Author: admin

Project Web Assignment

Group Project

For this small group project, you will create: A Website appropriate for a topic associated with Internet.  During the research and composing process for this project, you will propose a specific topic, gather and evaluate sources in multiple media, identify target audience, and compose and organize content appropriate for that target audience. While narrowing the scope of website down to something concrete and relatable and making an argument about specific topic of your choosing, your completed website must:

Effectively use elements of design: focal point, typography, color, etc.

Have a specific “feel”.

Feature a consistent look.

Look professional and (or) appropriate for the purpose.

Consist of at least 5 pages (or equivalent).

Must use appropriate navigation.

Use images, videos, songs, music, animations, interviews, print texts, and other appropriate and relevant resources throughout the site.

Include social media connections (Facebook “Like” or Twitter timeline or other widgets, if appropriate. Include all necessary content (No “work in progress” pages.)

When the website is complete and live, you need to identify ten potential users and conduct usability testing with them. Of course, you need to get consent forms signed before testing the website on them. And, based on the feedback from these test users, you need to revise the draft before making final presentation in the class.

A reflective blog post:

Connected with this project, you will also compose and post a 3-page long blog post on your site about the rhetorical situation and composition style; audience factor and source and language variety choice; audience and web design, and media and meaning-making resources. In other words, you must consider the dynamics of composing platforms and the content that can go with them, and how consideration of audience informs our rhetorical choices and vice versa. On top of that theoretical discussion, you should also explain your project’s target audience, context, purposes, and how consideration of all those rhetorical  factors impacted your design choices and decisions.

Some Group Presentation Guidelines

1. Plan out your presentation in such a way that every group member contributes equally to the presentation.

2. Your presentation should include–description of your topic (nobody except your group knows what you are working on), explanation of your research and design process, discussion of your  argument, design decisions (organization), and how your design decision supports or complements your claim in the website.

3. Make your presentation interesting/lively–demonstrate some videos, websites or other resources, and explain how they helped you make your argument.

4. Try to make your presentation interactive–ask questions, involve audience to discussion, and ask for audience feedback to your web design, content on the web etc. even during the presentation, and definitely at the end.

Individual Essay

In addition to the group project, each one of you will write an individual research proposal articulating your research plan/design. Each one of you will then write a 1,000 words essay on a topic associated with “Internet”, which demonstrates a good scholarly research. You will explore a set of very pointed questions around a particular issue, debate, idea or complexity related to your chosen topic. You can choose to work with the same topic that your group worked on. But, individually, you will make a claim about that topic, support your claim with evidence, and draw a logical conclusion following adequate exploration and discussion of issue or questions pertaining to that specific topic.

Some Specifics for Individual Essays:

1. 2-3 scholarly sources
2. 2-3 popular sources—images, blogs, videos, documentaries etc.
3. Primary data—interview, observation, survey
4. Consistent MLA citation.

This assignment asks you to compose a 6 page of critical/literary analysis of V.S. Naipaul’s novel,Half A Life by using insights and ideas from psychological and postcolonial approaches from Wilfred L. Guerin et al’s book, A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. You might want to engage in a thorough analysis of that text and make an argument about it. Analysis might focus on a set of themes, characters, symbols and other figures, and rhetorical features of that text, such as audience, author, context, persuasive appeals/strategies, and diction and so on. You need to adequately describe the concepts or theoretical lenses from critical texts and discuss them in connection with the fictional text that you are analyzing. While using a set of critical texts to analyze a fictional work, you might need to make a number of moves—description, explanation, contextualization, interpretation, evaluation, synthesizing, thesis formulation, and so on. To ground your analysis in recent conversation, you should look to use three other scholarly sources that critically examine the novel from various vantage points.

Half A Life Discussion Questions

For this project, you will work collaboratively in a group of 4 and produce an 12 to 15 minutes of documentary film. You can choose any contemporary or historical topics for this project. Your documentary should incorporate a good amount and variety of sources—alphabetic texts (books, articles, newspaper editorials etc.), audios, videos, still images, interviews, animations and visual resources, among others- and be organically composed. It should also demonstrate your knowledge or learning of a number of techniques such as handling video camera, still camera, interviewing people, conducting field research, incorporating voice over into the film and/or editing skills. The juxtaposition of different texts and narrative voice and their organic unity will be the key evaluation criteria for your project. Your project should also reflect your understanding of audience, textual cohesion, and ethical treatment of sources etc.

