About the Social Media Assignments

The Social Media Engagement Tweeting and Blogging Assignments have three primary goals:

1. to provide you with the opportunity to build on your tweeting experience by thinking about how to use it with new purposes and audiences in mind;
2. to help generate a #wdds17 community of learning in an online space that is informed by and impacts what happens in our classroom space;
3. to help you gain access to the individuals who are tweeting about web design.

The assignment is informed by three Course Learning Objectives:

Objective 1: Collaboration
Students will develop their ability to work collaboratively in a variety of in- and out-of-class activities and settings.

Objective 2: Effective Communication
Students will be able to identify and employ a range of effective communication strategies to navigate audience, purpose, and context.

Objective 4: Reflection
Students will develop their understanding of the important role of reflection during the investigation, design, and communication process.

Objective 5: Risk-taking
Students will know what it feels like to step out of their comfort zones and take risks with their approaches to and understanding of digital media and non-profit communications.

Design Journal Assignment Specifics

This semester we will be creating a collaborative blog using WordPress dedicated to the web design-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, much as former students have done at Let’s Get Visual, Visual!, Textual Arousal, Raiders of the Lost Architecture, Rummage This, and Don’t Worry, Be Mappy.

It is assumed that you are familiar with blogging because it is assumed that you have taken COM 200. If you are not familiar with blogging, please let me know and I will point you in some directions to help get you started.

Starting Week 5 and over 11 weeks during the semester, two or more students per week will serve as the blog’s Weekly Blogger.

Each weekly blogger will compose ONE blog post in which they discuss a web design-related tip or technique they have found online that is directly related to the readings and/or coding issues being discussed that week and that they have attempted to incorporate into their web design. The goal of the post is to provide other students with ideas they could possibly use in their own web designs and for us to see what it is like to try something new. We learn by taking risks, by making mistakes, and by trying something new. So, don’t be afraid to post attempts that have failed. As you will see, much of coding is failing–but it is through the initial failures that we get to were we want to be. In other words, have fun with this and see where your ideas take you.

Each post should:

• be informed, insightful, curious, authoritative, and in-depth, and very well written; they do not need to be wholly serious; one of the great things about blog posts is that they can include funny material, like video and meme images, that help a more serious point;
• be 500 – 750 words long;
• have at least 5 meaningful tags and at least 1 category
• features that are important to blogs and blog readers: links whenever having one would make a meaningful connection, images, video, and so on;
• examples of the code you found and the code as you attempted to use it;
• screen shots of your web page with the results of your attempts to use the tip or design idea;
• if you weren’t able to successfully implement the tip or idea, a brief reflection on what might not have worked and what you might try differently;
• suggestions for others who might use it.

The posts should be online by Thursday at 5:00pm of the week you are the weekly blogger so they can be discussed in class on Fridays. One your post is online, tweet it and include the #wdds17 hashtag and @mention any web site or coder you mention in your post.

Over the following week, each student is required to reply to at least 2 posts by engaging in a conversation (don’t just write “Wow, great post!”). The original author should reply back and continue the conversation.