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The Assignment: Your final portfolio will showcase your work across this course. You may choose to revise and improve earlier pieces from your portfolio, or compose new pieces. You can use audio projects, video projects, and/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 on digital writing topics; or 2) a new 60 second video on a topic of your choice that is relevant to a wider audience.

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 in a form of 2-page long reflection, and post it in the portfolio itself..

You should also consider the following:

You must be able to secure permission to use every element in your projects. When necessary, you may be required to secure written permissions. All work must be carefully cited.

Exhibit and Submission: May 11

November 24, 2015

Digital Portfolio Assignment

Digital Portfolio Assignment

The Assignment: 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, and/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 new 60 second video.

You should also consider the following:

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 must be able to secure permission to use every element in your projects. When necessary, you may be required to secure written permissions. All work must be carefully cited.

November 2, 2015January 20, 2022

Wikipedia Article Assignment

Overview

In this assignment, you’ll be practicing collaborative writing skills by creating a new feature-length or extensively editing an existing article on Wikipedia. This assignment invites you to consider the promises and perils of community-based collaborative composition by engaging in the drafting and revision process of Wikipedia where your group’s writings will be live, editable, and up for discussion among the wider Wikipedia community of contributors, editors and administrators. There are a lot of technical logistics for this project; further, because writing wiki texts is an extended process that requires acquisition of new skills and competencies, allow for a large amount of time when carrying out the processes of creation, extension, and revision.

Logistics

Here are a list of the steps you (and your group) will need to take to complete this assignment:

• By week two you should identify idea/location/individual /thing/etc., that you’d like to create or expand on Wikipedia. This means sitting down, brainstorming, gathering ideas, and checking Wikipedia for existing articles. There is nothing wrong with working on an article that already exists; however, you’ll be expected to make substantive contributions to that article. In other words, it would be wise to choose an underdeveloped or completely non-existent article to work with on this assignment. “Stub” articles are ideal candidates for development. To identify these articles, you’ll need to spend a good deal of time as a group figuring out your collective interests and what you’d like to develop.

• During week three you’ll want to be working together, as a group, to identify the portions of the page you’d like to expand or create. Obviously, the sections you chose will vary greatly based on the subject you’ve chosen; however, my advice to you is to check other feature articles that are comparable and see what their section headings include. After you’ve decided on the sections to write, you’ll need to spend some time deciding how to divide your labor across the group. Who will do what? You might decide to have everyone write a portion of the entry; alternatively, you might have particular individual/s write, and other ones responsible for uploading, hyperlinking, and including pictures in the actual post. How you divide up the labor of this assignment is entirely up to your group; however, suffice it to say that everyone should be pulling a roughly comparable load of work.

As I said before, this assignment will require you to create a lot of smaller writing tasks; however, there are a lot of them . . . as such, you’ll want to ensure that you’re staying on schedule throughout and that everyone in the group is pulling their weight. If you are having difficulty with someone in your group, please try to work it out among yourselves. If that doesn’t work, feel free to get with me and let me know what trouble you’re having.

The Product
A Wikipedia article of ~3000 (3000 words of new text – this means if your article already existed and was 1000 words long, the new and improved version revised by your group should be at least 4000 words long) that provides information to a particular discourse community about a particular issue. The use of at least two images as well as other relevant media are required (c.f., a map for a specific location). This article or revision should adhere to the Wikipedia position on neutral point of view and should contain references/citations whenever relevant.

Deadlines
Wikipedia Article Proposal due to Canvas: April 18

Wikipedia Article Presentation and the Link Due to Canvas: May 2

Wikipedia Article Proposal Guidelines:

Topic for the article
Creating New or Revising Existing Article
Group work Division
Bibliography of Existing sources on the topic
Schedule-
Section Headings/organization Scheme
Images
Other Multimedia/Hyperlinks

