Assignment Overview
This semester we will be creating a collaborative blog using WordPress dedicated to the visual rhetoric and multi-modal composition-related issues that we discuss and read about in class. The goal of the blog will be to present informed, insightful, curious, authoritative, and in-depth multi-modal posts on these issues specifically written for an audience outside of the classroom, much as graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin due with Viz (indeed, we can consider Viz a model).
You can see successful former student collaborative blog written for a public audience at at Rummage This. The blog will have it’s own Twitter account so you can tweet from it.
Posts will need to be informed, insightful, curious, authoritative, and in-depth, and very well written. Each post will need to have features that are important to blogs and blog readers: links whenever having one would make a meaningful connection, images, video, and so on. Write with the tone of exploration but with the confidence of an expert, not just a student learning something new in class. Rather, a writer thinking through new ideas on important subjects. Of course, use tags and assign appropriate categories–be sure to uncheck Uncategorized.
To give you a focus when you are composing, I’d like each student to choose one or two visual rhetoric and/or multimodal composition-related subject(s) about which you know little but have wanted to know more or something you know much about but haven’t considered it in terms of vrmc. Use this semester on the blog as a way to explore those issues. As part of your bio on the blog about page, be sure to list the subject(s) you’ll be blogging about. Take your time deciding on a topic(s), but when you do, tweet your choices so the class will know them, as well. Please decide by week 3.
Assignment Specifics
The specifics are as follows:
- each student is required to have a minimum of SIX blog posts
- Six posts is a minimum and is what is expected. To go “significantly higher” (as written in the grading criteria) in terms of blog posts, you should have significantly more. The posts can be of any length, but 20 really short posts won’t do the trick, nor will it keep readers. The posts should be engaging, nuanced, varied, and contain links and images. Here are a few sample posts:
- posts should be on the subject(s) you have chosen and include references to and quotes from texts we have read in class, but composed for a global audience
- do not wait until week 14 to do your posts; spread them evenly throughout the semester, composing when you’ve found something you want to write about
- each student is required to comment on at least TEN blog posts throughout the semester
- authors of blog posts should monitor the comments and reply to them, especially when they are coming from people outside of class
- have fun with it, experiment with new kinds of posts (vlog, podcast, etc.)—in other words, make it your own