WRT 302 is a required course for the major and is the only course that focuses on digital composing specifically. While many of the courses I design have digital components to them (notably blog writing and digital portfolios), WRT 302 was a bit different in that the readings focused on issues with digital communication specifically. I based this first course’s design on a shared syllabus and I built my materials around its three unit projects. I wanted this course to be approachable for the inexperienced but with enough space that those with different skills levels and expertise could build upon their prior knowledge and experience. This was my first time teaching using wordpress as a content management system and I was fairly happy with the results.
The first unit focused on critical technological literacies, namely looking at the surprisingly human cost to the internet and social media platforms we increasingly rely to obtain information and communicate. The readings had hints of surveillance studies in them, one of my subject areas, so I found this unit as a unique opportunity to apply what I have been researching to more pragmatic classroom contexts. More than anything, I wanted my students to walk away with a sense of the larger, material infrastructure that sustain what is often seen as an intangible “cloud” and the ethical implications of using our technologies to these ends. The interface unit project sought to accomplish two course goals. First, I wanted to expose students to alternatives to the larger tools and platforms we use (mainly google, apple, and adobe’s suite of tools). To this end, I had students select from a pool of smaller platforms they would be less familiar with in order to conduct their critical interface analysis. The second objective this assignment accomplished was to have student practice screencasting as a compositional form, a literacy that has increased in use substantially with the advent of vlogging and live-streaming. Students had to think about how to present their analysis in a form they were not accustomed to, to present in video what they had done numerous times in textual form. Not to mention considering the very different accessibility that these video based forms bring and the need for quality, accurate captioning. This unit dovetails into the second unit project because it ends on a series of readings that explore what the internet was at the height of blogging and before the social media age.
Unit 2 is a bit more on the rhetorical side as students develop an approach to audience awareness that considers the wider circulation capacities of digital compositions. Students produce a rather developed user profile to craft a content strategy for their own sustained blog. I left their options for the topic of this blog fairly open because I wanted students to write something that they could foreseeably sustain beyond this course. The sustained posting is meant to help students to develop an idea over a series of smaller spurts of writing, to think about a topic and enter to insert themselves into the algorithmic saturated discursive space. Moreover, writing a blog acts as a “slowing down” of the high speed reactivity social media encourages – if nothing else, I hope students can see just how hard it is to meaningfully engage with something on social media when it is designed for exponentially faster engagement, the contrast between blogging and twitter for instance.
The final project starts before the sustained blogging is over as students development of a multimedia, digital project of their own design about a topic of their choosing. While encourage them to select something that builds from their blog (as they would have already done a lot of the “thinking” required of a successful project), they were not forced to do stick to their blog (although all but two ultimately did). The most successful projects took a facet of their blogging and expanded it into a different, sometime unexpected project. For example, one student started blogging about the Knicks and the need for fans to temper expectations (the overenthusiatic speculations that always failed to deliver). His final project took this idea of misinformation, even optimistic “fake news,” and examined how quickly it spread in his own social media feed. Essentially, his larger project was about our desire for information that adheres to our desires and values, and he demonstrated how this is more than a “fake news” problem, it’s a human problem, one that exists in many facets of how we share information (whether in our politics or our entertainment).
It is difficult to cover everything that comes with digital writing. In addition to these core assignments, students talked about copyright and fair use (including image attribution), but also how circulation and exposure are now a integral part of online composing (Ridolfo and DeVoss’s rhetorical velocity). Considering the feedback I received from students, I would start them on the blogging a little earlier in the semester, or for a fewer number of weeks, providing them the time to digest what they covered in their blog enough to devise a final project they could commit to sooner. While I liked the screen casting and critical dialogues in the first unit, I think I would rework the first unit project to be more about following the circulation of digital texts, something that might better prepare them for the blogging portion of the course.
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