Your homework to complete before we meet again on Thursday:
- Read over this website very carefully as it constitutes the syllabus for this course. Note that the Syllabus page includes a number of subpages, covering such topics as: how to contact me and course objectives; the texts you need to buy; attendance, participation, and other policies; how you will be graded; and how Domain of One’s Own will impact your experience in this class. There is also a calendar of reading and assignments; and pages describing the major and minor assignments this semester.
- Add this site to your bookmarks. Make certain that you can find your way back here, because you’ll be spending a lot of time visiting these pages over the course of this semester.
- Join the class Ublend site: simply go to https://ublend.co/, select “Join a class” and use this class key when registering: x6y8cl
- Reply to this survey form, which both asks some basic information I’ll need in order to manage communications with you and also asks some questions that will help me get to know you a little bit better.
Once you’ve completed those tasks, you should to sign up for a domain and server space, which you will be using extensively this semester:
- Sign up for a domain of your own. (But first, see this post first for a note about choosing a domain name.)
- Come back to this post once you have signed up for your domain and leave a comment. Enter your name and email and the new domain address in the “website” line when on the comment. In the body of the comment, ask one question about the syllabus. If you want to get an email update each time a post is published on this site, you can also check the box labeled “Notify me of new posts by email.”
What will our final for this class look like?
The final will be a presentation of your final portfolio.
Will there be any group projects?
Yes, lots of different types, but the primary one I only mentioned glancingly — we’ll be producing a podcast series together over the course of the semester and those episodes will be produced in teams. We’ll talk lots more about that next week.
Are the short writing assignments going to be posts on our own websites or handed in assignments?
Everything for this class will be published digitally one way or another. There shouldn’t be any occasion this semester where you turn in something to me in hard copy.
Once this class is over, do we have permission to use what we have created and edit or expand on it/reuse it in the future? (And I don’t mean to be rude, but is there a reason that the table on the “Explanation of Letter Grades” table goes C, B, A and then explains the criteria for D and F? Thank you!)
Yes, the site is yours and I will be thrilled if you edit and expand on it. I will ask you to keep the specific subdomain you create for this class stable at least for a few weeks after the semester ends, for purposes of program assessment (we’ll talk about this more later). But you should use your domain however you’d like beyond that. In fact, if you want to create subdomains for other purposes or flesh out your primary domain in other ways or set up sites for other classes right now, please do!
The letter grades are organized that way because I am explicitly trying to cut against a theory of grading that says every student starts out with a 100 in the class and loses points as they screw up. More on that later, too!
I’ve done the podcast series before in one of your previous classes. What are some of the general changes to that project from previous years?
It will change depending on how we as a class decide to structure rules for episodes. I can’t give a more concrete answer to that question until we have that discussion.
For the podcast series, will everybody be working on the podcast each week or is it only a small group within the class?
Is there anything specific that we need to have on the main page of our sites?
What are some more sources that model the type writing we will be trying to emulate throughout the semester?