October 28, 2015August 19, 2019

Argument Essay Assignment

7-8 pages of argument essay on American Dream. More specifically, in this progression, you will investigate an issue, debate, problem, controversy or a question pertaining to the notion of American Dream. You are required to use primary and secondary, scholarly and popular, and print and digital (online) sources in your essay. You are also expected to treat your research participants and sources ethically. When you research and develop your argument, you do a number of things simultaneously: extend a conversation, historicize, make a new claim, complicate an existing claim or established fact, find a gap in the studies done and propose a solution or offer an alternative perspective. As a college-level student writer, you also make moves that academics make in their essays: state your thesis or theses at some points in the essay, make general or specific claims, and furnish evidences for the claims made. I am aware that it is almost impossible to come up with some grand universal claims or some irrefutable thesis or set of theses in a paper of this length, but you can and have to attempt to present a tentative claim or set of claims in this paper corroborated by the data or sources you retrieve through different research methods.

Even though it is an academic essay and you might have been schooled to avoid personal in your academic essays, I am open to you implicating yourself in the essay i.e. using “I” or bringing in relevant personal narratives or experiences from your life. In other words, your essay should ideally be a combination of personal and academic, experiential and empirical, and facts and narratives. Rather than a prose in a mechanical form, it should be a record of lively and deep dialogue between yourself, your personal location, carefully chosen sources, and the ongoing conversations in the area or topic of your research. So, make your essay an exploration or journey into an unknown and try to make it known to an academic audience using the strategies and techniques (such as narrowing the focus, evaluating print or online sources, or dialoguing with sources) you learn in this progression.

Source Requirements

2 Primary research data (gathered through interviews, field visit, questionnaires, survey or observation)
4-5 scholarly sources (books, journal articles, book chapters etc.)
2-3 relevant still images
2-3 popular sources (videos, blogs, songs, cartoons, documentaries, websites, magazine articles or recorded TV or radio programs/talk shows)

The sources should be carefully chosen. I will provide you with some guidelines/criteria (such as relevance, currency, authority, credibility etc.) to evaluate both the online and print sources. I want you to follow them strictly as you decide on the sources for this assignment.

Your essay should be carefully edited; it should include accurate and consistent MLA citation, and it should reflect your perspective, viewpoint or position, your voice, your active presence, and deep and genuine engagement with your chosen topic.

Final Draft Due on Monday, November 11, 2019.

October 11, 2015

DW 459 Student Digital Portfolios

Kevin Ruiz: https://kevinruizdigtialwriting459digitalportfolio.wordpress.com

Sharon Lim: https://sharonlimedu.wordpress.com

Colette Meade: https://colette495portfolio.wordpress.com

Hannah Brunelli: https://hannahbrunelli.wordpress.com

Breanne Foster https://breannefoster459.wordpress.com

Dylan Poirier: https://dylanditigalwriting459portfolio.wordpress.com

Karina Winkler: https://kwdw459portfolio.wordpress.com

Lisa Jones: https://lisamjonesblog.wordpress.com

Melissa Hernandez: https://mhdigitalwritingportfolio.wordpress.com

Hailie Sheehan: https://hailiesheehan.wordpress.com

Miguel Noh: http://miguelnoh.weebly.com/

September 15, 2015August 24, 2019

Rhetorical Analysis of a Media Artifact Assignment

Rhetorical Analysis of a Media Artifact Assignment (200 Points)—Due Monday, October 7, 2019.

This assignment asks you to compose a 4-5 page of rhetorical analysis of a media artifact (a music video, video advertisement, movie or animation clip etc.) of your choosing. The text for analysis should be carefully chosen, and should not be necessarily related to the inquiry for progression 2. The artifact should be rich in textual, audio, visual, graphic or spatial resources, and good enough for rhetorical analysis.

I encourage you to borrow critical and rhetorical tools and terms from our textbooks, Media Analysis Techniques, Everyone’s An Author and the documentary, Miss Representation, 2011. “Semiotic Analysis,” and “Discourse Analysis” chapters from Media Analysis Techniques, and “Writing Analytically/A Roadmap” (pp. 160-169); and “Analyzing Arguments: Those You Read and Those You Write” (pp. 275-304) from Everyone’s An Author could be very useful for your own analysis of the chosen artifact.