You need to write a proposal, then script for the documentary before putting everything together in I-Movie or other movie making programs. And, you must secure permissions for all materials used in your project. You must give credit for all materials used in your project.

Outcomes
You will demonstrate skills in audio and video recording and editing to create a rhetorically effective text.

You will talk in a generally knowledgeable way about video texts, how to compose them, and how they are structured in terms of compositional elements.

You will demonstrate a consideration of purpose, information, audience, and other rhetorical considerations, as it they relate to your documentary topic.

Proposal Due: March 14

Documentary Screening in the Class: April 4

Final Documentary Link due to Canvas: April 4

Documentary Project Groups

Group 1: 

Group 2:

Group 3: 

Group 4: 

Group 5:

Group 6:

 

English 654: Literacy, Diversity, and Technology

Spring 2015

Your final portfolio will showcase your work across this course. You may choose to revise and improve earlier pieces from your portfolio, compose new pieces, or a combination thereof. You can use audio projects, video projects, or blogging projects. Your portfolio should take one of two forms:

3-Piece Portfolio: The three pieces you have already composed this semester, 2 of which should be significantly revised.

4-Piece Portfolio: The three pieces you have already composed this semester, plus one more. You can choose from 1) a set of 5 new blog posts with a critical introduction; 2) an audio narrative collection; 3) a 60 second video.
Post your digital portfolio on your website in a way that is most suitable for your collection of materials.
The success of your Portfolio will be directly tied to how you think about, approach, and execute each of your projects. In addition to the three or four projects, you will describe, analyze, and assess the work in your Portfolio.

You should also consider the following:

Your projects can be about subjects of your choice as long as your treatment of that subject matter is rigorous, serious, critical, and reflective.

Your projects must exhibit your careful considerations of rhetorical choice surrounding the issues of audience, purpose, forum, and technological affordances. Also, your projects must exhibit your careful consideration of genre and its conventions. Finally, your projects must exhibit your careful consideration of design.

You should secure permission to use materials/assets, as needed.

Along side, digital portfolio, you need to submit/post your overall impressions of the project and reflect on learning challenges and successes.

 

You will write a short response to the shared reading(s) for the week and post the response to your website. Your response should show your familiarity with the assigned readings and demonstrate your engagement with them either by drawing connections between the readings (and course themes), and/or by thoughtfully reflecting on the implications of the readings and discussions.

This assignment is intended to spark and expand on our class discussions, prepare you to engage in those discussions more fully and productively, enhance your understanding of the assigned readings, explore new insights about the assigned texts, introduce you to ways of using informal writing for invention, and provide you with ideas that you may later use to develop your major projects.

Each post should be between 400 and 600 words and is due before class each week. Generally speaking, your blog post should examine one or more of these issues:
• main issues, themes, or questions/claims in the reading
• language use in the select texts
• key texts cited (and intertextual relationships)
• major questions/challenges the text pose for you
• issues/questions from seminar discussions and texts under consideration
I want you to take this assignment seriously. Not only will these responses prepare you for productive contribution to our seminar/discussions, they may also be the springboard for your longer projects.

You and a classmate will co-lead a discussion of select course texts, twice or thrice during the semester. You can pick your dates, or we can use other methods to choose the days (and texts). Each presentation may be about 20 minute long and end with questions that lead to engaged discussion on the given texts and seminar themes. I’ll be available to discuss the outlines or give advice in advance about how to focus your presentations.

English 654: Literacy, Diversity, and Technology

Spring 2015

For this collaborative multiple grants writing project, you will work in small groups of two to write grant proposals for our host organization. Together, you will identify some potential funding agencies; locate, research, interpret and respond to their RFPs; and thus prepare preliminary drafts of proposals. My expectation is that you will move through writing process and producing fairly polished drafts for your target agencies. Your writing process will be closely monitored and supported with resources and feedback from me and the designated grant writers from our host organization. As you complete your projects, you will submit your final drafts to me and the designated official from partner organization. Our expectation is that you will write grants that can be submitted to related funders with some or no further work, and any money generated by this partnership will go towards funding some new or ongoing projects of this great organization. This organization works with vulnerable population and around very sensitive issues. Therefore, being able to support its noble cause in some ways will be a remarkable achievement in itself.

