Describe what you imagine our collective equality of opportunity project might look like when it’s finished. Describe three or four main sections of that site with a brief description of what sorts of questions or subjects they might address.
[Hit publish and shut my laptop for the night last night, but I guess I shut down too quickly and it never finished publishing. For the sake of record keeping, publishing it now.]
Let’s tag these “eopsketch“
]]>Once you’ve published your Listening Project page, you need to also publish a post to your site. You should begin with a brief paragraph that summarizes the key points of your argument in such a way that it invites a reader’s interest enough to want to read the full piece.
You should also write a longish paragraph or so reflecting on the writing that you did and what you learned in the process.
How do you see your work on the podcast episode helping you to achieve the learning outcomes for this course? Link to the specific learning outcome posts that applied to your work on this assignment, and explain how you met that outcome with your work on this assignment.
You might also address questions such as:
Length: 750 – 1000 word analytical essay
Due: 3/28
Tone: “Academic casual”
Audience: You’re writing about your personal experiences, but an analytical essay exploring issues from your personal experiences for a general audience.
Format: Publish as a page on your site, grouped along with your previous narrative. Then you’ll write a post linking to the page and reflecting on your writing.
First, take a look again at the two posts describing different approaches to defining new media literacy: Mozilla’s web literacy map and Henry Jenkins’ list of literacies. And also look again at your own narrative describing the development of technological literacy in your life to this point, and consider the discussion you had with me about that narrative, wherein I likely pointed to one or two key questions that I wanted to hear a lot more about.
Reflect for a bit about your own new media skills and interests and consider some of these questions:
After reflecting on the sorts of questions above, write an analytical essay about your current new media literacy. You probably won’t be able to specifically address all of the questions I’ve asked you to consider above, but use those questions as a guide to identify some tension that you want to explore, understand, and explain. Your goal is to identify strategies in your life that you have probably not explicitly addressed as strategies, try to understand them more fully, and then to explain them in a way that is clear, direct, and succinct. Or to identify competing strategies that you have perhaps recognized but hadn’t thought about how they relate to each other. Or to identify strategies that you employ now but that you hadn’t really thought about how they evolved to where they are now and what that tells you about where they will evolve in the future.
All of which is to say, reflect on your own new media literacy and find some place in your behavior that is surprising, confusing, contradictory, or otherwise just really interesting, and then explain it.
As with any other writing I ask you to do, the underlying action I am asking you to carry out is this:
Once you have completed your podcast episode, you should publish a reflection post. Embed the Soundcloud episode in your post (if I haven’t published the episode yet when you publish your post, just edit the post later to add the link once I have).
Your refection should be 250 – 500 words and should be in the form of an essay with complete paragraphs, not as a list of bullet point answers.
Include a brief description of your process for developing the podcast. How did you and the other producers divide up the tasks involved and how did you structure your collaboration? In what ways does your episode respond to the other episodes in the series — in other words, compare your episode to the ones before it, explaining how you gained inspiration from, adapted, or resisted something that your peers did in their episodes.
Please describe your primary goals with the episode that you produced and explain the strategies that you used to achieve them. You are producing these episodes under a number of time and technological constraints, so it’s likely that there will be some goals that you just cannot accomplish within those constraints — address what challenges arose for you and the choices you made to meet them and/or describe what you would have done differently had you more time/resources available for your episode (in other words, what are some aspirational goals that were perhaps unrealistic given the constraints of the assignment but that you would have liked to have tried to accomplish if circumstances were different?).
How do you see your work on the podcast episode helping you to achieve the learning outcomes for this course? Link to the specific learning outcome posts that applied to your work on this assignment, and explain how you met that outcome with your work on this assignment.
Make sure you address the sets of questions above and then also consider some of the questions below and address them in your reflection (you definitely won’t be able to answer all of these, so go through the list and pick some that seem to be most of interest for you and write about them):
As you read Jenkins and Creeber for class on Tuesday, I want you to take some sort of visual notes representing their definitions of new media. You can make your visual notes however you like — the only requirements are that you try your best to summarize and represent the arguments from “Theorizing New Media” and“‘Worship at the Altar of Convergence’: A New Paradigm for Understanding Media Change” and that you somehow you get your representation into a post on your site.
