Assignments

  1. Hangouts: 10%
  2. Reading responses: 10%
  3. Personal website: 15%
  4. Multimodal analysis: 15%
  5. Book chapter remix: 25%
  6. Issue/cause website: 25%

Grading

I will use the following descriptors for grading your assignments. These descriptors will give you an indication of the the expectations that will guide my evaluation of your work.

I will use +/- grades for assignments and for the final course grades. The +/- grades correspond to the numeric ranges below.

Grade descriptors

  • A: Outstanding represents toryboarduperlative participation in all course activities; all assigned work completed, with very high quality in all course work.
  • B: Excellent represents above-average participation in all course activities; all assigned work completed, with consistently high quality in course work.
  • C: Average represents good participation in all course activities; all assigned work completed, with generally good quality overall in course work.
  • D: Below average represents uneven participation in course activities; some gaps in assigned work completed, with inconsistent quality in course work.
  • F: Inadequate represents minimal participation in course activities; serious gaps in assigned work completed, or very low quality in course work.

+/- grades

  • A+: 97 and above
  • A: 93-96
  • A-: 90-92
  • B+: 87-89
  • B: 83-86
  • B-: 80-82
  • C+: 77-79
  • C: 73-76
  • C-: 70-72
  • D+: 67-69
  • D: 63-66
  • D-: 60-62
  • F: 0-59

Hangouts

Hangouts description

Although this is an online course, interaction will be a key part of your learning experience. I have designed the course to provide you with opportunities for unscheduled interactions with your peers and myself via the course forums.

However, one of the most important methods of interaction in the course will be periodic, live group chats with myself and the members of your work groups for individual projects.

We will use Google’s Hangouts for our chats. You can access Hangouts via mobile apps, a desktop application, or through your Gmail or Google Plus accounts.

If you are new to Hangouts, you can find more information here:

Hangouts requirements We will hold at least four required Hangouts.

Hangouts due dates

You are responsible for contacting me during my office hours during the first two weeks of the semester. (If you are not free during my scheduled office hours, please email me to schedule an alternate time for us to meet.) During that meeting, we will introduce ourselves and you can ask me any additional questions you have about the course or course projects.

After your first Hangout with me, you will participate in at least one chat during each module of the semester. These chats will involve myself and the members of your work groups. I will work with your group to schedule these chats during a time when everyone in the group is available.

Hangouts grading

Your Hangouts grade will be based on participation. In this case, participation will not only refer to logging in on time and staying for the length of the chat; it will also mean contributing to the overall success of the chat by paying attention and actively engaging in discussions.

Your initial contact with me to test your connectivity and the remaining three group Hangouts will each be worth 25% of your total interaction grade. Because we will have so few chats, you are required to participate in all of them. There will be no excused absences from the chats and makeups for missed chats will not be allowed.

Reading responses

Reading responses description

Whenever I assign readings for the course I will give you a project to help focus your reading of the assigned text. On some occasions I will assign quizzes that you will fill out and return to me. On other occasions, I will ask you to complete a learning activity.

For each week when there are assigned readings from Net Smart or Blown to Bits, you will write a response to those readings on the Weekly Discussion Forum. For each of those weeks, I will create a topic on the forum titled after the week number (i.e., “Week 2”) where you will post your response. On some occasions I will provide you with a discussion prompt to guide your responses, but for most weeks you will be free to write about what you wish.

In addition to your original post, you will be required to respond to at least one of your classmates’ posts on the forum.

Reading responses requirements

Your initial posts to the forum should be no less than 150 words. Your responses to your classmates’ posts should be at least 50 words. Both your posts and responses should be guided by the course’s online etiquette policies.

Reading responses due dates

Your initial posts to the forum each week will be due before 5 p.m. 11:59 p.m. on Tuesdays. Your responses will be due before 5 p.m. 11:59 p.m. on Thursdays.

All other quizzes and assignments will be due  by 5 p.m. 11:59 p.m. on Thursday of the week they are assigned, unless otherwise noted.

Reading responses grading

Quizzes will be graded by percentages—e.g., on a quiz with 5 questions, each question will be worth 20% of the quiz grade.

Other reading assignments will be graded by your participation and ability to follow the assignment instructions.

If you fail to return a quiz or exercise to me by its due date or miss the deadline for a forum post or response, your grade for that assignment will be a zero. If you know that you will be unable to meet the deadline for one of these assignments, please contact me before the due date about alternatives. In general, however, missed quizzes, reading assignments, and discussion board postings cannot be made up.

