Tuesday’s class will be divided between three activities:

• touching base on the podcast series at the midpoint, evaluating the episodes so far and adjusting course as necessary;
• discussing best practices for visual analysis through the Tableau white paper linked above, and also available in our backchannel (and I’ll also bring in some books on data viz to pass around and look through); and
• continuing the discussion of the Opportunity Project data, website, and Tableau. If you weren’t in class yesterday, check out Katie’s helpful introduction to Tableau document.

If you have not already downloaded Tableau, please make certain to do so asap. If you installed the software in trial version mode, the student account product key information is now available in our backchannel.

For class on Thursday, we’ll look at data visualizations you complete as the sketch assignment and we’ll discuss, hopefully settle on, working groups for us to proceed in the following weeks.

Almost forgot a week ahead post! We’ll spend some time today looking at the two articles framing the Equality of Opportunity Project and talk about the issues they raise.

On Thursday, Katie Rawson from the library will meet with us and help us frame our investigation of the data. She’ll also show us Tableau, a data visualization package. Spend some time before class on Thursday exploring the Equality of Opportunity site and looking at the sort of data and analysis that they present on their page.

Edited to add

Please download and install Tableau for Students. You’ll have to provide some basic information and your official Emory email address before you can download it for free. If possible, install the software before class on Thursday (for the teacher version, I had to submit credentials that they will evaluate and they have told me 5-7 days before I get a response — I don’t know if it’s the same process for students). If you can’t get the full student version immediately, please install the trial version.

Check the backchannel for further information about activating the students teacher key for Tableau. If you haven’t already downloaded the software, you can get it here.

If you run into problems, let me know.

This week we’ll talk about accessibility and technology. Sarah Hendren’s “All Technology is Assistive” is an excellent introduction to universal design principles. Ian Bogost’s article was just published in The Atlantic this week and is not directly connected to accessibility issues, but I think it raises some useful ways to think about the issue, which we’ll connect up with Anil Dash’s blog post from 5 years ago.

Tuesday

Read the Sarah Hendren article linked above. I’ve also asked you to watch this screen reader demonstration:

The first 5 minutes is the demonstration itself, followed by a brief description of what is going on.

We’ll spend time in class connecting the demonstration video and Hendren’s article with Pullman’s argument in Writing Online. What lessons can we draw from these sources about how we present information?

Thursday

We’ll continue the discussion of accessibility, but we’ll also bring Bogost and Dash into the mix.

[More details coming here today]

In class on Tuesday, we’ll focus on The Listening Project and the podcast series. Before class, please reply to the emails you receive the student you’re interviewing and begin to establish some common interests. Think about the questions you’d like to ask your peer.

And before class on Tuesday, make sure you have listened carefully and closely to the first two podcast episodes that went up on Friday. I encourage you to comment on them in Soundcloud or on the posts on this site — note that in Soundcloud you can connect your comment to a specific moment in the episode, so if there’s a specific moment you want to highlight, you can locate your comment right there.

For Thursday’s class, we’ll work on code with Pullman. I want you to at least begin to move towards being able to replace the WordPress site on your primary domain (not the subdomain for this class but your primary domain) with the code that you’ve been writing along with Writing Online.

Also, make certain to sign up to meet with me individually this week for conferences.

George Williams is a professor of English at the University of South Carolina Upstate. He has helped facilitate several workshops on accessibility & pedagogy and accessibility & digital environments, including for the NEH-funded “Accessibility Future” project. Additionally, Dr. Williams is an editor and writer for ProfHacker, an online publication devoted to pedagogy, productivity, and technology in higher education. His research and teaching interests include writing studies, technologies of writing, digital humanities, disability studies, and British Literature. He will be giving a lecture for the Writing Program entitled “The Universe is a Big Place: Re-considering Universal Design for Learning” on accessibility in the classroom and in online spaces. I will offer extra credit for any student who attends the lecture and writes a blog post about what you learn. Lecture is Thursday 2/23 at 6pm in RARB 322.

Podcast series work over the weekend

In class today we decided to go with the logo that Jose designed for the podcast. As we discussed in class, on Tuesday we will record the intro bumper, which means that the script for our intro needs to be completed by Monday. There’s a new Google doc in our shared folder called “Podcast intro” — please, all of you, work on the language in that document and craft something that sets a tone for the series while also being relatively informative about what listeners can expect. As you read Creeber and Jenkins, you might keep an eye out for language or ideas that we can incorporate.

We’ll spend a few minutes at the start of class on Tuesday, recording the intro. Daniel has volunteered to be one voice in the intro. Do we want just one person reading or would it be worthwhile to get at least one other voice in the intro? Anyone else interested in volunteering?

