Shelley Rodrigo's List: Electronic Written, Aural, & Visual Expressions (E-Wave)

• Twenty plus media-rich assignments will be presented in a highly interactive poster format in Louisville. They are collected here so that others can explore these assignments and approaches. Digital interventions into all pedagogical areas of English studies are not likely to abate in the near future (Berger, CCCC, Cope and Kalantzis, Gee, George, Graff, Kress, NCTE, Selfe, Sirc, Wysocki). Perhaps that is why collections like Technological Ecologies and Sustainability, seem so timely (DeVoss, McKee, & Selfe, 2009). We need to take opportunities to think carefully about sustainable media-rich pedagogies.This workshop and site offer one such opportunity. Take time to interact virtually with a substantial number of teachers and students who have worked through and reflected on media assignments. Through the comments at the top of each assignment page, we will be able to continue to talk critically and practically about how media-rich assignments provide communicative affordances of value to 21st century students.

• Abstract: In this collaborative presentation, we (an instructor and two undergraduates) will discuss the curriculum, teaching, and learning in a digital writing course. For an entire semester, students researched a topic of their choosing, composing several multimedia arguments for a variety of audiences. Issues we will discuss include (1) curriculum design for students with diverse prior learning experiences and technological expertise, (2) integrating technological, rhetorical, and design-based learning, and (3) balancing analysis and production.
  

• To meet the expectations of University of New Mexico’s Core Writing Program’s genre-based curriculum initiative, we have paired “real world” sequences (analytical report, letter of intent/cover letter, and local issue proposal) and WebCT to prepare our 102 hybrid and face-to-face students for the academic and professional discourse communities they are in and will enter into. Although WebCT is problematic as it does not simulate the richness found within in-class discussions, we use the Discussion Board as a common space for brainstorming and sharing analysis of rhetorical strategies. In this online community, WebCT allows students to work out ideas to minimize the guesswork involved while they learn to invent the university.

• I am working on finalizing a project I tested out last year in combining our ENGL 150 course (a pre-freshman research strategies writing course) with the actual research course in a "stretch" (2 semester) package. To do this, I am working with McGraw-Hill Connect Plus and an online textbook--The McGraw Hill Guide to Writing Online-- to pace students through the reading and assignments there and allow the class meetings to be less lecture and more about discussing writing questions that are more global concerning audience and planning and to allow more time for individual and group conferencing.

• A guide to parkour hotspots in a city of 56,000, complete with instructional photos. A reflection on a 2,000 mile journey across the country. An investigation of the best pizza places in a region famous for that culinary dish. These are just a few of the student works resulting from an assignment to create a “text” within Google Maps. In essence, students use Google Maps to make, annotate, and post their own map to the public, whose comments then factor into the ongoing development and revision of the map.

• This digital poster, one component of which I am building as Prezi flash slides (see draft ), will demonstrate how student groups in a business writing course organized and collaborated on writing projects quite independently by using wiki. The poster will visually argue that there must first of all be a solid pedagogical framework in place for students to be able to manage the process of collaboration, writing, and learning. The pedagogy for the writing project that I will demonstrate was adapted from Joanna Wolfe's book Team Writing. I first trained students to develop and use task schedule and team charter as well as teamwork skills like floating meeting agenda/minutes and documenting project progress. I supported students with learning and implementing team working and team writing skills, but every group made all the decisions about content, form, process, and problem-solving involved in the completion of the collaborative writing and presentation project significantly independently. The combination of the collaborative writing pedagogy and the appropriate technology of wiki made the assignment highly student-directed and therefore effective. This digital poster will visualize the good pedagogy working side by side with a cool technology :).

• In a socially mediated world where more and more is focused on the sound byte, formal writing is becoming a lost art. What was once engagement through the written words between individuals has moved online to a social setting. Rather than fight the “paperless classrooms” that have evolved, let’s embrace the technologies to enhance student writing. I examine Google Docs collaboration mode and how to best engage student writers in meaningful exchanges of participatory writing and peer editing. Participants will leave with a working knowledge of how to implement Google Docs in their classes immediately to enhance literacy and encourage a dialogue between writer and reviewer.

• Students in two different sections of an upper-level composition course, Writing for the World Wide Web, chose two very different approaches to an assignment asking them to create a collaboratively written text with and about new media technology and its effects on written communication.

• Though composition instructors may explore how media affect the message, student writers rarely connect how specific media influence *their* messages. I ask writing students to re-envision their final essay--an analysis based on semester-long, self-selected research--and redevelop it in video. The project enables print writers to see and hear how directorial choices take on rhetorical power-- from audio, font, and color to video transitions and effects. Compiling comprehensive credits is "real world" citation. As students actively revise their writing while producing this project, they often truly begin to re-envision the essay itself.