I will evaluate your discussion forum postings using the following rubric in conjunction with the grade descriptors above:

  • Originality: When responding to the readings, think about how your unique experiences and knowledge allows you to reflect on the content of the readings. By doing so, you can ensure that your response will be an original—and interesting—take on those readings.
  • Detail: Include descriptive detail in your responses, not simply to make it interesting to your classmates and me, but so we can understand the context of your post. Use specific nouns and verbs, cite specific sections of the text, and provide specific examples.
  • Make connections: One sign of learning is the ability to apply knowledge to a new situation. In your discussion board posts, make an effort to identify connections between the readings, between current and previous readings, between the readings and current events, etc. In general, you should make an effort to relate and apply the concepts in the readings to contexts that are relevant to your classmates—the course projects, the college experience, the workplace—and yourself—your career goals, your interests.

Personal website

Personal website description

You will create a personal website to showcase your professional persona and your work in this course. You will create this site on WordPress.com, a free content management and web-hosting platform.

While all elements of your site are expected to function and display correctly in a variety of web browsers, because we are using WordPress, the project will primarily focus on the appropriateness of the website—its design and implementation, the text and other media it contains, and the overall appeal and effectiveness of the site and its organization.

Your site is designed for a professional audience—i.e., potential employers, peers and colleagues in your chosen field. Keep this in mind as you design it. When assembling the sections of your site and the material it contains, you should do so in a way that would provide the best version of your work for an audience of professionals.

Personal website requirements

Your site will be a work in progress to which you will add material throughout the semester, serving as a portfolio for your course work. It should be legible, appropriate, and attractive in its use of site colors, backgrounds and other images, and typefaces. The site should make effective use of visual material like photographs and illustrations when appropriate. If any material on the site is not wholly created by you, you must acknowledge the original author and link back to his or her work or, if the work is not online, provide a complete source citation for it.

The site will be due in two parts. For the first submission, your site should contain the following:

  • A home page featuring a brief description of the purpose of the site along with an image. This page can remain simple for now, but your description should be more detailed than “this is a website for my class.” Think about some possible uses you might have for a personal website (if you don’t already have one) and adopt one of them for this submission. You can always change this later.
  • An about page featuring a brief introduction of yourself. It is not necessary for you to divulge personal information about your life, but you should provide a description of yourself as the author of the site, connecting your skills to the purpose for the site described on the home page. This page should contain at least 150 words of text and at least one image. The writing should showcase your wit and ability to connect with your site’s potential visitors.

These two sections should be the whole site when you submit it the first time. Remove or delete unnecessary sections before this first submission.

When you submit the site a second time, you will be able to completely revise it. You can continue to build your site on WordPress.com or if you want you can move your site to your own domain, or use any other site-buidling or web hosting software (such as Google Sites, Wix, etc.). This second submission of the site should contain the following sections:

  • Updated home and about pages. Together these will pages contain at least 300 words of text and at least one image each. The writing should showcase your wit and ability to connect with your site’s professional audience.
  • A portfolio section, highlighting the digital work you will create as part of the course (although you can feel free to include any other digital work of yours that you feel would be appropriate)
  • An additional, user-defined section chosen by you. This section could be
    • your professional resume for potential employers;
    • a blog where you revise or expand your forum posts to relate them to your professional audience, or some other periodic form of media—podcasts or video blogs, for example—that you will update throughout the semester;
    • or some other content that will further the goal(s) of your site and add to its appeal to your audience.

Personal website due dates

The first submission will constitute half of your grade for this assignment. The purpose of this first submission will be to familiarize you with the WordPress platform and the tools for creating a WordPress site. To receive credit for the project, you must post the link to your site to the appropriate topic on the Personal Website forum before 5 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 30.

The second half of your personal website grade will be for the second submission of the site. Your final edits to the site are due no later than 5 p.m. on the last day of class, May 1.

If you continue to use the same site as your first submission, you will not need to do anything other than complete your changes before the final due date. If you move your site to your own host or another third-party website, however, you will need to contact me to let me know about the change before the final due date so I will know where to find your site.

Personal website grading

I will evaluate your personal website using the following rubric in conjunction with the grade descriptors above:

  • Design: The site adheres to the best practices for Web and multimodal design as articulated in Writer/Designer.
  • Accessibility and requirements: The site is logically ordered and structured and adheres to best practices for linking (using text tags instead of URLs, linking to all online sources, placing links where they are needed) and image use (using descriptive alt tags, providing citations and links to the original source for all images not created by you). The site meets all of the requirements laid out in the assignment description above.
  • Readability and effectiveness: The text and other multimedia elements are free of major and minor errors in structure, syntax, and grammar and display the quality of writing appropriate for a professional audience.
  • Multimodality: Multimodal elements are effectively incorporated into the site to complement, comment on, and/or extend the written text taking advantage of the affordances of those modes to serve the goals of the site and its audience.
  • Citation and research: All of the elements of the site are either the sole creation of the author, explicitly licensed for reuse, no longer covered by copyright, or used within the bounds of fair use. All media used on the site that are not the sole creation of the author or authors are fully cited. If the original source exists online, there should be a clickable link to that source.

