DWRL Lesson Plans - Arrangement

Tracing Memes in Storify

gianfagna — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 19:55:15 +0000

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Image Credit:

Screen shot of Storify home page

Brief Assignment Overview:

In this assignment, students use the free online program Storify to track the life of a meme by combining elements pulled from social and news media sources.

Type of Assignment:

In-class Exercise

Assignment Length:

One-Two Class Periods

Pedagogical Goals - Rhetoric:

Pedagogical Goals - Writing:

Organization

Summary

Synthesis

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

Additional Pedagogical Goals:

I've used this assignment in two different ways. The first time I taught the course, I used it as an outlining exercise. The second time I taught the course, I allowed students to use Storify as the platform for the essay itself. The outlining exercise can easily transition into a larger assigment. Originally, this assignment was meant to serve as both an invention and an outlining exercise for students as they prepared to write their first essay, where they map the similarities and differences among three iterations of a meme in terms of media, venue, exigence, purpose, audience, and message. This in-class project as well as the more formal essay are two ways of achieving one of the larger course goals: to have students look beyond individual platforms and investigate—through emerging multimedia composing practices—the broader, interconnected digital media landscape.

Media Requirements:

Adaptable For Use Without Classroom Technology

Technology-Based Classroom (computers for each student)

Required Materials:

Computer with internet connection

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Useful Anytime

Full Assignment Description:

In the context of my course, Rhetoric of Going Viral, the focus is on tracking a meme across multiple iterations, creating a sort of metacommentary on the way it has changed across media and time. I require that students integrate at least three “primary” texts, or iterations of their meme, as well as at least one contextual source to help the reader understand the meme’s origin, impact, etc.

The Storify interface allows students to search Twitter, YouTube, Google, Facebook, Flickr, the Storify site, and RSS feeds. Then they can drag the texts, images, and videos they find in the research window into their story. They can add commentary and rearrange elements as they go. At the top, they can add a title and a summary of their story. When they’re satisfied with their work, they can publish their story and share the link on a blog or social media platform.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

In the class period before students are scheduled to complete the assignment, I recommend sharing a few Storify pieces and discussing the assignment requirements. For homework, I have students select primary texts and contextual sources, though many do additional research as they are composing. Students will also need to create a Twitter account to log in.

The day of, students might spend the first 10 minutes of class getting signed in and walking through the basic features of the interface. There are also screencasts available on the Storify if you’d like to have students watch a tutorial prior to beginning their projects.

Instructions For Students:

Outline version

In Research Summary 1 and 2, you have practiced locating, summarizing and contextualizing online texts. As you move into Essay 1.1, you will create a multimedia narrative to help generate ideas and guide your writing. Using Storify, you will illustrate the relationships among the three primary texts you plan to use in essay 1.1. Your story should include three “primary” texts, or iterations of the meme, as well as contextual information about its origin, popularity, reactions it has caused, etc. You can organize your narrative chronologically or according to publication venue, message, topoi, or stakeholders. Remember that your primary goal is to give your reader insight into the relationships among these texts, so you will want to organize them in a way that makes those relationships most visible and gives your reader ample opportunity to note important overlaps and differences. Keep in mind that your map needs to include enough information and visual cues that it can be read and understood as a stand-alone narrative (that is, without the aid of additional explanation from you to me or your classmates). When you’re finished, you will publish your piece to your class blog.

Essay version

General

You have two options for the first assignment: a traditional essay of about 3 pages (this option can include embedded images and other multimedia elements or not) OR a Storify piece that fulfills all objectives of the assignment. If you choose the Storify option, you will need to sign up for a free account or sign in with your Twitter or Facebook login. The platform allows you to pull text, images and video from news and social media sites and integrate them into a narrative. You can add commentary and transitions to complete the story of the meme you’re mapping. Here is a demo/tour of the site’s capabilities.

For your first major project, you will trace the life of an event or argument, placing it in a specific socio-historical context and noting how its rhetorical features change and evolve as it moves through multiple media platforms or iterations over time. To do so, find three digital or physical texts (blog posts, videos, news coverage, op-eds, tattoos, T-shirts, posters, etc.) responding to a common exigence and talk in-depth about the sequence in which these texts appeared, the venues in which they are presented, and how the representation of the idea changes according to media and genre. You will be required to include at least 4 sources (3 of which will be the texts themselves and the other of which might be contextual information from a website or article).

