Digital Rhetoric Projects
English 665
Spring 2015 Syllabus
Instructor: Blanca Gomez
Office: UH 301.52
Class meets: M/W/Fri from 6:00 p.m.-7:10pm
Office Hours: MF 4-5:30p.m. and by appointment
Office Telephone: 909.537.5000
E-mail: bgomez@coyote.csusb.edu
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Course Requirements:
Blackboard Discussions (20%) Weekly Black board responses due every Wednesday by noon that comment on our reading. You can start a new post or reply to at least on of your classmates but try to respond to someone else’s post as often as possible to start a conversation. Be sure to first summarize the reading to contextualize it and then feel free to explore or experiment with the text. Pondering questions to think about when responding or thinking about the readings are: How are the texts conversing with one another? What challenged you, provoked you, or assisted you in thinking about composition and computers? How could you students use rhetorical tools for empowered in the and out of the classroom? The goal of this Bb posting is to converse. Post your thought about the readings by noon Wednesday so that your peers can respond to them and read them by noon the following week.
Critical Responses (20%) Multimodal texts will also be assigned weekly up to 3 minutes of new media responses responding to the readings for the prior week that we have already discussed in class. Use this time to experiment, take risks, and explore with sound, without sound, through still images, through words through contrast, color, and shapes.
Freewriting: (10%) We will have daily in-class free writing moments that will be either at the beginning of class or at the end, perhaps. This is to help you with our discussion as you put into words the complex ideas that you may be grappling with during your reading. This will help you engage in a meaningful conversation where you, if you are the quiet type, can still get your thoughts across without feeling criticized or awkward.
Conference Proposal Assignment (10%) – Due week 9.
I will meet with you Friday March 20, 2015 a week before finals to help discuss your goals and assist you with any question or comments. I will meet with each of you during class time and reserve (optional) office hours for week 11 of finals week to meet with you again if you believe you want more feedback on your e-portfolio (website compilation).
E-portfolio (40%) website compilation
Your unit portfolio should include 4 digital multimodal texts each being up to three minutes long which must contain sound, video, and a web page. For example one digital multimodal text may be only sound (podcast) while another is a web page that has still images and no video while the third one is a video with voice over and the fourth digital multimodal text is a brochure you designed and decided not to add sound. You will also submit a personal self-evaluation electronically that may be found in Bb.
Course Rationale and Course Assessment
English 665, computers and composition for graduates, prepares you to conduct advanced research in English Studies, to recognize the conventions that govern digital rhetoric studies, and to continue the life-long process of refining composition with the use of new media in the classroom.
The course that you will be part of this semester is designed to help you meet the requirements for graduation. Our in-class discussions and this course’s readings will involve the study of rhetoric, or the art of textual practices, or the art of technology literacies, or the opportunity to explore innovative technology and master it for your academic and personal life. Developing your writing ability is essential to your life-long process. So you will learn ideas and strategies through putting them down on in writing. Because writing comes from different contexts (Hesse) such as ideas, observation, experience etc., in this writing course student writers will be composing through writing with the public sphere in mind as well as other social media as venues to composing in the classroom.
Questions to consider in this course:
Do literacy practices in FYC with the use of new media matter? How are textual practices in the FYC classroom aids to students when entering in the public sphere of writing? What strategies do students incorporate in composing essays that incorporate multimodality? What are the rhetorical affordances of collaboration in the classroom when incorporating writing in the iGeneration? How do teacher incorporate the World Wide Web as a mean to writing in the publics?
The answers to all of these questions and related ones is not absolute multifaceted. It requires reflective, critical, and rhetorical tools. Writing is mediated through time and space, so collaboration and interactivity will be a large part that adds on to the student-writing repertoire—metawriting.
The motivation of this course is to further equip you with literacy (computer, rhetorical, and social) and critical thinking tools you need in order to take an informed position on the debated going on about the digital divide and the digital rhetoric by “Paying attention” to technology and literacy c.f.Selfe1999. By taking a research base perspective this course will allow you to experiment with social play and clearly articulate the competing theories and hypothesis about technology and literacy and evaluate the strengths of the traditional standard essay and the digital multimodal approach to composing essays in favor of and against each theory.