Listening Project

Overview

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.

Method

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:

• A method for synchronous communication (for example, Skype or Google hangouts)
• Find out basic information about each other and discern 5 things you have in common

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.