DWRL Lesson Plans - Collaboration

Assignment Length:

One-Two Class Periods

Pedagogical Goals - Literature:

Cultural Context

Historical Context

Literary Criticism

Pedagogical Goals - Writing:

Research

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

Media Requirements:

Required Materials:

Scavenger hunt worksheets, enough for each student (should be created by the instructor prior to the class; see "Suggestions for Instructor Preparation")
Computers for student research (since the exercise takes place in the library, using the library computers works just fine or even better)

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Full Assignment Description:

There are a variety of ways an instructor could set up for this activity, but here's what I did (and found successful):

We met in our regular classroom, where I distributed my twenty-question worksheet and broke them into teams (see "Suggestions for Instructor Preparation"). After everyone had a chance to read over the sheet, we walked over to the PCL together, whereupon I showed them where I’d be waiting on the ground floor in case they had any questions or when they were ready to submit their worksheets. I emphasized that they needed to submit their worksheets by the end of the class period, whether or not they were finished. Thanks to our 75-minute class period, they all had plenty of time to complete their work.

I did not require my students to stay with their team members at all times. I said they could remain together, or they could split up if they found it more efficient to do so, as long as they each turned into me a worksheet with answers that matched those of their teammates, to prove that they'd discussed their findings with one another.

For the first portion of the following class period, we reviewed their findings and discussed the commonly missed answers.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

First, I would strongly recommend having discussed digital research strategies and research goals for the class prior to this activity. We had already done these things, which was helpful because the digital research components of the exercise were much-needed practice but not first-time efforts (which undoubtedly saved time), and because they had a better understanding of why exactly I'd be encouraging them to find resources about Nigerian history, for example, when we were discussing a coming-of-age novel set primarily in Lagos (Chris Abani's GraceLand).

More immediately prior to the library scavenger hunt day, the instructor should create the scavenger hunt sheet. Because my own questions were so tailored to our specific class, I don't want to lay out our exact set of questions here, but here are some of the types of questions I found most productive:

Questions about relevant library resources. For example, I asked them how they'd obtain a copy of a certain book of which I knew UT didn't have a copy. Some of them already knew about Interlibrary Services, others decided to ask someone at the Help desk, etc.
Questions for which the answers could be found either digitally or physically. For example, I asked them to decide which chapter of a particular history book seemed like it would offer the most relevant context for a story we'd been analyzing in class. I chose this book purposely both because it was pertinent and because I knew it was available both via Google Books and in hard copy at the library. In our subsequent class discussion, we compared/contrasted strategies for tracking down digital vs. physical resources.
Questions that require students to consider the library's physical layout. That is, I asked them to find a particular book (the collection of short stories from which we had read) and then identify two others on nearby shelves that seemed relevant and interesting. A lot of them later indicated that even if they'd tracked down a book at the library before, they'd never thought to look around for pertinent titles in the area.
Questions that require just one extra step of Googling and/or that are solveable by using a series of different research strategies. For example, I asked them to find an article in Research in African Literatures about the novel we were reading. (I knew the journal had published several articles on the novel over the last ten years or so.) Most of them didn't know what Research in African Literatures was, but they all came up with an appropriate article, some because they'd Googled the journal title, others because they used library databases, and so forth. The various strategies they deployed to answer this question led us to an especially fruitful conversation later.

Ideally, the instructor should also assign teams in advance of the scavenger hunt. What worked well for me was to create an even distribution of English/Rhetoric majors, students with different class standings, etc., among the teams.

The instructor should also take into account questions of student mobility, disability, etc. I conferred with my students beforehand to make sure that the walk from the classroom to the library and the movement around the library was not at all burdensome for them.

Instructions For Students:

You have until the end of the class meeting to complete the library scavenger hunt worksheet. If you have any questions over the course of the scavenger hunt, you are welcome to come find me, but of course I can't give much away. You do not have to remain physically with your team members, but if you choose to split up research tasks, you must reconvene at the end to discuss your answers with one another. When you submit your worksheets, I will check to make sure that your sheets all have matching answers, to confirm that you've gone over everything with each other.

Evaluation Suggestions:

I scored their worksheets after class. The teams earned between 16.5 and 19 points out of a possible 20 points, so I was pretty happy with that result.

We also had a follow-up class discussion during our next meeting, which was a good opportunity to compare/contrast their various research strategies and to review the answers to commonly missed questions.

Notes on Reception, Execution, etc.:

My students seemed to enjoy and learn from the activity. Among the gains they later mentioned were that they had mostly never thought about looking around the shelves for similar titles, that they got a better sense of the library's layout, that they were less anxious to ask for help from a librarian, and that they learned from each other's research strategies (ex. brainstorming different search terms). It also didn't hurt that getting out of the classroom for a day seemed like a novel experience for many of them.

Course Type:

Course Description:

Violence, social inequality, anarchy, authoritarianism, poverty, disease, natural disaster, manmade disaster: what makes a place truly dangerous, and for which people? And how can books that merely depict dangerous places seem so threatening that they themselves are deemed too risky for certain audiences? With a broad understanding of what might constitute “danger,” we will investigate these and other questions through reading banned fiction set in dangerous places around the world.

The primary aim of this course is to help students develop and improve the critical reading, writing, and thinking skills needed for success in upper-division courses in English and other disciplines. They will also gain practice in using the Oxford English Dictionary and other online research tools and print resources that support studies in the humanities. Students will learn basic information literacy skills and models for approaching literature with various historical, generic, and cultural contexts in mind.

This course contains a writing flag. The writing assignments in this course are arranged procedurally with a focus on invention, development through instructor and peer feedback, and revision; they will comprise a major part of the final grade.

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Banned Books Virtual Read-Out

herbly — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 21:48:42 +0000

Author:

Hala Herbly

Image Credit:

bannedbooksweek.org

Brief Assignment Overview:

Students videotape themselves reading 2-minute-long passages from a banned book of their choice. They then upload their readings to the Virtual Read-Out Youtube channel, sharing them nationally. Instructions can be found here.

This assignment is well-suited to banned books classes, though I don't see why anyone else couldn't participate. Banned Books Week falls at the beginning of every October, and the American Library Association, among many others (see here for a full list of sponsors) organizes a Virtual Read-Out.

Since I am teaching my banned books class during Banned Books Week, I am making student participation in the Virtual Read-Out optional for extra credit. Even though this assignment is voluntary, I've had a couple of submissions, and a few more are in the works.

Type of Assignment:

Semester-long Project

Assignment Length:

Partial Class Period

Pedagogical Goals - Literature:

Additional Pedagogical Goals:

This assignment accomplishes a few pedagogical goals. First, it requires the student to choose a book important to them, thus requiring a degree of engagment that compulsory excercises don't always inspire. It should be noted that they are not required to read from books that I've assigned--the American Library Association has a comprehensive list of most challenged books since 1990. Thus a few students seem to have chosen books with personal significance to them, unexpectedly making this an excercise in ethos-building.