You can draw notes by hand on paper and then scan or take a photo and post them. (I prefer that you scan them — there are scanners around campus, including in the library, but if you take a picture please make some effort to take a good quality picture that we can actually make out.) You can also create your visual representation digitally to begin with in a bunch of different ways.
Some suggestions include:
The goal with this assignment is just to get you to play around with visualization techniques instead of relying solely on text to convey information. We’ll spend some time looking at the visualizations as we discuss the chapters on Tuesday.
Remember that this is just a sketch assignment — you don’t need to produce beautiful designs and you should not spend tons of time on this. Read the articles carefully and then spend a little bit of time sketching out your visuals, then post them. This is not polished, major assignment work but a sketch.
Tag your posts with however many tags seem appropriate, so long as one of them is “sketch4”
I’m a big fan of the work of Giulia Forsyth. She works in a teaching and learning center, where she helps professors and instructors be more innovative in their teaching practices, and she also works as a visual note-taker and facilitator, which means that she is sometimes employed to go to presentations and meetings and to doodle notes for the meeting.
Check out this four minute video where she gives a quick summary of how she began to take her doodling seriously and where it has led her:
On her Visual Practice page, Forsyth has lots of videos and images explaining how she approaches the task of producing drawings that help her and others to not just grab the information that’s been presented in a class or discussion, but to grapple with the material and better understand it. You can also see numerous examples on her Flickr page, especially her Visual Practice album.
I’m not asking you to take visual notes in real time in the same way that Forsyth does (though I would encourage you to try something like that!) so the technological choices for you are much easier, but I hope that the resources above are helpful in getting you to think through why this sort of practice might be helpful.
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We agreed to be paired up with students from the State University of New York, Environmental Science and Forestry in a project designed for you to talk, listen to each other, and learn something about each other.
Each of you will be receiving an email at your Emory address from a student in Janine DeBaise’s class over the next few days (the subject line for the email will include the words “Listening Project” so be on the lookout for that).
Please reply to that student’s email and work out:
Once you’ve got a method and details in common, you’ll arrange to talk and interview each other. The SUNY students have brainstormed a list list of sample questions and drafted a document about their goals. We should brainstorm our own list too (go to the Listening Project document in our shared Google Drive folder) — some of those questions might be the same, but we might want to ask some questions specifically about their new media reading and writing practices — where do they get their news? What sites do they read frequently? And so on.
After you have interviewed each other, you’ll each write something about what you have learned about each other. Like any other writing we do in this class, you’ll need visuals and text. If they agree to be recorded, you might also include audio (but make certain you get their permission before recording anything). Ask the other student how they want to be identified in your story (they might choose a pseudonym or might ask you to use their full name or something else).
When you’ve got your piece drafted, you’ll publish it as a page on your site but you need the other student to approve what you’ve written. Probably you should publish it as a password protected page, then send them the URL and password so they can see what you’ve done. Once it’s approved, you can just make the page public. Then you’ll write a post linking to the page and reflecting on the process (more details soon).
The other student will go through a similar process publishing a story about you. It would be a good idea to interlink those pages.
]]>Here are some additional instructions around some of the hot-to for the podcasts.
The Music and Media Library has a number of microphones available for checkout, including Snowball and Snowflake microphones. They aren’t on that list, but I believe they also have a box full of older iPod Nanos with microphone attachments that should work pretty well for recording voice too.
I have two Yeti usb microphones that I can loan out as well.
Audacity is a good, free, open-source audio editor (available for Windows, Mac, and Linux). There is a very good tutorial wiki for Audacity online — this basic page on mixing voice narration with music probably covers 90% of what you’ll need to do for your podcast. It’s not terribly difficult, but there is a learning curve to it and you should definitely make an extra copy of your raw audio files before you start mixing and editing them.
Expect for it to take longer than you think it should to do the sound editing and build time for mixing into your plans. There are some students in the class who have a fair amount of experience working with Audacity — make friends with them and ask them for help (make sure to give thanks for their help in your episode credits!).
Exporting as an MP3: Note that probably the most complicated part of using Audacity will be configuring the MP3 encoder. Because of copyright laws, Audacity does not come with a native MP3 encoder so you can’t export as MP3 straight out of the box. You’ll need to download and configure an extra plugin to do so.