Please also make suggestions for music in the intro at the bottom of the podcast intro document. I’ve got a list of possibilities in there, but you can suggest others or comment with reactions to those.

Readings

Creeber and Jenkins are both working towards giving a broad overview and a theoretical grounding for this broad genre “new media.” I want to spend a significant chunk of class time discussing their models and how we might apply them.

Sketch Assignment

Post will be up very soon (here it is!), but I want you to generate a visual representation of how Creeber and Jenkins define new media writing before class on Tuesday.

Many of you have already posted designs for the podcast series. If you haven’t, get something up soon. And please comment on your peers’ designs with appreciation and constructive criticism (and approve comments from your peers on your own).

By now, you’ve read a number of different takes on the issue of information literacy, critical thinking, fake news, crap, or bullshit — as it’s been variously referenced in the readings. We’ll spend time in class today talking about those issues and perhaps connecting that to what we are observing over the last week or so in the world at large.

I’ll also pitch an idea for an assignment that we would collaborate on with students in upstate New York and Florida called “The Listening Project” (draft proposal here).

Thursday there will be no class because I’ll be putting on a workshop at Georgia State. I’ll probably be showing them this site as part of that presentation, so maybe some of them will comment on the work you’re doing? You should have your literacy narrative pieces published to your site sometime on Thursday — if some of you can possibly have them up by Thursday morning, that would be great, but you are only required to have those posted sometime before its’ Friday.

We haven’t spent enough time discussing the coding assignments and probably won’t have time in class today either, so expect to spend a significant chunk of class on Tuesday of next week circling back to the coding. I’ll try to have instructions for getting your code loaded into a folder on your site by the end of this week too, so that you can put it up and we can all check each others’ code out.

Also, please at least 4 of you need to volunteer to start production of the first pair of podcast episodes! I’ll help you get going once you’ve signed up for that slot! Volunteer so I don’t have to voluntell you!

I’ve rearranged the schedule for the next couple of weeks a bit, so pay attention.

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).

You should also, before class on Tuesday, read through the post where I listed some potential examples of subjects for our podcast and think about examples of new media that you might want to analyze in a podcast episode. Which probably means spending some time thinking about what media sources you consume as you spend your time online. As you are doing that, you should also be thinking about your behaviors and habits online — what sorts of things you do online now, what sorts of technologies you use, and how you got to where you are with technology. What sorts of technologies do you know how to use? What sorts of technologies do you wish you knew how to use? When you write something for class or for other purposes, what sort of process do you use and what technologies do you rely on? How do you take notes, keep yourself on task, collaborate with others? How have all of those processes evolved while you’ve been in college? Just keep those questions in the back of your mind and take note of any observations that arise while you are reading Pullman or thinking about podcast subjects. Thinking about those questions will help you to begin to construct your technology literacy personal narrative beginning on Tuesday.

For Thursday, you’ll need a plain text editor (not MS Word or Google docs). My favored text editors are TextWrangler (Mac only, I think) or Atom (which is Mac, Windows, or Linux). Notepad++ for Windows is also highly rated. As you read, perform the coding tasks outlined. I’ll follow up with some more specific instructions for uploading the resulting files to your domain early in the week.

The Rolin Moe article is in fairly direct conversation with the Rheingold chapter from week 2, so we’ll circle back and discuss evaluating sources online during class as well.

During week two, we’ll begin discussing Howard Rheingold’s Net Smart. (Remember you can get an electronic version of the book through Woodruff.) Come to class on having read the assigned chapters.

Before we meet again for the second week of classes, you also need to have a couple of websites up and ready to begin being developed.

If you haven’t already, register a domain and install WordPress on it, then create a subdomain for this class and install WordPress into the subdomain too. (More detailed instructions are included here — and there are links from there to even more detailed instructions.) With your subdomain, follow the instructions in that linked post and configure the site as directed.

Once your domain is set up, create an avatar too. Make certain your final image is a square and publish it as a blog post on your class subdomain. Once I’ve got your subdomain URL and I’ve set up the course feed function, your avatar post will automagically come over to this page and then I’ll use your avatar images to fill in the student sites page.

If you run into trouble with any of this work, please:

Just do your best to work through it. If WordPress is new to you, this will all be a little disorienting and confusing, but I promise you that it will feel much more manageable once you’ve gotten used to this all a bit. There are other students in the class who have done all this before, so if you do run into trouble, before you come to me with your questions, try posting in uBlend and seeing if someone else can help your figure it out.