Second, this excercise fosters collaboration. Since a few of my students are more tech-savvy than others, they have offered to record and edit other students' readings. My class has entirely voluntarily created a facebook group to help them organize a larger group version of the read out project, editing together several readings into one entry.

Last, the read-out compels them to pay attention to oratorial style. A few have remarked that they had to think of ways to keep the reading from becoming monotonous. And even those who have not voiced such concerns tend to rely on inflection and emphasis in their readings.

When our submissions reach a critical mass, I plan on devoting a chunk of class to watching and analyzing their performances, paying attention to their stylistic choices.

Media Requirements:

Technology-Based Classroom (computers for each student)

Required Materials:

Video camera (available through phone, webcam, or video camera). Web cams are installed in all Lab computers and cameras are also available for check-out.

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Useful Anytime

Full Assignment Description:

In honor of Banned Books Week, perform your own Virtual Read-Out!

Choose a text of your choice from the ALA website and create a video of yourself reading a passage from the book in question. You don't have to choose a book we're reading this semester. The Virtual Read-Out rules advise you to keep this reading under 2 minutes. Then, when you're done, send it to me, and upload it to the Virtual Read-Out Youtube channel. You could be internet famous! instructions can be found here.

Due Date: By the end of the semester.

This will count as extra credit on your final paper. Note: videos MUST be uploaded to the Virtual Read-Out Youtube channel in order to count for extra credit.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

Be sure to look over the Banned Books website preparatory to presenting the assignment to class. N.b. though Banned Books Week ended Oct. 6, there appears to be no cutoff date for submitting videos.

Present the website. I took some time to go over the "Most Challenged" lists for the past year or two, which generated an interesting discussion about what books were banned and why.

Then take them to the Virtual Read-Out page. Explain the assignment.

Instructions For Students:

In honor of Banned Books Week, perform your own Virtual Read-Out!

Due Date: By the end of the semester.

This will count as extra credit on your final paper. Note: videos MUST be uploaded to the Virtual Read-Out Youtube channel in order to count for extra credit.

Evaluation Suggestions:

As I note above, this assignment is voluntary, for extra credit. I plan on awarding 5 extra points toward the final paper to anyone who reads or otherwise participates in a reading.

Course Type:

Course Description:

In this class, we will examine books that have been banned or otherwise challenged in Britain and the United States. Beginning with John Milton’s Areopagitica, an essay that, one might argue, provides the foundation for modern notions of free speech and censorship, we will examine how challenged books interrogate our notions of decency and morality. The course will end with Beloved, a book that forces us to question how we understand our nation’s traumatic past. Each of these books will allow us to discuss how literature as an art can also profoundly disturb us.

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Setting Up a Studio Environment for Multimedia Projects

Scott Nelson — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 02:27:16 +0000

Author:

Scott Nelson

Image Credit:

Matt Jones CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Brief Assignment Overview:

Whenever I teach, I always assign some form of multimedia project, and these practices have helped to set up a studio environment where collaborative multimedia projects can thrive. Rather than post an explicit lesson plan to our site, I thought I’d run through a set of practices that have been successful for me over a few courses.

Type of Assignment:

Semester-long Project

Assignment Length:

No Classroom Technology Required

Course Unit

Semester-long Project

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

Additional Pedagogical Goals:

The pedagogical goals for this assignment are to have students think about what multimedia production skills they already possess and what skills they'd like to develop. Further, these practices foster a collaborative environment where studetns learn to work together toward common goals.

Media Requirements:

Required Materials:

Since these are a set of practices rather than a specific use of a technology, what follows can be adapted to any classroom. Because most of the classes I teach are in rooms with computers for the students, I'll assume such a setup. Mainly, the students need some way to communicate with each other outside of class. I use PBWorks wikis for this aim, but a class blog or even email can be used to coordinate student skills.

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Late in the Semester

Full Assignment Description:

While each course's specific assignment may vary, I've sucessfully implemented these practices in many student projects. These projects have ranged from creating infographics to video games to ebooks. What I hope to achieve from these practices is a form of student autonomy that places responsibility for their work squarely with students.

For this aim, it's important that the assignment's product have some form of value outside of the classroom. Digital media needs a real audience, one beyond just the teacher in a particular course. With this in mind, I require that any multimedia project that students create have some venue in which it is showcased. This can be something as simple as posting it to Facebook, or something more complex such as publishing an ebook in Apple's iBookstore. Hopefully, by having an audience beyond the classroom, students will attribute more value to the rhetorical work they do. These projects aren't just for a grade in a self-contained course, but instead rhetorical practices that work upon the networks they inhabit.

Secondly, I set up a type of Craigslist for student skills. Early in the semester, I have students post a brief biography detailing their current skills in multimedia production and skills they'd like to develop. I normally create a new wiki page for students to populate, but this can be done via a course blog or a mass email. This particular stage in setting up the studio environment requires that students think about their relationships to multimedia and the ways they can create in these modes. Undoubtedly, I have students who begin this stage thinking they have no skills in multimedia whatsoever, but a brief class discussion usually gets students thinking about the digital discourse communities they already belong to. Some may be avid social media prosumers, while others may keep Twitter or Instagram accounts.

A further advantage to these Craiglist-style bios is that students can self-select collaborative groups. If, for example, one student has a great idea for a video game, but no skills with Photoshop, the bios are a first step to making those need-based connections. Plus, because students are shopping for skills among their classmates, they tend to create more organic groups with a common goal. This practice seems to reduce the occurances of group members who refuse to contribute to a project and let others "take up their slack." Common interests drive group formation, so individual students are less likely to be bored with the project.

As a final bonus from this practice, because groups are formed based upon skills, sudents tend to create affinity groups that share knowledge. Students teach each other their skills, and thus all participate in the production of the project. While there is the risk that students will only practice what they are already good at, experience has shown me that this isn't the case. Students are genuinely interested in the common goal they've set, and hence, they all work to create a quality product.

The final practice I do in the classroom is to give students time to play. Multimedia takes some time to create, and scheduling in-class time to experiment is extremely important. Digital technologies ask that we manipulate them, to try out hypotheses regarding their rhetorics and grammars. Groups need time to teach each other skills, and studio work days are important for this task.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

As I've indicated above, this is more a set of classroom principles rather than a specific lesson plan. However, they've worked well for my students, especially when they are working with multimedia. A familiarity with programs like Photoshop, GIMP, Illustrator, Inkscape, inDesign, iMovie, Audacity, or GarageBand can help, but I've found the single most important skill to have is flexibility. No instructor can possibly know all there is to know about these multimedia creation applications, so a willingness to learn from students is paramount.

Instructions For Students:

Since this is a set of practices rather than a specific lesson, there aren't any explicit instructions to students beyond what I've outlined above. However, the following may be helpful when attempting to set up a Craigslist-style skill listing:

In a brief paragraph, outline your interests in the upcoming project, listing any type of multimedia you would be willing to work in or learn. The aim here is not necessarily to give only those programs you're already confident in, but instead your interests in creating multimedia using some applcations.