Similarly, the following articles have a lot of good discussions on popular culture (the inquiry for this progression), and they can be equally useful for analysis, particularly if your artifact is from popular culture:

Sika A. Dagbovie-Mullins’ “Pigtails, Ponytails, and Getting Tail: The Infantilization and Hyper-Sexualization of African American Females in Popular Culture” (PDf in Canvas).

While analyzing the chosen media artifact, you have to use at least 4 shared sources (from the class) and/or other productive insights from rhetoric, such as rhetorical appeals (ethos, logos, pathos), and elements of rhetorical situation: 1. A text (i.e., an actual instance or piece of communication); 2. An author (i.e., someone who uses communication); 3. An audience (i.e., a recipient of communication); 4. Purposes (i.e., the varied reasons both authors and audiences communicate); and 5. A setting (i.e., the time, place, and environment surrounding a moment of communication).

Similarly, the idea of stereotypes, status quo, gender or racial discrimination and/or normalcy can come handy while critically examining your artifact. We will do some sample rhetorical analyses in the class too, so I want you to keep note of critical and rhetorical terms and concepts discussed in the class and use them in your analysis.

Structurally, your analysis should have at least two parts. The first part should describe the text/artifact in specific detail. The description should be vivid and minute to the point of replicating the artifact in words. The second part is the key to the assignment: analysis of the artifact. You might want to pick on symbol, sound, shape, color, images or any other properties of the text and begin the analysis from there. Once you are done with the analysis part, you also should make an overall claim about the artifact.

August 22, 2015January 20, 2022

Audio Movie Review Assignment

For this project, you will compose a short (5 minutes) audio review of one or two contemporary movie/s of your choosing using GarageBand or Audacity 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 in this medium. Therefore, your review script should be written with much care, and plan for the composition should be done intricately before recording and editing the tracks. Unless you have an 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, uploaded in Sound cloud, and then embedded in your website—which becomes a part of your digital portfolio that you exhibit towards the end of the semester.

Even before all that, you will write a proposal and we will have in-class workshop. Your proposal needs to extensively outline the plan for your audio review. It should be approximately 200 to 300 words. You should indicate why you believe this would make an engaging review. I will respond to your proposal. Your next step will be to produce a script that outlines your audio review plan. You will present your review in the class. At that time, you will submit your mp3 and your script.

Proposal Due in Canvas: before class on February 9

Audio Movie Review Presentation: February 21

Submit your final Audio movie review via Canvas Link by February 23.

August 22, 2015January 18, 2022

Digital Literacy Narrative Assignment

Digital Literacy Narrative Assignment

An individual’s digital literacy develops out of their particular historical, cultural, socio-economic, educational, or familial contexts and must be understood in light of the material conditions experienced within those various, interconnected environments and influences. In other words, our (in)abilities to work in and through technology to create writing and communicate in the world are a product of our own histories of use, learning, and opportunity. For this assignment, you will write your own digital literacy narrative, focusing on the process of acquiring your present level of digital literacy, the challenges and successes you’ve encountered with technology, and the individuals, institutions, organizations, or communities (both real and virtual) that helped and hindered you along your journey.

The narrative you compose shouldn’t be a chronological list of “literacy events” but instead should be focused on specific aspects of your own literacy and its development and should center on specific themes and key events. Avoid attempting to be exhaustive; instead, make choices to construct a specific narrative that is concrete, detailed, episodic, and interesting.

Remember, you’re crafting a narrative, and also remember that narratives are stories. In this sense, your narrative won’t be like a traditional academic research paper; however, you might make some of the same persuasive moves that you would in an argumentative essay or proposal. You’ll likely need to do some prewriting to reflect and understand your own historical relationship to digital technology as well as your current immersion or distance from it.

Product: A 5-7 minutes long audio/video that investigates your personal history of digital technology, your present interactions with digital technology, and your digital identity vis-à-vis technology. You might first want to write down the narrative, and then video or audio record it. The camera on your computer or your phone should be fine. If you don’t have access to a camera, talk to me. Upload the recorded narrative to Canvas on or before due date.