Your purpose in this essay/Storify piece is to map out the various texts or versions of a single text you've chosen, clearly describing each one and then highlighting the relationships among them. Do not argue for which of the texts is “best,” but rather articulate as neutrally as possible what each says and what its relationship is to the other texts.

One way to maintain a neutral stance is to give each text equal space and attention in your paper, giving each the opportunity to present its message from its own perspective when possible. Be sure to attribute statements to their original speakers or organizations: phrases such as "According to. . ." and "As stated by. . ." along with verbs that indicate that someone has stated a particular position, such as argues, advocates, asserts and contends will indicate that the argument you are presenting is not necessarily your own.

Your audience for this essay will be concerned and interested but not particularly informed citizens who are looking to you to provide an unbiased lay of the land. With that in mind, you will want to provide enough background information to allow them to follow the conversation but not so much detail that it overwhelms your primary purpose.

Specifics

You'll want to sketch out the basics of what your three texts have in common and provide brief but informative descriptions of their form and content. You can draw heavily on your annotated bibliography for this information. For example, if they are all responding in different ways to a common exigence, you may want to explain what event(s) or cultural moment led to the creation of these texts. For each of the three individual texts, you'll want to tell your audience who created them, where and when they appeared, who they are targeted towards, and what message they send or position they take. Provide a clear timeline and sense of how the three texts relate to each other.
You'll want to compare how the texts have responded similarly or differently to the event or idea that spurred their creation. As you do so, you'll want to indicate who the stakeholders are (as well as what each source's stake is) and points of intersection and diversion among their responses. Your comparison (or perhaps the essay/Storify piece itself) should begin with a polished claim summarizing the main similarities and differences—a thesis. If you're discussing one meme that has appeared in multiple contexts, you'll want to focus on any ways it has changed or how it is being used or regarded differently on each site.
Document your sources according to the MLA or APA documentation guidelines.

Evaluation Suggestions:

I use the Learning Record, so individual assignments do not receive grades. Rather, I comment on the Storify projects and students later draw on those comments when composing midterm and final evaluations of their performance in the class.

Notes on Reception, Execution, etc.:

My experience has been that students really love the Storify interface and need very little instruction to create their projects. Many students commented that they felt the texts they were working with were more visible, more immediately available to them as they were writing in Storify than in Word, and so their arguments emerged with less difficulty. As a reader, I found the Storify outlines and essays very engaging.

Course Type:

Introductory Writing Course

Course Description:

RHE 309K - Rhetoric of Going Viral - an intermediate writing course.

Tags:

Visual Representation

Revising/Drafting/Editing With Wikis

detweiler — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 17:19:32 +0000

Author:

Eric Detweiler

Image Credit:

Eric Detweiler

Brief Assignment Overview:

Students engage with and revise each other's texts using a wiki platform. Allows students to consider the various ways of composing a summary of a single text.

Type of Assignment:

In-class Exercise

Homework Assignment

Assignment Length:

Partial Class Period

Pedagogical Goals - Writing:

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

Collaboration

Software

Additional Pedagogical Goals:

For my RHE 306 (introductory composition) course, I created a course wiki to which students posted numerous in-class activities and homework assignments. I find wiki particularly advantageous for group activities, as students can create pages that all group members can edit/revise/view/etc. (which GoogleDocs can also allow, but in a different manner). A wiki can thus be a useful space for foregrounding the collaborative nature of writing. Also worth noting is the “page history” feature of PBWorks, the wiki platform I use, which can allow both students and you, the instructor, to see how a particular page developed.

This lesson plan provides a way for students to think carefully about the rhetorical choices they make when summarizing a text by collaborating on the creation of a trio of wiki pages. The lesson plan is also designed to help students learn the difference between drafting, revising, and editing—three stages of the writing process we have already discussed as this lesson plan unfolds.