Evaluation Suggestions:

Because I use the Learning Record Online for all of my courses, the practices outlined above aren't assessed in the traditional sense. I circle the room on studio days, talking with students about what problems they may have run into and to get a general sense of the project's progression. The Learning Record allows for these documented processes to be used as evidence for learning, so the multimedia product is much less important than the processes students go through to create their project.

A successful project is one where students learn new ways of communicating in multimedia, and learn to collaborate with likeminded individuals toward a common goal.

Notes on Reception, Execution, etc.:

As I've indicated above, these pracitces have been sucessful in a variety of group projects. I've used this with an infographic assignment, a video game prototype assignment, an actual working video game assignment, an interactive image assignment, and an ebook assignment.

Course Type:

Course Description:

I have successfully used this studio environment in RHE 306, RHE 309K, RHE 312, and ENGL 314J. I'll give each course description below.

RHE 306:

This course is designed to prepare you for the academic writing you do at the University of Texas and writing you will do in your careers and personal lives beyond UT. It is a course designed to teach you not what to think, but how to think on your own. Ultimately, you should learn to be a better thinker, who is able to think critically about topics, other people, and yourself; a better rhetor, who is able to analyze a specific situation and adjust your writing to fit accordingly; and a better communicator, who is able to express ideas effectively.

It will include three units with each unit culminating in a composition and including writing instruction that supports the drafting of that composition. Composition is a broad term including symbolic efforts in a variety of media (including video, audio, and web-design, to name just a few). Many lower-division RHE courses (such as RHE 315 and 312) encourage or even require composition outside of the traditionally imagined prose essay. Nevertheless, the written component of every lower-division RHE class must meet the writing flag requirements as stipulated by the college. These written assignments may include a variety of genres, including narrative, argument, analysis, or critical reflection. (“Creative” writing assignments—plays, fiction, poetry—are not suitable genres for formal writing assignments.) As required by the college, each major writing assignment includes a peer review process. You will also complete informal writing exercises that prepare you to do the writing necessary in your formal assignments.

RHE 309K: The Rhetoric of Video Games

This course seeks to explore video games as a modern discursive medium. Far from being mere “mindless entertainment,” many video games make explicit or implicit arguments about gender and sexuality, economic systems, corporate practices, geopolitics, and both real and imagined societies. What arguments do these simulations and simulacra mount about how the world is? What arguments do they mount about how the world should be?

Much of the past and current study of digital rhetoric seems to look at the content of computers through applying older means of rhetorical analysis, looking at the text and images contained on computers rather than the processes through which this content is represented. What we seek to explore is a relatively new field—procedural rhetoric—and the ways this new field can inform video game criticism. How do the procedures inherent in video games make arguments about the world?

The course will include three major units with each unit culminating in a composition and including writing instruction that supports the drafting of that composition. Composition is a broad term including symbolic efforts in a variety of media (including video, audio, and web-design, to name just a few). Many lower-division RHE courses encourage or even require composition outside of the traditionally imagined prose essay. Nevertheless, the written component of every lower-division RHE class must meet the writing flag requirements as stipulated by the college. These written assignments may include a variety of genres, including narrative, argument, analysis, or critical reflection. (“Creative” writing assignments—plays, fiction, poetry—are not suitable genres for formal writing assignments.) As required by the college, each major writing assignment includes a peer review process. You will also complete informal writing exercises that prepare you to do the writing necessary in your formal assignments.

RHE 312: Writing in Digital Environments

This course explores rhetoric across a variety of modes: verbal, visual, aural, procedural, haptic, and kinesthetic. “Writing,” in this sense, refers to a variety of inscription technologies. For example, it can be communicating through text on a screen, through the rules of a game, or through the layout and colors in an image. In this course, we will create a variety of digital communications, most with a purpose of persuasion. In doing so, you will learn about digital discourse communities and will eventually present an argument to a chosen digital community.

Each form of media brings with it a set of affordances and constraints. Much of digital media relies upon the logics and metaphors of earlier forms of media, but does present new avenues of distribution and production to a wider range of people. In this course, you will analyze various forms and communities of digital communication and reflect upon these affordances and constraints. Hopefully, you will leave the course with a greater awareness of not only the communicative power of digital media, but also some of the limitations it imposes upon its users and producers.

The course will three major units, with each culminating in digital composition and textual reflection. Throughout the process, you will participate in peer review of your compositions and maintain evidence for use in your Learning Record.

ENGL 314J: Literature & Video Games

In the popular press, literature and video games are frequently positioned as enemies fighting over time. In a recent Slate article, for example, journalist Michael Thompson states that in the time it takes to play one modern video game, “You could read War and Peace, for instance, then follow it up with Thus Spoke Zarathustra and a few starter courses in a new language” (par. 1). Further, the often-cited 2004 National Endowment for the Arts’ Reading at Risk report places video games among other forms of electronic media as “competing” with literature. But both of these sources (and countless others) fail to examine the more complex connections video games have had with literature over the past sixty years. What at first began as a parasitic relationship of video games borrowing, adapting, or extending literary themes, characters, and plots has now become more symbiotic, with both media now remixing each other.

Rather than view video games and print literature as contenders for precious time, this course seeks to explore the ways literature and video games impact one another. That is, this course looks at literature as a practice and not merely a collection of artifacts. Using video games as a frame through which to study literature, we will work our way through a variety of genres, including fables, fantasy, epic poetry, historical fiction, science fiction, mystery, and gothic fiction. This course helps students prepare for upper-division English classes (as well as a wide range of upper-division courses in other UT programs and departments) by focusing on close reading and critical writing, and by introducing formal, historical, and cultural approaches to literary texts. Students will learn how to use the online Oxford English Dictionary as well as other resources essential to literary study.

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Collaborative Web Page Annotations With Diigo

Battistelli — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 16:29:21 +0000

Author:

Todd Battistelli

Image Credit:

Todd Battistelli

Brief Assignment Overview:

This lesson introduces students to a collaborative annotation tool to facilitate class discussions and to encourage active reading and research practices.

Type of Assignment:

Class Discussion

Assignment Length:

One-Two Class Periods

Pedagogical Goals - Rhetoric:

Pedagogical Goals - Literature:

Textual Analysis

Pedagogical Goals - Writing:

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

Additional Pedagogical Goals:

Introduce students to a tool that enables organization and annotation of web pages. Encourage active reading and research practices. Support in-class group discussions with references to common reading.

Media Requirements:

Technology-Based Classroom (computers for each student)

Required Materials:

Diigo accounts for each student & Diigo toolbar add-on installed in Firefox.

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Early in the Semester

Full Assignment Description:

After introducing students to the concept of annotating their sources, the instructor describes Diigo. Diigo is an add-on for Firefox (a more limited add-on is available for Chrome, but the Firefox add-on is used for this activity). It allows for real-time collaborative annotation of text on web pages. Users may highlight text, add sticky-note annotations to specific highlights, or add floating notes to any web page. Diigo also provides a bookmarking & caching function to store pages on diigo.com servers to mitigate against digital impermanence. Teachers may sign up for an educator account which provides access to group administration features useful for working with a group. Users within a group, for instance, can share annotations with each other without making them publicly available to all Diigo users.

