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, much as former students have done here at Rowan at Let’s Get Visual, Visual! and students at the University of Texas at Austin have done with Viz.

It is assumed that you are familiar with blogging because it is assumed that you have taken or are enrolled in Introduction to Writing Arts. If you are not familiar with blogging, please see “What is a Blog?” by Jill Walker-Rettberg, which is available on the Readings page.

Assignment Specifics

Starting Week 3 and over 10 weeks during the semester, two students per week (there are 20 students in the class) will serve as the blog’s Weekly Blogger.

As the Weekly Blogger, that student will compose:

• 1 post that discusses, challenges, problematizes a reading from that week in depth
• 1 post that draw attention and discuss items found in any other media that relate to the subject matter we discuss in the readings for that week.

Update clarification (9/25/12): Each weekly blogger should compose TWO posts—one on the topic of the first above bullet the other on the topic of the second above bullet.

The posts should be posted during the week before or just after the Tuesday class meeting for that week. Your posts should have alphabetic and visual texts and should be around 750 words long. They would include links to various related places. They should be written with the tone of someone thoroughly engaged in the subject-matter and is learning more about it. All posts should have at least 5 meaningful tags and be located into at least 1 of the following categories: semiotics, photography, remix, mashup, digital story telling, and comics (or any other that you think appropriate).

The goal of these posts is to start discussions with your classmates outside of class about the course topics. As such, try to write them in a way that encourages open discussion. As such, consider them important essays for the course. They will be assessed in terms of how well they start discussion, how well the ideas from the course texts are incorporated (yes, quote and paraphrase), how well they incorporate multimedia (images, videos, and so on), and how well they show you thinking critically about the issues you discuss.

During the weeks when students are not the Weekly Blogger, they are required to:

• reply to 2 posts in a way that pushes the conversation forward and makes reference to the class readings or things discussed in class
• each reply should be at least 100 words long
• keep a log in a Word or GoogleDocs document that contains for each comment: the date, post you’re responding to, and the full text of your comment. I’ll be collecting these at the end of the semester so they can be assessed.

See the course schedule for who the blogger is for each week.

Update: WordPress has a very good Support page, and I encourage you to spend some time with it, especially the sections for Getting Started, Creating Content, Manage My Profile, and Customize My Site. Please check these areas before emailing BW with questions.