Student Digital Life also has lots of resources that should be of use to you with this project. If you want to use more advanced software, the Media Lab has the full Adobe Creative Suite, including Adobe Audition, available and student assistants who can help you in using it. The Tech Lab is also a great space for you to go to get ideas about how to approach these projects.
You should plan to meet with me, ideally a couple of weeks before your episode is due, so that you can fill me in on your plans, we can brainstorm ideas, and you can ask me any questions that have come up. Try to come into the meeting with a paragraph of text outlining what you hope to achieve — think of it as an articulation of your hypothesis.
You are the producers of the episode, which means you’ve got ownership of it and make the decisions about how to get your episode together. I’m the executive producer, which means it’s my role to help you to achieve the goals you set for your episode while also ensuring that you meet the expectations for the series as a whole. These meetings should be collaborative negotiations.
You are allowed to bring in friends or other people from outside the class to take part in your podcast. You can also ask fellow classmates to appear in your episode, either to be interviewed or to serve as vocal talent — please be as generous as you can be with each other about agreeing to help out. If you do ask classmates to appear in your episode, please be respectful of their time and energy, and also make certain to thank them in the credits.
Depending on what new media publication you are looking into, you might also contact the author(s) or creator(s) and ask to do an interview, either in text through email or over Skype of Google Hangout or whatever. Ask in advance if you can record the interview, if possible, and let them know that you’d like to include them in the podcast episode.
If you ask someone from outside the class to appear in your episode, you should get them to fill out a media release form. Note that the form asks whether the person wants to be identified by a pseudonym, first name, or full name — make sure that they let you know and then use whichever method they choose to identify them during the episode credits section at the end of your podcast.
You are encouraged to mix music and sound effects or ambient sounds into your episode, as is appropriate and useful. If you do use music or songs, please find licensed or public domain music:
You are responsible for creating the audio for your episode, which includes an introduction that provides a title for your individual episode and the names of the two producers; the primary content of the episode itself, which should be about ten minutes in length; and a closing credit section for your individual episode in which you thank your Line Producer, provide references for works that you quote in the episode, and any other thanks that are applicable.
Once your episode is complete, send me a single MP3 with your episode content. You can upload it to the podcast group conversation in the backchannel or upload the file to Google Drive and share it with me (please do not email the file — that sometimes gets caught in the spam filters). Make sure to read the podcast assignment page carefully, noting the list at the end of everything you need to turn in along with the MP3.
]]>Now that we’ve settled on the title for our podcast, The Web We Weave (which we might write as THE wEB wE wEAVE) we need a few images before I can add the RSS feed for our new Soundcloud account to iTunes so that an audience can listen and subscribe to it:
(We also need to have episodes uploaded, which we won’t have until 2/16 when our first pair of producers finish their episodes and I upload them.)
Here’s your next sketch assignment: each of you should take a stab at designing a square cover image for our podcast. If you have some interest in design, it would be cool if you also tried creating a rectangular banner image too!
Take this as simply a creative challenge. Try to come up with a single image that conveys the discussions we’ve had so far about what this podcast will be about, the suggested topics in the podcast planning doc, and your own sense of what you want to happen with the podcast.
Use whatever technology you choose, including crayons and paper if that is what works for you. If you are using digital methods, export a good quality .jpg or .png file. If you use analog methods for designing a cover, then make a color scan of your image (don’t just snap a photo with your cell phone).
Here’s some inspiration for you: a the podcast gallery has a big list of podcasts and you can scroll through the cover images to see other designs. And here are the 2 covers for the podcast series from my classes on video games: Gamecast and Doing Video Game With … in case they help to spark something.
If you use images created by someone else in your design, make sure they are CC-licensed and allow modifications (in other words, the creator did not choose the NoDerivatives license).
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This is really a placeholder post for the sake of consistency. Here’s what I asked you to do as your sketch assignment for week 3:
Your homework between now and class on Tuesday is to read the introductory chapter of George Pullman’s Writing Online and to liveblog your reading on uBlend — which in this case means as you read, I want you to keep an eye out for claims that seem especially insightful, unexpected, or challenging. When something seems especially worth note, check the uBlend class stream and if someone has not already written about that claim, then add a post where you quote the claim, or at least paraphrase it, (and cite the page number parenthetically so we can all find it). Add a single sentence of your own — even if it’s brief — indicating why you find that claim interesting or posing a question about it. If someone has already addressed the claim that you were going to, add a “+1” reaction to their post, and if you feel like you have a slightly different reaction or want to offer an answer to the question your classmate posed, consider adding a one-sentence comment. You should each have at least one post in the stream, preferably two, and at least one comment on a classmate’s post (in addition to any +1s).