As students are introduced to Diigo's functions, they should sign up for an account on the website. Teachers choosing to work with a Diigo group can add students to the group, or users can make their annotations public to share with the group.

Once set up, students work in pairs to annotate a page selected by the instructor responding to questions relevant to the goals of the course (in this case evaluating how accurately discussants in a discussion thread summarized each other). Students highlight text & add sticky notes with their responses. After students are done, the class reviews the annotations as a group.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

Instructor should become familiar with Diigo & apply for educator-level account. Set up student accounts (have students sign up for accounts in class). Locate & bookmark a webpage to use for the activity.

Instructions For Students:

Annotate the website according to the prompts assigned to your group. Highlight the relevant text. Hover your cursor over the text to attach a note to the highlighted text. Review the annotations made by other groups by refreshing the page & checking the Diigo side-bar (displayed by clicking on the icon left of the "Diigo" button in the toolbar.

Evaluation Suggestions:

Instructors can assess this activity according to the annotations students produce and how well those annotations can be tied into the class discussion as well as used in later work during the semester. The annotations should provide a means to record and index ideas and arguments often lost in day-to-day discussions.

Notes on Reception, Execution, etc.:

Students should be required to use the Firefox add-on, as the Chrome version only provides basic annotation features. Firefox provides access to a sidebar that provides an overview of a page's annotations. Before students begin group work, the instructor should run everyone through a brief training exercise to familiarize students with the basic operations of the toolbar.

Course Type:

Course Description:

RHE 330E - Advanced Rhetorical Theory and Analysis - Topic: Audience & Argumentation. Students study variety of rhetorical theory & investigate questions of how rhetor and audience infuence each other and the arguments produced in any persuasive situation. Students apply theoretical models to analysis and evaluation of how sources interact in argumentation.

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Google Docs - Crowd-Sourcing an Annotated Bibliography

Anonymous — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 14:45:35 +0000

Author:

Eileen McGinnis

Image Credit:

"2 reasons why the term 'crowdsourcing' bugs me" via opensourceway's Flickr

Brief Assignment Overview:

Using GoogleDocs, students create a group bibliography page to practice summarizing and evaluating a source. They then engage in an informal presentation of their source to the class. By addressing their classmates as an audience, students have an extra level of accountability to their peers to find quality sources and to write about them with care.

Type of Assignment:

Assignment Length:

Pedagogical Goals - Writing:

Annotated Bibliography

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

No Classroom Technology Required

Open Access Software

Presentations

Additional Pedagogical Goals:

Research, citation, group collaboration, awareness of audience, summary

Media Requirements:

Required Materials:

Students will need a Google account in order to access the group document. A media console with projector would be preferable, but strictly-speaking, this lesson does not require classroom technology as students do most of the work from home.

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Early in the Semester

Full Assignment Description:

Using GoogleDocs, students create a group bibliography page to practice summarizing and evaluating a source. They then engage in an informal presentation of their source to the class. This collaborative exercise goes against the Lone Researcher model, but it is interesting to track how an article that one student finds stimulates another student's thinking in the final paper. There's also an ethos factor here--by addressing their classmates as an audience, students have an extra level of accountability to their peers to find quality sources and to write about them with care.

This assignment took about two weeks (i.e., less than a unit-length) to complete. 2-3 students would present each day, over the course of about 6 class periods.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

After introducing research methods in class, I asked students to find a source related to our texts for the third unit. They signed up for presentation slots available over the course of the next two weeks. On the day of their presentation, their annotated citation was due.

Instructions For Students:

Overview

In 250-400 words, write an annotated citation of a primary or secondary source. Your annotation should include (1) a concise summary and evaluation of the source and (2) an argument about how this source might enhance our reading of Gattaca or Oryx and Crake.

Specifics

This semester, we've examined materials that establish the historical and cultural contexts in which literary texts participate. E.g., we've looked at Lankester's writings on degeneration to understand the bleak evolutionary themes of The Time Machine. We've also consulted visual artifacts, such as late-Victorian cartoons about evolution and representations of genetics on recent magazine covers.

Now it's your turn: find an outside source that illuminates the literary and scientific contexts of Gattaca or Oryx and Crake. A few ideas: an interview with the author/director; an article in Nature or another scientific journal; a scholarly article or book chapter by a literary critic; an advertisement, artwork, film, etc. In class, we will discuss strategies for researching and assessing potential sources.

Regardless of your choice, your annotated citation will have three components: (1) an MLA-style citation, (2) a concise summary of an argument or an evocative description of an artifact, and (3) an argument that connects your source to the film/novel. Although you won't have much space to quote extensively, use specific language and examples to tie your reader closely to the source.

To receive credit for this assignment, you will also informally present your source to the class, summarizing your findings and pointing us to their implications.

Goals

Demonstrate care in selecting a source.
Provide a succinct but thorough summary/description of your source.
Successfully argue for what this source can tell us about the film or novel.
Clearly present your findings to the class.

Formatting

Each assignment should be 250-400 words, single-spaced. Include an MLA-style citation in bold at the top of your entry.
Add your citation to our class's annotated bibliography on GoogleDocs (no hard copy needed).
In-text citations should be formatted according to MLA style: insert page numbers for any quotations in parentheses after the quote (just the page numbers; no pp. or p.)

Evaluation Suggestions:

This short assignment counted for 6 percent of their total grade. However, the presentation component was evaluated on the basis of completion only, as it was not the focus of the assignment. Strong assignments demonstrated care in selecting a source, provided a succinct but thorough summary/description of the source, and successfully argued for what this source can tell us about the film or novel.

Course Type:

Course Description:

This lesson was used in an introductory literary studies course: E314J - Literature and Biology

What does it mean to be human? Why do we behave the way we do? What’s the difference between life and non-life, organism and machine? Where are we (the human species, the planet Earth) headed next? Acknowledging certain obvious and meaningful differences in methods and outlook, one might nevertheless argue that both writers and biologists travel similar terrain, presenting themselves as (often competing) authorities on the “big questions” about Life. Instead of seeing literature and biology as necessarily antagonistic ways of looking at and understanding the world, we will read literature about science and literary science writing for their complementary insights. What do literature and biology look like at their interface? How do the scientific paradigms of their day influence how writers grapple with questions of human experience, identity, and ethics? In turn, how do literary narratives about evolutionary biology or genetics shape the way we think about these disciplines, the way they’re understood by non-scientists? No expertise in biology or in literary criticism will be presumed. The broad goals of this course will be to introduce science majors to the basic tools of literary analysis as well as to enable non-science majors to be savvier readers of the popular science they encounter. The course’s emphasis on students’ own critical writing will be helpful no matter what your major.