First step in the assignment for you is to go through description and action plans of projects this organization has in file. I encourage you to choose something you are interested in. After you decide on the projects, next step for you will be to research, identify, and contact potential funders for those projects. After that, you will look at the RFPs, gather needed info/data, and start writing the grant in the format/structure outlined by the funding agencies. Your writing process will be supported by classroom discussion on, among other things, components of grant proposal, grant writing conventions, strategies of writing persuasive grant proposals, peer feedback, and close work with me and the grant writing unit of our host organization. By the end of the semester, you will produce multiple proposals for small and medium grants that host organization can submit to potential funders.

We have agreed that we will use reviewers’ evaluation criteria to assess your projects. In most cases, RFPs also include evaluation criteria, and we will use them to determine whether your drafts are polished enough to be submitted to target funding agencies. My understanding with host organization is that I will not assess the projects alone, but we will collaborate in their evaluation. Using reviewer’s criteria, we will determine whether you adhered to funder’s directions/guidelines, whether your proposals are persuasive to us and to the reviewers, whether your proposals include required components of non-profit grant proposal, including detailed action plan, budget, and plan for evaluation of project outcomes, and so on.

Week 1/Jan 20

Introduction to course. Setting up websites, posting bios/sample post.

Intro Prompts

Literacy Narratives

Literacy narrative is telling a story about reading and composing in print

and/or digital media.

Consider the following questions as you think through your literacy journey:

When and how did you learn to read or compose texts on papers and (or) screens?

What made that learning possible—schools, parents, community centers, relatives

or something/somebody else? What language(s) did you first use for reading,

writing and/or online activities? Is English your first language? When and how did

you learn to speak, read and write in English? What about computers and the

Internet? When and where did you first encounter them? What did you begin

with? What were the programs/applications you began your digital or cyber

literacy with? Where did you stand in relation to alphabetic literacy or digital literacy

in high school, for instance, and where are you now? If you speak more than one language, what is your degree of proficiency in each of them? How do they play out in your multiple literacy practices? Is your literate life informed by variables such as age, sex, gender, class, nationality or digital divide? And finally, what are your literacy priorities at this point?

Take next five minutes to jot down your thoughts around these prompts.

Web Design–1. create pages, create posts–connect pages with posts and other pages.2. Embed video/images, embed scribd doc. 3. Order menu, create sub-menu (parent-child), customize header, color, fonts, themes. 4. Add widgets–blogroll, Twitter, recent posts/comments. 5. Post bio.

Homework:

Blog Post Due before next class:

New London Group. “A Pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures.”

NCTE. “The NCTE Definition of 21st Century Literacies.”

Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “A Call to Support 21st Century Writing.”

… “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” CCC 56.2 (2004): 297-328.

Week 2/Jan 27

Discussion of Readings—facilitators–

Audio Movie Review Assignment

Screening of Sci-fi movie, Her

Further work with websites

Homework: Write a critical review of the movie. See audio movie review assignment for details. Bring sound tracks, scripts/narratives to class.

Week 3/ Feb 3

Workshop on GarageBand—sound recording, mixing, editing.

Homework:

Blog Post Due before next class:

Selfe, Cynthia. “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing.”

Richert and Salvo.“The Distributed Gesamptkunstwerk: Sound, Worlding, and New Media Culture”

Week 4/Feb 10

Selfe, and Richert and Salvo. Facilitators–

Garageband—peer-review, and final workshop

Homework:

Blog Post Due before next class:

Gunther Kress. Literacy in the New Media Age.

Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. “New Media, New Learning.” Multiliteracies in Motion: Current Theory and Practice.