Usually these sketch assignments will be more visual and will be published as posts on your sites, but because you were still getting your sites set up, I went with liveblogging for this week instead.
]]>As the semester comes to an end, you will organize the work on your course site into a portfolio showing the work you have done this semester. Make certain that your entire course subdomain looks complete, coherent, and like you’ve given some thought to its overall design and aesthetics. As part of that process, you’ll write a portfolio cover essay about 750 – 1250 words (3-5 pages) in length, discussing your own learning and the improvement and progression you’ve made in the course.
In this particular case, the reflective essay should take as its topic your relationship to the writing process and should explore the improvements or progression you have made in this course. Over the course of your essay, you will link to and discuss each of the major projects you’ve published this semester, along with some of the best of your other work.
You might ask and answer the following questions:
Your reflective essay will address these kinds of questions in some way and will make use of the artifacts (your writing projects) you include in your portfolio as evidence to support your answers to the above questions. A reflective essay does not need to have a specific thesis but should have an organizational framework that takes the reader of your essay though your ideas effectively and clearly.
Because process is such a personal part of writing, in this reflective essay feel free to use first person and write a narrative of your experience, rather than an argumentative essay. You can present your discovery by:
However you choose to structure this reflective essay, it still needs to have a purpose. That purpose need not be defined by a thesis but perhaps might have more to do with acknowledging what you have learned and what you are still learning.
Because you are talking about the process of writing/composing each artifact and the portfolio as a whole, you should think of your portfolio and its artifacts as texts to be analyzed (like you would a piece of literature or an article not written by you). Quote from your writing. Use it to show your process and describe how the writing itself demonstrates your learning.
Imagine that the audience of your reflective essay has not read your writing before. You need to teach them about the artifacts themselves and how your writing process directly your portfolio.
Describe the assignments you composed in this course that allowed you to practice writing for an audience. Make sure to discuss what you learned in those assignments. Also, consider the challenges of writing to different audiences and how you managed those challenges.
The reflection should become the new index page for your course site and should begin with a note indicating that the site is an archive of the work that you completed as part of ENG221.000 at Emory University during spring semester 2017 and include a link back to your primary domain, should a visitor want to go see what you are up to currently, and a link to the site for this course, so that a reader who is going through your work can easily find out more information about the course you were in.
Notice that each of the Student Learning Outcomes outlined in the course site is a separate blog post, with its own separate permalink. As you are going back through your site and writing your reflection essay, consider how each piece you worked on met one or more of those learning outcomes, and then add a link someplace on that page to whichever outcomes it applies to–feel free to follow the example in the previous sentence and simply add a small parenthetical note with links to whichever outcomes apply.
Adding those links will create pingback comments on the Student Learning Outcomes posts on this site, and will therefore become another nonlinear route for exploring the work we’ve all engaged in as a community this semester. In order to make sure this works, first log into your own dashboard and find Settings > Discussion and the first check box, which is probably unchecked, says “Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article.” Check that box, then save your settings.
Your reflective essay should conform to the same hybrid of MLA guidelines and conventions for publishing on the web that you’ve used for your other writing this semester.
Your reflective essay must include visual elements. You have lots of freedom to decide the nature of these visuals, but one good choice available to you is to take screenshots of the projects on your site and use those as images for the major projects as you discuss them. You can also repeat images from your projects in your reflective essay. Or, you can use Flickr advanced searches to find CC-licensed images to use in your essay (make certain that you link back to the image properly if you do!). Just make certain that any images your include in your reflective essay are clearly identified with good captions.
Use links not URLs throughout your reflective essay and throughout your site.
In the process of reorganizing your site into a portfolio, you might consider changing themes for your course site. Your goal is to make certain that the entire site looks good, and shows that you’ve given thought to how the pieces all fit together. Think of the entire course site as an argument that you have met the learning outcomes for the class and that you know how to write, design, build, and publish an effective and thoughtful academic web site.
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