Tags:

Annotated bibliography

Google Mapping Travel Narratives: Lolita

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 14:27:55 +0000

Author:

Lauren Nahas

Image Credit:

Screen shot of narrative Google map

Brief Assignment Overview:

This assignment asks students to engage in an uncommon form of literary analysis, where the goal is to determine the significance of location and travel in the novel. The entire class collaborates in creating a Google map of all of the places that Humbert Humbert travels to in Lolita.

Type of Assignment:

Course Unit

Assignment Length:

Pedagogical Goals - Literature:

Pedagogical Goals - Writing:

Research

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

Additional Pedagogical Goals:

The goal is to offer students a new way to consider the process and products of literary analysis. This assignment also encourages students to consider a novel both visually and spatially, and to determine the usefulness of gaining such a perspective on the novel. In addition, it introduces them to a new technology (surprisingly, most are unaware that you can create your own maps using Google). In addition, it’s meant to be a collaborative experience that illustrated the importance of organization, as what can be accomplished by a group.

Media Requirements:

Technology-Based Classroom (computers for each student)

Required Materials:

A Google account (this allows students to create, edit, and share their own personal maps. Without this account students will not be able to edit the map). A course wiki, or some other online location for organizing who maps which parts of the novel, questions or problems that come up during the mapping process, and so on.

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Full Assignment Description:

In one sense, I see this assignment as an alternative form of formal analysis. It is basically asking students to take a very close look at the movements and locations of the novel and visually represent them in a map. In this sense, it broadens the concept of literary analysis for students and will give them at least one example of how digital media can be used for literary analysis. They gain technological skills simply through having to use Google Maps, and they gain collaborative skills as we determine as a class how to organize the creation of the map and make decisions about the map’s content.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

Prep: In Google maps, create a map entitled “Nabokov’s Lolita.” Put in place markers and descriptions of the first few places mentioned in the novel to give the students an idea of what the map will look like in the end.

On your course wiki or website, create a table to organize the map. Add columns to the table with the following titles: Place, Page Number, Found by, Added to Map by, Problems. This allows you to keep track to who found what, who added what to the map, and gives the students a place to note any problems that they run into. The students need to be able to edit this table themselves. Here’s a link to the table I created on my course wiki.

In-class: Have the students create Google accounts. Have them send you an email from that account. Using that email, invite them as collaborators to the map.

Explain the basics of mapping a novel (I showed students maps of The Devil’s Highway and Ulysses, and there are many more on the Google Lit Trips website.

Show them the Lolita map that you have created and explain that they will receive and invitation to the map that will allow them to edit it.

Show the students the basics of how to create and edit a map. Have them create a map of their own, add a few places, edit them, etc. You want them to get a feel for the Google maps interface.

Show them the table you’ve created to organize the map creation. Tell them to add locations to the table as they read the novel.

I didn’t have students begin adding locations to the map until we had finished the novel. At that point we had a long list of places. In class we had a discussion of how we wanted to deal with places that didn’t exist, places where the chronology of HH and Lolita’s travels becomes unclear in the novel, etc. We created a key for the map and there were some issues of representation that we decided to deal with after the map had begun to take form. At this point I also reminded them of the “Problems” column in our organizational table on the wiki and that if they ran into any problems with the map, they should note them there.

I visited the map in class every day to encourage them to keep adding and set a soft deadline for adding locations. I also monitored the “Problems” column on the organizational table and dealt with problems in class as they arose. When the map seemed to be completed, I checked through it and brought up any concerns that I had in class.

Once the map has been completed, it deserves a day’s discussion in terms of how it relates to reading the novel. The students will not automatically see the usefulness of the map.

Instructions For Students:

Lolita Mapping Project

In some respects Lolita is a travel novel. Many of the locations mentioned in the novel are real. Because of this, the text lends itself to mapping.

Mapping a piece of Literature is a new method of literary analysis. It has gained popularity with the advent of tools like google maps that allow anyone to create map.

Although not every place mentioned in Lolita is mappable, we will do our best to create what a geographic model of Nabokov's masterpiece. The purpose here is to consider the novel from a completely different perspecive and to see if the map reveals anything of interest to us about the novel. The may also serve as a reading aid or guide to those of you who later choose to write your essay on Lolita.

Map Key

Exists - Icon with Dot
Doesn't Exist - Icon without Dot

With Lolita - Pink Lines & Icons
Without Lolita - Blue Lines & Icons

Content of the placemarkers:

Page number and chapter
Basic description of the significance of the location

Evaluation Suggestions:

I use the learning record, so the map was not graded. They will be graded on what they took from the experience of mapping the novel. That learning could be related to using this mapping tool, collaboration, literary analysis, completing a complex project, and so on. I do not expect all of them to come to significant realizations about the novel from this project.

Notes on Reception, Execution, etc.:

I think the students were initially surprisingly enthusiastic about it. I didn’t make this a mandatory assignment, but they created the list of places and the map itself with little encouragement from me. At this point they seem to be a bit confused about the purpose of what they’ve created. I anticipated that reaction, so in the next week we’ll be taking some time in class to look carefully at the map to consider what implications it has for our reading of Lolita.

Additional Resources:

Here is a list of sources that discuss mapping as a literary analysis technique. They helped me to consider what the purpose of such an assignment was and how it related to my larger course objectives.

Gordon, Eric. “MAPPING DIGITAL NETWORKS From cyberspace to Google.” Information, Communication & Society 10.6 (2007): 885-901. Web.

Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso, 2005. Print.

Ramsay, Stephen. “Special Section: Reconceiving Text Analysis: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism.” Lit Linguist Computing 18.2 (2003): 167-174. Web.

Samuels, Lisa., and Jerome J. McGann. “Deformance and Interpretation.” New Literary History 30.1 (1999): 25-56. Print.

Tullock, David L. “Many, many maps: Empowerment and online participatory mapping.” First Monday 12.2 (2007): n. pag. Print.

Course Type:

Course Description:

This assignment was used in an introductory literature course, E314K Banned Books

Tags:

Visualization Software

Oral History Group Podcasting Assignment

Anonymous — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 16:41:56 +0000

Author:

Amanda Moulder

Image Credit:

"Microphones"via Sue Langford's Flikr stream

Brief Assignment Overview:

Students conduct oral history interviews, write papers narrating the interviews, and then work in groups to create a multi-segment “radio show."

Type of Assignment:

Assignment Length:

Technology-Based Classroom (computers for each student)

Pedagogical Goals - Rhetoric:

Pedagogical Goals - Writing:

Organization

Synthesis

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

Additional Pedagogical Goals:

Invention, style, multimodal composition, digital literacy.

Media Requirements:

Required Materials:

A way to record digital audio files for each student in the class

GarageBand software

Access to “This American Life” and “RadioLab” podcasts to discuss with your students as sample “papers”

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Late in the Semester

Full Assignment Description:

Students do oral history interviews, write papers narrating the interviews, and then work in groups to create a multi-segment “radio show."

Students must work together to discover the best possible way of combining their individual papers into a podcast. They must also learn to use GarageBand. Finally, recording their papers gets students to think about concerns such as word choice, syntax, and overall style.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

Familiarity with the rechnology and podcasting genre will help. See "Instructions for Students" below for detailed explanation of how the assignment was implemented.

