 at 11:59 pm, and subsequent posts will be due on 11:59 pm of the first complete day of every weekly class cycle. After that time, read each other's posts and comment on a minimum of five of them. Commenting should be done before the next week's assignment is posted by me and we begin another round of discussions.
Please use the Discussion Board (DB) in Blackboard to post a link to your introductory message in your new blog. Please don't hesitate to email me if you have any questions or to ask questions in the forum provided for that purpose.
The guidelines for blog posting for the entire semester are available here.
Blog Post 2: Remediation and Multiliteracies
Due: Feb. 6 (11:59 pm)
This week, as you reflect on the readings by Bolter and Grusin, Selber, and Reiss and Young in your blog post, do at least one of the following:
Find an interesting example of remediation out in the world, on the Internet, in computer software, on TV, in film, in the visual or plastic arts, in architecture, in industrial design, or elsewhere, and analyze it. How does it fit into Bolter/Grusin’s framework of immediacy and hypermediacy? What is being “remediated” in the artifact? What attempts are being made to make you forget the medium of creation or to make you hyper-aware of it? What do you grasp as the intentions behind the presentation and how do you discern the effects?
Pick a passage (sentence, paragraph, or idea) of particular interest to you in any of the readings and write about it. Include some of the following: what you find most and least plausible or agreement about the passage; an example related to the passage not mentioned in it; a question related to the passage; an action or experiment you would suggest based on the passage; an idea for a creative piece (poem, story, play, painting, photograph) based on the passage OR do the piece and present that in your blog (with a reflection on its creation and the relationship to the passage).
Take advantage of the datedness of the authors’ work (with Remediation and Selber’s book, at least) to use your current technological experiences to illustrate the extension or limitations of their ideas. For example, how does Bolter/Grusin’s discussion of windowed user interfaces on desktop computers in Chapter 1 apply for today’s GUI (think tab-browsing, docking, Launchpads, etc)?
How does Selber’s assessment of multiliteracies relate to your experiences with literacy (both conventional and computer literacies, either as an individual learner or as an instructor)? How does his approach push you to reconsider (if it does) your own approach to literacy learning? How do you see his principles affirmed (or not) in an article such as Riess’ and Young’s “Multimodal Composing, Appropriation, Remediation, and Reflection: Writing, Literature, and Media”?
Blog Post 3: Bodies, Interrupted
Due: Feb. 13 (11:59 pm)
While reveling (or struggling, but hopefully in an invigorating way) in the abstractions of this week’s reading, find a a narrative that helps you to understand and claim this knowledge. It might help you to choose passages from Haraway and Hayles that seem to illuminate or contradict each other and write about those; it might be best to choose a scene from “A Scandal in Belgravia” or Au’s interview with Wilde and analyze it using ideas from Hayles and/or Haraway. If you are familiar with one of the many fictional texts mentioned by Hayes in her chapter (DeLillo’sWhite Noise, Calvino’s if on a winter’s night a traveler, Gibson’s Neuromancer) and would like to explore her use of them, feel free to do that. If you would like to explore Second Life, you might analyze your experience there in terms of virtual or cyborg identity as covered in the readings. Another option is to write a point of view (POV) narrative of your own that demonstrates some of the concepts, pleasures, and/or anxieties that arise from these readings.
Blog Post 4: Online Identities and Identity Tourism
Due Feb. 20 (11:59 pm)
For this blog post, you may narrate and explore an event in your own experience of identity tourism or online deception. You may create an online identity with different racial or gender proclivities from your own and test it out in an online environment such as Second Life or Twitter (but be careful) and then write about your experiences. How do people respond to you? Do you respond differently to them in this disguise? What’s intentional or unintended?
You may respond to a particularly interesting or provocative passage in one of the readings and support or challenge it, or connect/relate it to one of the earlier texts we’ve discussed in class.
Looking at Donath’s article on online deception, how are the trends she noticed in Usenet groups replicated or evolved or repudiated in current online social networks?
Blog Post 5: Multimodal Composition and Digital Storytelling
Due Feb. 27 (11:59 pm)
Suggested posts: Write about how you might encourage multimodalism into a class you are teaching or planning to teach within any constraints you may feel for approaching such an endeavor: examples might be time constraints, confidence level of the students or your own, availability of materials or resources or access, a restricted curriculum or particular learning outcomes required or desired, etc. Be sure to consider your target age-groups and learning levels.
Create a multimodal composition that does not involve a computer (see Shipka’s article), and photograph it (or audio/videotape it if it involves something that can’t be captured in a still photo), and post it or embed it to your blog with a backstory. Describe the rhetorical principles that you have employed in its creation.
Create an assignment for a multimodal composition that does not involve a computer (see above) and explain what the learning outcomes are (or rhetorical principles involved).
Pick a passage from any of the readings by Selfe, Shipka, Cordova, or Nelson and Hull, and support, illustrate, or challenge it multimodally in your blog post. (Photos or charts are multimodal, but consider what they are doing to your argument.)
Blog Post 6: Gaming and Avatar Literacies
Due: March 6 (11:59 pm)
Respond to the readings in any manner that helps situate your current interests in the course. A few suggestions:
If you have played games comparable or identical to those explored by the authors, what experiences or assertions made by them parallel your own or offer a counterpoint that allows you to extend or refute their conclusions?
If you have not played games of this nature, or you prefer not to write about games you have experienced, recall a situated learning experience or an learning experience that did not take advantage of the learning principles described by Gee and use his principles to organize your discussion of it.
Use any of the concepts discussed earlier in the semester to enhance your understanding of Bissell’s personal narrative, Nardi’s ethnographic narrative, or Gee’s learning through games . For example, these are video game players cyborgs (Haraway) or do they exhibit qualities of posthumanism (Hayles) or identity tourism (Nakamura)?
Blog Post 7: Copyright, Remix, Creative Commons Due March 13 (11:59 pm)
Suggested posts: Summarize Lessig’s definition of a sharing economy (versus a commercial economy) and discuss one or several sharing economies you participate in that are important to you and your work, or to your students’ or children’s work, or both. Lessig gives many examples of sharing cultures such as Wikipedia, shareware computer programs, Linux system software, and Project Gutenburg. How many others can you think of?
Find a work on the Creative Commons search engine, use it in a remix, and then reflect on the process. It can be a photo, video, audio file, etc. Make sure that it is licensed to be remixed.
Review the Creative Commons website, describe what you find there, and analyze its structure/design from a rhetorical perspective.
Blog Post 8: Wiki Culture and Wikipedia (OPTIONAL)
Due March 27 (11:59 pm)
For this week’s post, as usual, you may respond to the readings in any way that promotes your understanding of the areas of most interest to you in the class and/or helps to propel you toward your realization of the final project.
You may consider the following suggestions:Describe an experience you’ve had using or editing a Wikipedia article or learning/teaching with a wiki.
Create a Wikipedia account, edit an article, and describe your experience (and link the article).
Propose a use of wiki in one of your current teaching assignments or courses you are taking.
Describe and analyze your position of the usefulness of Wikipedia, referring to the week’s readings.