• ENG 553 is an upper-level course (theme varies by instructor). For this course, I had students read, listen to, and view a variety of sci-fi texts across the century (including works by: Orson Wells, Ridley Scott, William Gibson, Octavia Butler, and others). Students wrote two main papers for the course, kept a "sci-fi scrapbook," and completed a collaborative group project: the "sweded" presentation.
  

• Drawing on a qualitative study of several online writing classrooms, this presentation examines an experimental, first-year writing pedagogy that questions the materialities of a digital learning environment. This pedagogy asks students to consider the potentials and limitations of their course management system. Then, students are encouraged to push, bend, and, potentially, even break this software in order to serve their goals as students in a computer mediated learning environment. In addition to reporting on findings, this presentation will also offer strategies, sample assignments, and openings for discussion.

• • Looks like the presenter still needs to finish the page and take down the "under construction" image. I wonder what image she'll put up for the permanent page?
  Add Sticky Note
• Many instructors require annotated bibliographies as process assignments during a research project; why not put them online using the "list" feature in Diigo? Not only does Diigo function as a regular social bookmarking tool, saving URLs to relevant resources; Diigo also allows users to annotated individual webpages and share those annotations with others. Still desire hardcopy resources (don’t forget those books!)? This assignment also provides various methods for how students can digitally bookmark paper resources.
• • I was very bummed to learn that the "Social Bookmarking in Plain English" video was no longer on YouTube so that I could embed it here. However, the Common Craft folks still have it available to watch on their website! Be sure to link out and watch it.
  Add Sticky Note
• • Public/Private
   
  • Tagging
   
  • Description (Global)
   
  • Highlighting
   
  • Sticky Note (Location Specific, w/ability to get annotated link)
   
  • Lists
   
  • Groups
   
  • Teacher Console
• • Realistically, these tips are pretty generalizable to introducing an new technology.
  Add Sticky Note

3 more annotations...

• The video essay assignment asks students to address an issue that is important to them, work with others in researching and crafting a position, and use video to effectively communicate this argument and persuade others either inside or beyond our class. In this assignment, students work collaboratively in groups of 3-4 to generate a short video argument (no more than 3 minutes) about technology’s impact on public issues. We ask them to submit a topic proposal, a group work contract, an individual and group storyboard, as well as a first and final cut of the video itself. To provide feedback to other groups, we ask that students write an individually-authored rhetorical analysis of another group's first cut. In what follows below you'll find a short overview of the course as a whole and how it fits within the curriculum at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), assignment prompts and grading criteria for the video and rhetorical analysis assignments, some sample student work, and our brief reflections on how the assignment has evolved in response to our reflections and student feedback.

• For this oral remix assignment, students are asked to find examples of aural rhetoric (speeches, songs, and other sound files) and recombine them in a way that changes the rhetorical purpose, audience, context, or strategies used from their original rhetorical situation. In this way, students will not only rhetorically analyze the original pieces, but will also appropriate them for use in a recombination of those resources – mimicking research and scholarship in a particularly “non-academic” genre.

• This presentation describes on an on-going experiment that taps the peer-networking Web 2.0 skills students have learned outside of class to benefit students' work in our FYC classes. Specifically, this presentation details how students in 23 sections of FYC develop online resources to foster connections (e.g., "Did you see Malcolm Gladwell on the Colbert Report?") and to answer their questions (.e.g, "Can anyone tell me what makes a good introduction?"). We’ll discuss how to match technologies (ning, wiki, listserv) with pedagogical goals (fostering conversation outside of class) and how to find institutional resources to fund these projects.

• In this three-part assignment, students create professional websites for graduate students and, if available, local businesses. Businesses and graduate students willing to participate introduce themselves. Students select whom they would like to work with. Students are provided client contact information and must begin the process of creating a website which meets assignment criteria. Students learn the process of designing websites. They negotiate with clients to achieve the assignment criteria, they storyboard websites, create prototype pages, and finally demonstrate their skills by hosting a professional websites for clients utilizing what they have learned about design principles.

• Videogames are a budding interactive digital art form that, until now, has been scarcely discussed except to point out the violence, misogyny, and racism their critics find offensive. I will use the game Braid, by Jonathan Blow, to illustrate how a close reading of videogames offers a fresh new avenue of criticism in the field. I will be showing both screenshots and video from the game to highlight key points of literary comparison, and to demonstrate the new theoretical grounds on which this approach can be built.