Instructions For Students:

STEP ONE - Writing Assignment Description:

Paper III Assignment Sheet: Analyzing Culture/Oral History. (1500-1750 words)

This assignment requires you go out into the world and find a story worth recording. It’s a difficult task, really. Your first step is to conduct oral history research and make a record of interviews you conduct. You need to listen closely to how individuals process and frame their beliefs and/or respond to what you ask. You will nee to determine the overall purpose of your essay and make the stakes of the essay clear. Why is this story worth telling? To do this you will place the interviewees’ experiences and/or perspective within a larger historical, social, or political context OR you use the interviewees’ experiences and/or perspectives to make an argument about a larger historical or social context.

Prior to this assignment, we will read Paul Thompson, “The Voice of the Past: Oral History,” The Voice of the Past: Oral History (1988) and Hugo Slim and Paul Thompson, with Olivia Bennett and Nigel Cross, “Ways of Listening,” Listening for Change: Oral History and Development (1993). We will also have an expert in oral history research come in to talk about how to conduct interviews.

Although this particular assignment is a 6-8 page paper, it will also require that you record and save the interview(s) you conduct as mp3 files because you will use sound bytes from these interviews in your Unit IV podcast assignment.

STEP TWO - In-class Exercise:

Student “speed-dated” their papers. I put them into groups of three and they talked about how their papers were related for seven minutes. After 7 minutes, the groups rotated so that each students was in a new group. We repeated this exercise as many times as class time would allow, so that by the end of class, each student had an idea of who they might want to work with for the podcast assignment.

STEP THREE - Paper revisions:

I wanted my students to think about sentence structure in their revisions. I spent one class day talking about the following grammatical forms that their papers used and we talked about how they might revise their papers at the sentence-level. The following sentences were some of the examples that I used in class (the first two are adapted from in-class exercises that Patricia Roberts-Miller has done in her own classes):

Passive Voice, Nominalization, and Verb Choice:

Hubert was bitten by Chester. (The agent is the predicate). Biting happened between Chester and Hubert.

It seems as though the writer does not know which dog bit the other. So, she turns the verb into a noun through the process that grammarians call nominalization. This happens to your sentence when you really don’t know the agent.

Biting happened on the part of Chester toward the dog of Hubert.

The writer of this sentence knows the agent of the action, but doesn’t show the action in a concrete way, which makes the sentence unclear. If you are Chester’s attorney, this is your sentence, but it’s not rhetorically effective if you want your audience to understand what happened.

Using Punctuation Rhetorically

The family held a reunion on the Fourth of July, and everyone had a great time. vs. The family held a reunion on the Fourth of July; everyone had a great time.

Both sentences are grammatically correct according to standard rules, but the semicolon produces a tighter connection and give emphasis to the second clause.

My favorite activities are skiing, playing golf, and bowling; unfortunately, they cost more than my budget can stand. vs. Unfortunately, my favorite activities—skiing, playing golf, and bowling—cost more than my budget can stand.

The second sentence is tighter, and the dash acts as an attention-getter. It tells the reader: “Pay attention. This is important!”

STEP FOUR - Podcast Assignment:

(45-60 minutes total)

For this assignment, you will work with two or three of your classmates to create a podcast in the style of the radio shows (“This American Life” and “RadioLab”) we have listened to this semester. Initially, you will work as a group to discuss the pieces you wrote during the semester, decide on a target audience (or audiences) for your podcast, play with how to frame one piece per group member together in a cohesive way, and create a schedule and series of task assignments for group members.

Your next step will be to revise (dramatically) your chosen piece of writing so that it more clearly reflects the theme or idea that your group has chosen to explore in the podcast and the target audience for the podcast.

Then, your group will write a title for your podcast, a short introduction to your show, short transitions between the pieces in the show, and a conclusion to your show. You will be allowed some class time for the planning, but should use this time to create a schedule of deadlines for these parts of the assignment and divide up the labor evenly between group members.

You will use personal audio recorders and the GarageBand software in the DWRL lab to record and edit these audio stories. The podcasts will incorporate sound bytes from interview. You may want to include other sound effects that add depth, dimension, affect, or comic relief to your stories.

Evaluation Suggestions:

Rubric for Paper 3 (I had the students read “The Transom Review” and they created this rubric based on that reading):

The story you tell must:

Give background, as well as consider carefully where to start and how to give background.
Make clear the stakes of the story.
Either build up central conflict so that the point of the story is apparent, or directly state the point.
Strike a balance between the big ideas (reporting) and the personal narrative (interview, quotes)

Students will get two grades for the podcast, one for their individual contribution and the quality of their revision, and a group grade for the overall cohesiveness of the podcast, the quality of the transitions, and how well it addresses the target audience they selected.

Additional Resources:

Ira Glass' "The Transom Review"

The DWRL's Guide for Podcasting in Pedagogy written by Kevin Bourque

Course Type:

Course Description:

This assignment was implemented in an intermediate rhetoric and composition course.

Tags:

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:

Assignment Length:

Partial Class Period

Pedagogical Goals - Writing:

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

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:

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:

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.

Tags:

In-Class Group Evaluations of Short Videos

Gulesserian — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 18:30:07 +0000

Author:

Lisa Gulesserian

Image Credit:

Image of Chrysler's "Imported from Detroit" taken from a post on Jalopnik

Brief Assignment Overview:

For an entire class period, groups of students are tasked with evaluating a short video. Each group is assigned a video and a category of evaluation that they will use to evaluate their assigned video. They will work together to come up with criteria, evidence, and an evaluative claim for their video. By the end of the activity, students will present their evaluation to the class.

Type of Assignment:

Technology-Based Classroom (computers for each student)

Assignment Length:

Single Class Period

Pedagogical Goals - Rhetoric:

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

Video

Additional Pedagogical Goals:

With this activity, I want students to get familiar with seeing how evaluations can look very different if the category of evaluation is not the same. This activity is also quite useful for getting students to practice coming up with criteria for a given category, as well as making them see that some criteria need justification depending on the audience. Students also start thinking about the rank of importance for the different criteria that they've chosen.

Media Requirements:

Required Materials:

Computer classroom with internet access. I use my course Wiki at PBworks to get students to post their group's findings, which I then project onto the screen so that the whole class can see a group's Wiki page as they present their evaluation. I can see a number of different websites besides PBworks fulfilling the same function.

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind"

Full Assignment Description:

In small groups, students evaluate one of two short videos, Chrysler's "Imported from Detroit" Superbowl Commercial with Eminem and Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind." Each group is assigned a video and a category of evaluation. Students then work in groups to come up with at least three criteria (appropriately ranked and supported/justified with two other "texts" from the same category) to use to evaluate their video. Students will then find evidence for whether or not their text meets/doesn't meet each criterion. By the end of the activity, each group will present their findings, starting with an evaluative claim that they drafted together.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

I spent the previous two classes discussing evaluations, categories, and criteria. The first class was mostly spent explaining the concepts, and the second was spent looking at sample evaluations (of the same item, such as an album by a specific musical group). Students should be familiar with evaluation, category, and criteria before this in-class activity.