Media Requirements:

Adaptable For Use Without Classroom Technology

Required Materials:

Computers with internet access, preferably one per student; a course wiki (as mentioned above, I use PBWorks).

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Early in the Semester

Full Assignment Description:

I divide students into groups of 3.* Each group is assigned one chapter from the RHE 306 first-year forum book, and each member of that group is responsible for composing a “research summary” (RS) of their assigned chapter. (RSs are one-page summaries of a source’s argument, and are ideally free from the summarizer’s opinion about that argument.) I have students compose their RSs as Word documents, then copy and paste them into the body of a wiki page. I also ask them to choose a distinct color for their wiki-page summaries. Below is a screenshot of a student’s RS. The student has turned it blue using the bottom-left button in the formatting toolbars above the text window.

Once each student's research summary (RS) is drafted and uploaded, I assign her/his RS to another group member to revise—for instance, if Jaime, Harold, and Terry are a group, Jaime is assigned to revise Terry’s RS, Harold is to revise Jaime’s, and Terry to revise Harold’s. I ask each student to make her/his revisions in a different color than the original draft of the RS.

Finally, I reassign the revised RS to the third group member, who is charged with editing (i.e., Terry drafts, Jaime revises Terry’s draft, and Harold edits the revised draft).

Since deletions obviously don’t have a color, I also have students record any removed phrases, words, punctuation, etc., at the bottom of the page.

The timing on this whole process can differ—you can assign it as homework and have each stage due on a different day, or you can have the revision and editing stages take place during a class meeting.

After the editing work is done, I have the original drafter look at her/his revised and edited RS. I then let the groups have internal discussions about how they made the choices they did at each stage: Why did Harold choose to quote different lines than Jaime during his drafting process? What led Terry to cut the first line of Harold’s second paragraph? If you want something tangible, you can have students write out their reflections: Where did their group members original drafts differ? What rhetorical choices did their group members make that led to these differences? What differences in opinion were revealed in what group members chose to revise about each other’s RSs, and did any revisions seem especially effective? Etc. Broadly speaking, I like these questions to get students thinking about writing—even summary—as a rhetorical process rather than a fill-in-the-blanks sort of task.

*If the total number of students in the class isn't divisible by three, I'll create groups of four, but each group member will only engage with two other group members' summaries as revisor/editor.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

At this point in the semester, my students are already familiar with the wiki and the process for creating wiki pages. We have also discussed the differences between drafting, revising, and editing, which I roughly define as the following:

Drafting: The creation of new written material—getting words on the page for the first time, similar to invention.
Revising: Working with the words you’ve already composed (moving paragraphs or sentences around, rewriting phrases for clarity, deleting extraneous sentences/paragraphs/pages), which can include some new writing (scrapping and recomposing your introduction, or adding a new sentence at the end of a paragraph to better establish that paragraph’s purpose).
Editing: Cleaning up/polishing your grammar, spelling, citation, etc. (removing commas, adding in-text citations, changing “th” to “the”).

We will have also already covered methods of forwarding a source’s argument, particularly the relative merits of summary, paraphrase, and direct quotation.

Instructions For Students:

Relatively similar to the full instructions above--mostly, assign the students the chapter summary as homework in advance, have them post it to the wiki before class begins the day of the activity, and put them into (ideally) groups of three. From there, instruct them to revise one of there group member's summaries using a particular color of text, the edit the third group member's summary with yet another particular color. At the end, have them discuss why they made the specific revision and editorial choices they did and discuss what they found particularly effective about the group's summaries.

Evaluation Suggestions:

I generally grade this assignment on a pass/fail basis—as long as the student completed all three stages, they get credit.

Notes on Reception, Execution, etc.:

Students do occasionally find the process tedious, especially by the editing stage. As an alternative, the original drafts could be shorter. Really, one paragraph of drafted material could be enough given how extensive this activity can become.

Course Type:

Introductory Writing Course

Course Description:

Rhetoric 306 is a course in argumentation that situates rhetoric as an art of civic discourse. It is designed to enhancestudents' ability to analyze the various positions held in any public debateand to advocate positions effectively. Students work in this course willhelp them advance the critical writing and reading needed to succeed in coursesfor their major and university degree.

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