Multimodal analysis

Multimodal analysis description

Note: this assignment is adapted from one by Kristin Arola.

This assignment will test your ability to analyze a series of multimodal texts for their effectiveness for a particular audience or group of audiences. You will select four to six multimodal texts in a particular genre and analyze the potential goals of the author(s) and the effectiveness of the texts with regard to those goals along the dimensions of audience, purpose, context, and genre. In doing so, you should pay particular attention to the affordances (Writer/Designer, pp. 14-19) of the texts and their genre as well as the design choices made in the text. For a discussion of the rhetorical situation, a partial list of design choices, and examples of multimodal rhetorical analysis, see W/D ch. 2.

Although you will not work on this project in a group, I will assign each of you to a small group of 2-3 persons from whom you will receive feedback on early drafts of the project. That is, over the course of the module, group members will share their work on the project with each other and provide feedback on those projects prior to its submission. Part of your grade for this assignment will depend on the quality and timeliness of your feedback to other members of your group.

The goals of this project are to focus your attention on the rhetoricity of multimodal texts—their persuasive goals and the ways that those goals are or are not achieved through the particular design choices of the author or authors.

Multimodal analysis requirements

You are free to choose the form that your analysis will take: it can be an audio file, a section on your personal website, or a Word document. The only requirement for form is that your analysis itself should be multimodal, and the final product should serve an analysis of the modes and genre of the texts you have chosen for the project. For example, it will be impossible for you to adequately analyze a series of web videos without showing your audience screen shots or clips from those videos.

The final submission should be be 750-1,000 words for primarily textual projects or 4-6 minutes for audio/visual projects.

Multimodal analysis due dates

A draft of your analysis is due to myself and your small group members for peer review before 5 p.m. on Friday, 2/13 9 a.m. on Monday, 2/16.

Your peer response to that first draft is due to myself your group partners before 5 p.m. on Friday, 2/20 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, 2/19.

The final version of the project should be posted to your personal website’s portfolio page before 11:59 p.m. on Friday, 2/27.

Multimodal analysis grading

I will evaluate your analysis using the following rubric in conjunction with the grade descriptors above:

  • Requirements: The analysis meets all of the requirements laid out in the assignment description.
  • Content: The analysis demonstrates an awareness of rhetorical analysis and multimodal genres and affordances by directly describing, with examples, the audience, purpose, context, and genre of the chosen texts along with the modal affordances and design choices of the author or authors.
  • Style: The analysis demonstrates an awareness of professional tone, style, and structure, both in its textual and multimodal elements.
  • Format/Conventions: The analysis demonstrates an understanding and application of layout, visual design, audience awareness, and information structure appropriate to the mode in question.
  • Citation: The analysis cites all sources and materials not created by the author in a manner appropriate to the chosen medium (see Writer/Designer ch. 4).

Book chapter remix

Chapter remix description

For this project, you will choose one chapter from either Blown to Bits or Net Smart and remix the major themes and arguments of that chapter in a video made by you.

Here, I use the term remix to mean taking an original text and putting it to a new or innovative use. Just as an audio remix takes samples from different songs—a vocal track from one and a bass line from another, for example—and arranges them together into a new piece of music, your goal will be to take the original materials of the chapter—the text, the argument, the themes—and make something new out of them.

Your project should not take the form of you simply reading the chapter, although you can quote from it as necessary; rather, you should re-present or remix the content of the chapter in a way that both makes something new out of the chapter and is suited to audiovisual media.

There are many different forms your project could take. You could use the documentary form to present the ideas of the authors, illustrating their purpose with news clips and other media. You could create a narrative around the chapter, using fictional characters or settings to illustrate information in the book. You could animate the chapter, or otherwise illustrate its contents.

I am open to any of these options or others you can think of; the only firm requirement is that your project should take advantage of the resources of video—editing and the grammar of video, the use of still images and video clips, narration, and sound effects—to engage the argument of the chapter.

This project will require a number of steps: First you will need to understand and successfully summarize the main themes of the chapter that you choose. You will then need to create a script for the project, planning out the ways in which you will incorporate the features of the medium to present these themes to best effect. You will turn that script into a storyboard that will serve as a visual roadmap for your project. You will need to research the resources you will include—audio and video clips, still images—and plan how you will record your new material—both shooting video and recording audio. Finally, you will need to record and then edit your video into a coherent final project.

As with your analysis project, you will work on this project alone, but in small peer-review groups that will provide you with feedback on the project as it develops.

Chapter remix requirements

As you can see from the course schedule, we will not complete all of the readings from these two texts until the end of the semester, so you should scan through these books to decide which chapter you will want to choose for this project. Pick a chapter that is interesting or challenging to you; the more interested and engaged you are by the reading, the better your final product will be.