Week 5/Feb 17

Embedding audio movie review on your website

Group formation and collaborative documentary making assignment—Emerging new media and literacy practices

Discussion of Readings— Facilitators–

Homework:

Blog Post Due before next class:

Hempe, Barry. Making Documentary Films and Videos: A Practical Guide to Planning, Filming, and Editing Documentaries.

Week 6/Feb 24

Discussion Hempe. Facilitators–

Analysis of A Clip from Digital Nation

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/view/

Intro to I-Movie

IMovie tutorial by Apple.

Homework:

Write the Script, interview people, collect other resources.

Week 7/March 3

Workshop on I-movie—voice over, transition, editing, recording narrative on GarageBand Homework:

Blog Post Due before next class:

Put together documentary. Upload documentary to YouTube. Embed documentary on your site. Read Postcolonial Studies, and the Psychological Approach from A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature

Week 8/ March 10

Discuss postcolonial and psychological theories.

Facilitators–

Literary Analysis Assignment

Homework:

Blog Post Due before next class:

V.S. Naipaul Half a Life

Week 9/March 17

No Class—Field Visit to our Partner NGO. Meet the NGO Rep (if needed), find more about their projects, find a project that you want to write proposal for, identify some potential funding sources (you might want to email Joyce regarding that–she might have some ideas). Fill up time sheet (download one from Community Engagement page, if you haven’t already). Remember that you need to spend 20 hrs in service learning in order to pass this course.

Week 10/March 24

Field Visit Report

V.S. Naipaul Half a Life.

Facilitators–

Homework: Identify topics for your paper. Also identify three other sources related to your topic. Annotate them.

Week 11/March 31

No class—Cesar Chavez Holiday

Homework:

Complete Literary Analysis assignment.

Week 12/ April 7 April 6-11—Spring Recess

Homework:

Blog Post Due before next class:

O’Neal-McElrath, Tori. Winning Grants Step by Step: The Complete Workbook for Planning, Developing, and Writing Successful Proposals.

Week 13/April 14

O’Neal-McElrath

Facilitators:

Homework:

Identify Potential funders,

Read RFPs,

Blog Post Due before next class:

James Pokrywczynski. “Peer Reviewers Describe Success in Grant Writing.”

Katie Krueger. “Severn Deadly Grant-Writing Sins.”

Week 14/April 21

Visit to our Project Site at 2:30PM-4:00PM. Site Address: 18227 Acre St. Northridge, CA 91325.

Facilitators:

James Pokrywczynski.

Katie Krueger

Group work–Strategizing grant, outlining

Homework:

Draft Proposals, and send them for feedback to NGO liasion, Joyce Harmon, and me by Saturday.

Week 15/April 28

Workshop on grants. Upload proposals to your site.

Week 16/May 5

Course Evals/Grants Due/ Digital Portfolio Demo

For this project, you will compose a short (5 minutes) audio review of Spike Jonze’s sci-fi movie Her using GarageBand in the style of radio programs in NPR. In the review, you will make creative use of sound effects, music, silence, and any other audio tools at your disposal to communicate your ideas.

Your review should be relevant to an educated audience beyond campus. It needs to be written in a style that will translate well into speech, a written piece adjusted into something more “talky” — a vocal performance. It should also display originality and technical execution, and should mix together at least three audio tracks (background music, your voice over/narrative, clips of dialogues from the movie, or director/producer or cast member’s interviews/commentary on the movie etc.).

In the composing part, you should make sure that your tracks are precisely edited and transition between tracks is natural and smooth. The principles of coherence, unity, organicity, and consideration of audience and media all come into play even in this medium. Therefore, your review script should be written with much care, and plan for the composition done intricately before recording and editing the tracks. Unless you have a effective delivery (output), all your behind the scene diligence hardly makes any sense in this media. Your final product should be exported in mp3 format and embedded in your website—which becomes a part of your digital portfolio that you exhibit towards the end of the semester.

• Syracuse University Writing Center, Spring 2013; Fall 2012; Spring and Summer 2009

• University of Louisiana at Lafayette Writing Center, Spring, 2008; Summer 2008 

• International Centre for the Human Rights Education (equitas), Montreal, Canada, Translation and Interpretation Service for Nepal from May 2006 to Jan. 2008