Before the activity, I assigned two short videos for students to watch for the day's homework: Chrysler's "Imported from Detroit" Superbowl Commercial with Eminem and Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind." Students should have finished watching these videos before the in-class activity.

On the day of the activity, split students up into six groups.

Instructions For Students:

You will be put into one of six groups. I am going to assign a video and a category of evaluation to each group. Groups 1-3 will evaluate Chrysler's "Imported from Detroit" Superbowl Commercial with Eminem, and Groups 4-6 will evaluate Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind." The first Chrysler group will evaluate the Chrysler video as a Chrysler commercial, the second will evaluate it as a 2011 car commercial, and the third will evaluate it as a 2011 Superbowl commercial. The first Jay-Z group will evaluate "State of Mind" as a rap music video, the second will evaluate it as a Jay-Z music video, and the third will evaluate it as a music video set in NYC.

In the next 45 minutes, each group should:

Find two other "texts" in the same category using YouTube.
Use the assigned video and the two supplemental "texts" to come up with at least three criteria for the category, justifying the criteria as necessary for your audience of peers.
Decide on a rank for the criteria.
Provide evidence as to whether or not the assigned video meets each criterion.
Draft an evaluative claim about the video.
Post their findings (category, criteria, evaluative claim) to our PBworks "Group Work" folder.

At the end of 45 minutes, each group will present their findiings to the class using their Wiki page.

Evaluation Suggestions:

I did not assign a grade for this assignment, since I want students to experiment with evaluations before they had to write their own without the help of their peers.

Notes on Reception, Execution, etc.:

Students love this activity! They enjoy giving their opinions, and they gain confidence in the rhetorical concepts of evaluation, category, and criteria. Many of them say it's the activity that finally made them understand what kind of paper they'd be writing in the coming weeks! Plus, I inevitably have a few Jay-Z or Eminem fans in the classroom who are always vocal about their undying love for either artist.

Additional Resources:

Chrysler's "Imported from Detroit" 2011 Superbowl Commercial

youtube.com

pbworks.com

Course Type:

Course Description:

RHE 309K: Rhetoric of Suburbs & Slums

Depending on who you ask, London can be a cultural mecca or a den of vice, Los Angeles can be a palm tree paradise or a polluted suburb, and Lagos can be a dangerous slum or an exciting place where residents reclaim space for their own uses. In this course, we will identify, analyze, and evaluate the discrepant ways that we think and feel about cities (and their respective suburbs and slums) around the world. We’ll begin our exploration by looking at explicit arguments made about (sub-)urban places by urban planners, architects, and citizens. After rhetorical analyses of the various arguments made about these places, we’ll then move into uncovering and evaluating implied arguments made about cities, suburbs, and slums by artists, musicians, writers, and filmmakers. We’ll end our journey through these locales with you and your peers adding to the conversation. For better or for worse—with the rapid urbanization of our planet—cities, suburbs, and slums are here to stay. What we say about the nature, value, and future of these places is just as important.

Tags:

Twitter in the Classroom: Observations and Analysis

King — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:10:45 +0000

Author:

Matt King

Image Credit:

Twitter icon

Brief Assignment Overview:

My class used Twitter for a few general purposes and then for two specific assignments. For our general goals, we used Twitter to share resources among one another and to familiarize ourselves with various conversations that are important to people in the digital humanities. By following one another, we were able to tweet helpful links, questions about class, reminders and advice about assignments, etc. By following people participating in the sorts of conversations we were interested in (conversations about digital technologies, rhetoric, and writing), we found out how these conversations develop on Twitter and the internet generally.

For the two assignments, we practiced rhetorical analysis by analyzing various Twitter feeds and then used our own Twitter streams as a space for sharing Learning Record observations.

Type of Assignment:

Assignment Length:

Single Class Period

Course Unit

Pedagogical Goals - Rhetoric:

Audience

Invention

Rhetorical Analysis

Pedagogical Goals - Writing:

Pre-Writing

Research

Pedagogical Goals - Digital Literacy:

Open Access Software

Social Media

Additional Pedagogical Goals:

Research, rhetorical analysis, invention, delivery, reflection, Learning Record observations

Media Requirements:

Technology-Based Classroom (computers for each student)

Required Materials:

Internet access on any connected device, inside or outside the classroom. Various Twitter clients could be helpful and are available for free (see, for example, Tweetdeck and Yorufukurou).

Timeline for Optimal Use:

Useful Anytime

Full Assignment Description:

My general overview for using Twitter can be found on my wiki. The rhetorical analysis assignment is available below (in the instructions for students section). You are welcome to use and modify these assignments as you see fit, although I would recommend creating your own handouts or webpages and adapting the descriptions to your own needs.

For the Learning Record observations, no specific assignment description was offered students. The Learning Record is a portfolio-based assessment model, and this system asks students to make observations about their development over the course of the semester. We used Twitter as a platform for sharing and keeping track of these observations so that students could learn from and be inspired by one another. You can find out more about the Learning Record on the LR website.

Suggestions for Instructor Preparation:

I spent 30-45 minutes in one class period introducing students to Twitter, helping them create accounts and follow one another, and having them begin tweeting, searching, and exploring. I offered this overview of Twitter for them to consult during and after this introduction (you are welcome to borrow this material, but it might need to be updated as time goes on). It would help to have your own Twitter account set up before class and to be familiar with how it works generally. If you would like students to follow particular people and conversations on Twitter, it could take a few weeks or months of your own personal Twitter use to find the people you find most relevant for your class interests and goals. This assignment assumes that rhetorical analysis has already been introduced to the students. If this is the first rhetorical analysis assignment, it would help to spend at least half a class period explaining the expectations and terms for analysis.

Instructions For Students:

Rhetorical analysis is a practice that helps us think through how a particular text is persuasive and who it would persuade. A successful rhetorical analysis takes into consideration at least three things: the main argument/goal of the text, the rhetorical strategies that the author employs to make the text persuasive, and the audience for the text. In addition to identifying the main argument/goal and the rhetorical strategies, we also want to analyze whether or not they would be effective for particular audiences.

This weekend, your assignment is to write a rhetorical analysis of tweets from a particular tweeter. You should write and submit this assignment as a new page on our course wiki. You should name this page "Twitter Rhetorical Analysis - [last name]", and you should file this page in our "Rhetorical Analyses" folder. Your final product should be 350-500 words long, and it should be completed before class on Tuesday, February 9.

To start, pick one of the people you follow on Twitter (for the sake of objectivity and everyone's comfort, do not choose someone from our class). This person can be someone you were asked to follow for this class or someone else (a friend, a celebrity, etc.). We want to look at several tweets from this person, so it should be someone who tweets fairly regularly. As you look at this person's tweets and write your rhetorical analysis, you should go through the following steps.