Your video should have a title and clearly indicate that it is a remix of the chapter you have chosen, and it should also clearly credit the original author of the chapter. It should be 5-7 4-6 minutes long. This will require you to summarize and reduce the content of the chapter so that you can present it in that available time.

As with your other projects, all outside sources must be cited, including in-text citations to indicate when you are citing materials and full citation information in the credits.

Chapter remix due dates

Your storyboards for the video will be due to myself and the other members of your peer review group by 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, 3/12. Your peer review of your group members’ storyboards will be due to myself and your group by 9 a.m. on Monday, 3/16.

Your final remix will be due before 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, 4/2. You will submit it by uploading the final video to a video sharing site (such as YouTube or Vimeo) and then embedding the video with a title and description on the portfolio section of your personal website.

Chapter remix grading

I will evaluate your chapter remix videos using the following rubric in conjunction with the grade descriptors above:

  • Quality: The video makes effective use of the affordances of video, including the use of visuals, audio elements, and text—both on screen and in narration—to present its argument in a way that would not be possible in another medium.
  • Requirements: The video meets all of the requirements laid out in the assignment description.
  • Readability and effectiveness: The script and other elements of the video are free of major and minor errors in structure and syntax and display the quality of writing and presentation appropriate for a professional publication.
  • Remix: The video does not simply summarize or narrate the chapter, but in its content and style effectively remixes the elements of the chapter—its themes, arguments, etc.—into something new.
  • Citation and fair use: All of the elements in the video are either the sole creation of the author, explicitly licensed for reuse, no longer covered by copyright, or used within the bounds of fair use. All sources used in the video that are not the sole creation of the author or authors are fully cited using standards appropriate to the medium.

Issue/cause website

Issue/cause website assignment description

For this project, you will work in small groups of 3-4. As a group, you will pick an issue or cause that is important to your community (traffic problems in Morgantown; clean water initiatives in West Virginia) or demographic (rising costs of college tuition and student load debt; safety on college campuses) and identify a particular audience that is likely uniformed about that issue or cause. Then, as a group, you will research, design, and build a multipage, multimodal website that informs your audience about the issue. You will create the site separately from any of the group members’ personal websites. You are free to make this site on WordPress.com or any other webhosting platform.

Issue/cause website requirements

Your group is free to use a range of multimodal elements and creative organizational structures for this site. However, the final website should consist of at least four separate pages or sections, including a static home page that introduces the site and its cause, an about page where the group describes the purpose of the site and gives a short introduction to yourselves as the site’s authors. Additional pages might describe the history of the issue or cause, where site visitors can find more information about it, controversies surrounding the issue or cause, or any other pertinent information related to the topic and purpose of the site or its audience.

The site as a whole must contain a minimum of 1,250 words of text and ten images (not including any images that are part of the site’s template). You are free to use outside images and video, but all images that you wish to be counted toward the requirement above should be created by members of the group. Any material not created by the group contained on the site or in your video must be fully cited both in the text, to indicate when material is not your own, along with a complete citation on an easily accessible works cited page. The works cited page will not count as one of the four required sections of the site and the citations will not count toward the required word count.

Issue/cause website due dates

Before Week 12 I will assign you to groups for this project. During Weeks 12-13 your group will work on two planning documents: A Proposal that describes the topic and other details for the assignment, and a Team Contract that establishes how members of the group will work together.

Your group’s final version of the issue/cause website will be due before 5 p.m. on the last day of class, Friday, 5/1. You will submit it by posting a link to the site with a placeholder image, a title, and a description of the purpose of the site to the portfolio section of your personal website. For the purposes of the personal website assignment, each member of the group should post a link to this project to their individual site’s portfolio page.

Issue/cause website grading

Except for extreme cases, all members of a group will receive the same grade on this assignment. I will evaluate your issue/cause websites using the following rubric in conjunction with the grade descriptors above:

  • Design: The site adheres to the best practices for Web and multimedia design.
  • Accessibility and requirements: The site is logically ordered and structured and adheres to best practices for linking (using text tags instead of URLs, linking to all online sources, placing links where they are needed) and image use (using descriptive alt tags, providing citations and links to the original source for all images not created by you). The site meets all of the requirements laid out in the assignment description above.
  • Readability and effectiveness: The content of the site effectively accomplishes the goals laid out in the proposal, including the quality of its content and its appropriateness for the target audience. The text and other multimedia elements are free of major and minor errors in structure, syntax, and grammar and display the quality of writing appropriate for a professional audience.
  • Multimodality: Multimodal elements are effectively incorporated into the site to complement, comment on, and/or extend the written text.
  • Citation and research: All of the elements of the site are either the sole creation of the authors, explicitly licensed for reuse, no longer covered by copyright, or used within the bounds of fair use. All sources used on the site that are not the sole creation of the authors are fully cited using the MLA or APA citation format.