About Homework Assignments

The assignments that are listed on this page are to be completed before class starts the day they are due. The latest assignment will be placed at the top to reduce scrolling.

for Thursday, July 2

Please watch a few times Wesch (2007) “The Machine is Us/ing Us” (the only audio in this video is background music; the content appears as text on the screen), and read Thompson, “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” and Gee’s “Semiotic Domains: Is Playing Video Games a ‘Waste of Time’?” (this reading is linked off the readings page.) We will discuss them in detail in class.

for Tuesday, June 30

Please read Wired magazine articles: Turkle (1995) “Who Am We?” Kelly (2005) “We Are the Web,” and Garfield, “YouTube vs. Boob Tube” (some of the videos on this page may no longer be available, but they can be seen if you go to YouTube and search for them).  We will discuss them in detail in class.

Please also look at the following blogs: PostSecret, The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks, Literally-A Web Log, Why That Plate, Lowercase L, Jeff the Giant Orange Cat, A Food Coma, and Bathroom Graffiti Project.

for Thursday, June 25

Please read Selfe (1999) “Literacy and Technology Linked” and Berners-Lee (1994) “The World Wide Web.”

Please post a response to your blog by the start of class on Thursday. There is no formal prompt—and there will be no formal prompt for the rest of the module, only the suggestion that your responses to assigned texts be about the equivalent of 1/2 page, single space, Times New Roman, font 12. When composing your posts, write them as if you are writing for the whole WWW audience—not just for this class and these students and this professor. Because, in fact, anyone in the world can read your responses if they find the blog in a search or stumble upon it through this or other Web sites. Discuss, critique, cite—whatever you wish to do; just remember that blogging is all about authority. I also encourage you to comment on each other’s posts. Blogs are also about feedback, so let’s start giving ourselves some feedback.

Remember that each student is responsible for posting a total of 4 posts per week to their group blog, 1 of which must be on the readings. The other 3 can/should be on topics of your own interest as long as they relate to the overall theme of your blog. Don’t leave these blog posts until the end of the module (doing so will negatively impact your grade)—be diligent and stay with it. Once you get rolling, it will be hard to stop.

To get to know your blogs a bit more, please see WordPress.com’s very helpful and intuitive FAQs page. By classtime on Thursday, I would like you to learn how to do the following using the FAQ page linked-to above, and the create a post that contains all three of the below listed items. Use the Topics keywords (also known as ‘tags’) to get you started. The subject of this post should be on a subject that is related to your personal, professional, and/or educational interests:

• add / write a link
• add an image
• emded / post a YouTube video

for Tuesday, June 23

Because this is for the first day of the module, the assignment is a bit more involved than other assignments will be. It is broken in three parts.

Part 1
Please download, print, and read the syllabus (.pdf), which is available on the syllabus page. Come to class with any questions you may have.

Part 2
Please and annotate: Penrod (2007) “Why Blog?” and “Blogs as a New Writing Genre.” I will check the copies of your readings in class to see how you have annotated the texts. These, and all readings, are linked off the readings page, which is password protected. Please email me if you forgot the password.

For the first part of this assignment, I’d like you to identify your personal, educational, and professional “interest spheres.” These spheres are the subjects, ideas, communities, etc., that you are interested in and/or curious about on a personal level. Often, when we think about our personal, educational, and professional interests we say, “Oh, I’m a Writing Arts major and I’m interested in journalism.” Or, “Oh, I’m an Education/Writing Arts double major and I’m interested in elementary education.”

Those statements are quite useful, but the areas “journalism” and others, like “elementery education” or “law” or “creative writing” are quite broad. For example, what specific area of journalism are you interested in: op/ed, sports, politics, environmental, journalist ethics, etc.? These are subclasses of the larger field of journalism. We can do the same with elementary education: No Child Left Behind, funding of education, politics and education, special needs students, art in education, technology in the el ed classroom, and so forth. Each of these areas offers a very specific community wherein people are exchanging ideas, best practices, and proposals for future changes. Similar things can be done with personal and educational interests. Here, for example, is a breakdown of my professional and personal:

• higher education (professional)
  • technology and education
  • learning space design
  • classification systems
• photography (personal)
  • black and white
  • Holga
  • infrared

I would like you to locate 3 or 4 specific areas of professional, educational, and personal interests. Create a hierarchy as above, and bring it with you to class. Then, using the blog search engine technorati or google begin searching for blogs in that particular specific area. So, for example, I might look for blogs that discuss “learning space design.” If you have trouble with the subareas, try the overall subject area and then narrow based on what you see. You might also try putting a phrase like “education blogs” into Google and see what you get. By doing that, the first result is to a page that discusses the Top 100 Education Blogs, which itself contains a link to edublogs.org, a site that hosts more than 30,000 blogs.

Part 3
Please read Bolter (2001) “Writing as Technology” and complete a response to the following:

“Writing as Technology” introduce two of the key terms we will be discussing this module: writing spaces and remediation. For this post, please identify three of the writing spaces you use most frequently, discuss their characteristics, and what makes them unique. Then, choose two of those spaces, and using Bolter’s definition of remediation, discuss how one remediates the other (or how they remediate themselves).

Please have an electronic copy of your response available to you in class. This can be on email, flash drive, CD. We will be using the electronic version in class, so it is absolutely necessary that you have it.

for Tuesday, June 9 – Thursday, June 28

For all HW assignments for Dr. Tweedie’s module (including for the first day of the module) see his module calendar (.pdf)

for Tuesday, May 26

Please read and annotate Lindemann, “What Does the Process Involve?”; Nelson, “The Great Conversation.” Review Bishop and Starkey, “Creativity.” Please read the syllabus for Dr. Courtney’s module, Issue in Writing. All readings are available on the readings page of the course web site.

for Thursday, May 21

Please first read Axelrod and Cooper’s “Strategies for Reading Critically” and use the annotation techniques they describe when you read: Bishop and Starkey, “Creativity” and the course syllabus (.pdf). We will discuss your individual annotation techniques and check the copies of your readings in class to see how you have annotated the texts. These, and all readings, are linked off the readings page (Bishop and Starkey under Dr. Courtney; Axelrod and Cooper under Dr. Wolff) which is password protected. Please email us if you forgot the password.