1. Invention - Remember, for rhetoricians, invention is about finding what is out there rather than making something up. After you have picked someone from Twitter to analyze, you will need to read through their tweets to find out what they talk about on Twitter. You should look through at least 50 tweets, and you can do so by going to their Twitter page. For example, if you were focusing on Steven Johnson (whose article about Twitter we read), you would go to http://twitter.com/stevenbjohnson. You can get to a tweeter's page by going to your list of people you are following and then clicking on their name.

As you look through this person's tweets (again, at least 50 of them), take notes on what they tweet. Does this person use their tweets to share personal information such as where they are or what they are doing? To make jokes? To participate in conversations? To share links? Anything else? Once you have a general sense for what the person tweets, identify these uses more specifically. If the person shares personal information, what sort of information do they share about themselves? If they have conversations with other people on Twitter, who are those conversations with and what are they about? If they post links, what are these articles/websites/blogposts/etc. about?

Once you have a clear sense for what this person does on Twitter, think about how they are presenting this information. In other words, we want to identify what rhetorical strategies the person uses to help accomplish their goals. Rhetorical strategies can refer to any number of things, including the way an author structures their argument, the way they establish themselves as authorities, the values and emotions to which an author appeals, and the specific language they use to present their argument. Of course, most people on Twitter are not making arguments; instead, their main goal is likely to share information about themselves with friends, to share interesting links with other people, to make jokes, to have a short conversation with someone about something, etc. Nonetheless, we can still talk about a tweeter's rhetorical strategies. That is, we can still talk about the ways that they use language, the way that they appeal to particular values or emotions in their audience, the ways that they establish themselves as trustworthy or authoritative, etc. Try to answer the following questions regarding the tweets that you read: What is the author's tone in these tweets? Does the author use different tones in different situations? How so? Does the author appeal to any particular values or emotions in their tweets? For example, does the author use their tweets in political ways? If so, how? Does the author use their tweets to try to make their readers laugh/cry/get excited about something/think about something/take action in a particular situation/etc.? If so, how? Does the author do anything else that appeals to specific values or encourages specific emotions in the audience? There are many other questions we could ask, but this should give us a decent start. Feel free to take note of anything else that helps us identify how this tweeter is trying to achieve their goals on Twitter.

2. Analysis - At this point, you should have a good sense for what this particular tweeter says and does on Twitter, what their goals are for using it, and how they go about achieving those goals. Now we want to analyze this information to get a sense for who would likely find these particular tweets interesting, useful, funny, or meaningful in any other way. Don't worry about identifying specific audience members. Instead, focus on the type of person who might be interested in these tweets. It might be helpful to think of the community to which various audience members might belong. Try to be as specific as possible as you identify possible audiences and communities. It is not incredibly helpful to say that a particular tweeter appeals to a "general" audience. It would be much more specific to say that a particular tweeter appeals to educators and friends. It would be even more specific to say that a particular tweeter appeals to people who teach college writing. Part of the challenge here is to figure out the range of audiences that would likely be interested in these tweets. Some people will appeal to a broad range of audiences; some people will appeal to a smaller audience. The goal of your analysis is to demonstrate the range of audiences that would likely follow this person based on what they tweet and how they do it.

Let's consider a few hypothetical situations. Imagine Celebrity X, an actor who mainly uses twitter to post personal stories about other celebrities. These tweets would likely appeal to people interested in Hollywood gossip, but they might not appeal to a fan of Celebrity X who wanted to know more about her daily activities. Imagine Celebrity Y, a comedian who uses twitter to post obscene jokes and random thoughts but also to help promote their favorite charity. Some people might follow this person because they enjoyed the jokes; some people might follow this person not because they enjoy the random thoughts but because these random thoughts are eccentric and allow you to make fun of Celebrity Y; some people might follow this person because they are interested in the charity; some people might not follow this person even though they want to support the charity because they find the jokes offensive. Finally, imagine important Academic W, a significant figure in new media studies who only uses Twitter to post links to her blog posts. Some people might follow this person to keep up with new blog posts; some academics interested in new media studies might not follow this person because she only blogs about video games and they are interested in something else. In other words, just because someone is famous does not mean that all of their fans would follow them on Twitter. Just because someone is an academic in a particular field does not mean that everyone in that field would follow them on Twitter. The audience for a particular tweeter depends on how that tweeter uses Twitter.

So, the goal of this analysis is to think about the ways that certain uses of Twitter will appeal to different people. Again, we want to be as specific as possible, and we want to be able to demonstrate what sorts of audiences would be interested in what a particular tweeter posts and why these audiences would be interested.

3. Arrangement - At this point, you should have a clear sense for what you want to include in your rhetorical analysis. All of this information might be in your head, or you might have notes that you have written as you gathered information and analyzed it. The next step is to think about how you want to organize this information into a coherent and well-structured analysis paper. There are multiple ways to do this, so you will have to decide which organizing principle you will use. Do you want to organize your paragraph around different audiences? Around different ways that your person uses Twitter? Some other way? Regardless, you should organize your analysis so that it is easy for your reader to get a sense for the main conclusions of your analysis and how the different parts of your analysis fit together.

4. Style - You will also need to consider how you translate all of these ideas into a particular style in your paper. Like in our research summaries, we want our analyses to be objective. We are not taking sides here; we are not making claims about whether or not someone is interesting or whether we like them. Instead, we are analyzing - as objectively as possible - what they tweet in order to describe who would likely follow them. Another important consideration here is quotes. As you perform your analysis, it will be important to provide specific examples from the tweets you are examining. When you quote a tweet, include the date and time it was posted in parentheses. On Twitter, if you click on the date and time underneath a particular tweet, you will be directed to a page that is specific to this tweet. It would help to offer a link to this Tweet in your parenthetical citation. Here's an example: earlier this week, I posted a tweet that asked everyone, regarding the Rhetorical Peaks handout, to "please bring a hard copy with you to class" (Feb. 3, 2010; 3:02 pm).

Once you have finished your rhetorical analysis, save your page. Let me know if you have any questions about the assignment. We will discuss this assignment in class next Tuesday, and I will also offer you feedback that you can use to help you revise your paper.

Evaluation Suggestions:

Since I was using the Learning Record in this course, no specific grades were given on any aspect of our Twitter use. For the rhetorical analysis assignment, it would be easy to grade it as you would any short analysis assignment.

Notes on Reception, Execution, etc.:

Students responded well to the rhetorical analysis assignment. It was helpful to consider how a rhetorical orientation could be embodied in 140 character chunks, in links, and in a network of followers. The assignment gave students a different perspective on cultural figures and academics.

As for the Learning Record observations, students were somewhat hesitant to engage and share their observations (but not more so than other classes that have used the Learning Record but didn't share their observations on Twitter). The main challenge here is helping students be more comfortable with the observation process generally and then making them comfortable with sharing these with one another. To work toward these ends, I would want to spend more time in class discussing observations and allowing students to post on Twitter at that time.

Additional Resources:

ProfHacker has a number of posts on using Twitter in the classroom.

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