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:
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.
]]>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.
]]>This semester, as a class we’ll be producing a podcast series about new media, in which we’ll share our thinking with each other and with listeners outside the class. Early in the semester, we’ll spend a class period developing a more specific plan for how we want to structure the series, coming up with a title for the whole series, and making some decisions about the process. We will also work together to record an introductory audio segment, which will go at the start of each episode of the podcast, and to design a logo and other visuals for promotion.
Read on for further details so you have a sense of what to expect.
As instructor for the class, I will be the Executive Producer for the series. In this capacity, it will be my role to consult with the individuals responsible for any given episode, to provide some guidance in order to ensure that each episode maintains the standards of the whole, and to provide feedback on the production.
Each student in the class will be responsible for serving as Producer for one single episode. The Producer initiates, coordinates, supervises, and controls all aspects of the podcast episode production process, including creative, technological, and administrative. A Producer is involved throughout all phases of production from inception to completion, including coordination, supervision, and control of all other talents and crafts, and publication and promotion of the completed episode.1
Each student in the class will also serve as the Assistant Producer for one episode. As the title suggests, the Assistant Producer helps the Producer to create a finished episode. The Assistant Producer will come in at the beginning, with initiation of the idea for the episode, and will help to think through how to bring the Producer’s ideas to fruition, including providing assistance with research, storyboarding, recording, and editing. The Producer is ultimately responsible for final decisions and should be the primary coordinator for the entire process, but the Assistant Director should be included as a collaborator in the entire process.
Each student will also serve as a Line Producer for one episode — the creative decision-making process is reserved to the Producer and Assistant Producer but the Line Producer serves to assist them where necessary. The Line Producer probably does not need to be involved in the initial planning and research of the episode, but can come in just before it’s time to record and help with final steps in the process. In your individual teams, you can decide reasonable boundaries around this role, but I’m imagining that the Line Producer can be responsible for technological assistance and overseeing the recording while the two primary producers are in the midst of generating the content for the episode — they can watch sound levels and listen in on headphones while the producers speak to check that the sound quality is good. Probably it’s too much to expect the Line Producer to be the primary editor for the episode, that’s something the primary producers should focus on, but the Line Producer can offer suggestions during the recording and editing process.
The Producer and Assistant Producer will be together as a team for two episodes, taking turns as to who is in charge between them. The Line Producers can rotate however makes sense with regards to availability.
(Role definitions adapted from the Producers Guild of America.)
Each episode should be approximately 10-15 minutes in length. Once you deliver your part of the episode to me, I will add the series intro audio bumper, which will be the same for all episodes. Your production will begin with the audio introduction for this episode that will identify the title of the episode, its primary subject, and name the Producer and Assistant Producer. Then there will be the primary content of the episode itself, and finally a closing segment in which you thank your Line Producer for assisting you, provide credit for anyone else who was involved in the episode (for example, if you interview someone in the episode, make sure to name them in the close), provides the URL for the publication you’re analyzing, and lets listeners know that you’ll provide citations for all of your sources in the episode description.
I think we agreed that, for the most part at least, each episode will take a single publication as its subject. We have left open the possibility that some episodes might compare a couple of publications (for example, a single episode about Every Frame a Painting and Folding Ideas together) or that we might have episodes that take a single topic and look at a range of different new media publications devoted to that topic (for example, the HBO series Westworld) — but if producers decide to pursue these ideas, they’ll need to think carefully about how their episodes fit within the structure of the series that we lay out.
For each episode, the Producer and Assistant Producer should attempt to schedule a conference with me in advance to brainstorm and discuss ideas and structure. I’m not going to make it an absolute requirement that you meet with me, in case schedules just preclude it, but if we can’t meet in person we have to at least touch base before you start recording. We can meet at whatever stage before recording is most useful for you — if you want to come in as soon as you know what your episode subject is and do initial brainstorming that’s fine, or you could also come in after you’ve done research and are pretty certain what the key aspects of your argument are. The goal of these conferences is for me to be in a collaborative space with you, where I can help identify questions or strategies that might be useful. I’ll also be ensuring that there is some consistency across episodes, so that the series as a whole coheres.
We’ll also set up a group Direct Message channel in the backchannel for communicating about the episode. You can choose how extensively to make use of this channel, but hopefully it will prove helpful.
Once your episode is completed, you’ll need to send me a finished MP3, including your episode intro, the body, and a close. I’ll add the series introduction and then publish it to Soundcloud.
You will also need to provide the following, all of which I’ll publish to Soundcloud along with the audio:
The Producer and Assistant Producer should each also write and publish to their sites a reflective blog post soon after submitting their materials to me. (I’ll publish a prompt separately and link to it from here.)
]]>
More details to come, but as the next iteration of your technology narrative I’ll ask you to produce a complex self-portrait representing your uses of technology.
]]>The technological literacy narrative is designed to ask you, over a period of several sessions, to describe your early relationship with technology (particularly in regards to writing), to explain your current relationship with various technologies, and to reflect how these relationships have evolved over time. The narratives will encourage reflection on your past, present, and future relationship with technology.
Please do some freewriting in response to the following questions. Please try to write for at least five minutes in response to each question. Use as much detail as possible—try to imagine all the details but don’t worry about spelling, grammar, or structure yet:
Now that you’ve gotten a good start brainstorming I’d like you to expand on those questions through your writing, working to fashion a narrative detailing your past history with technology. Use the questions as a starting place but feel free to elaborate on issues or questions that are salient to your individual history. Later in the term I will ask you to look at your current relationships with various technologies, and finally I’ll ask you to look to the future, and I will ask you to remix the pieces in some other ways.
Publish your narrative as a page on your class subdomain (make certain to add it to the menu, so we can all find it).
As with everything you publish for me this semester, you need more than just words for your narrative — you must have at least one image, video, or audio file with your narrative. You’ll need to provide a caption and give credit to the creator of the image (even if it’s your own).
Once you have published your narrative, you’ll need to publish a post about the narrative that links to the page. That post should serve two fundamental functions: it will provide a compelling preview of your narrative that summarizes the controlling idea of your narrative in a sentence or two that encourages readers to read what you have written and it will reflect on what you have learned in the process of writing your technology literacy narrative.
Some questions to consider in your reflection: