Accessibility and Course Delivery
I work continually to ensure this course’s design, delivery, and policies are as radically accessible as I can make them. I am here to help you succeed. If you have questions or specific accessibility needs that are not being met, I welcome dialogue with you. I work on the basic assumptions of an ethics of care: 1) We’re all people and deserve to be treated like people. 2) Your well-being is important to me. 3) I will do what I can to be flexible and responsive to situations, and ask that you do the same.
Catalog Description
Explores the dynamics of online, networked reading and writing practices by examining the rhetorical, social, cultural, political, educational, and ethical dimensions of digital texts and examines issues of technology and literacy in digital spaces. Students will create digital texts in a variety of media, genres, and contexts.
About the Course
This course explores digital writing and rhetoric. In particular, we will focus on rhetoric in motion: Circulation. Distribution. Delivery. Collaboration. The fun, messy stuff that goes along with digital writing AFTER you hit the “publish” or “share” or “print” button. You know, I’ll probably update this section and redistribute it later, after syllabi are posted, reviewed, reposted, and delivered over and over and over, published again and again in a complex hierarchy of people, offices, technologies, and checklists. It’s all kind of a mess, but that’s the world we live in. To help you live in that (this) kind of mess, we will consider questions such as:
- How can we characterize relationships between form and content?
- What relationships do writers, institutions, and audiences have to texts in circulation, particularly on social platforms and the web?
- How does discourse circulate to achieve goals? Whose goals?
- What happens when discourse is on the go?
- What roles do templates, interfaces, platforms, and other technologies play in digital composition?
- How can we—or can we in the first place—anticipate updates, circulation, and delivery as components of rhetorical situations and ecologies?
- How might we use rhetorical theory to inform practice, advocacy, and critique in a digitally circulating world?
To answer these and probably other questions, we will explore digital rhetoric: an interdisciplinary field offering scholars, teachers, and makers an array of theories, methods, and practices for working with digital texts. We will survey scholarship in digital rhetoric and explore the relevance of that work for your pedagogical, professional, and personal writing practices. You will develop a research project on a topic of your choosing. You will also add to your technical and rhetorical skills to evaluate and compose accessible and usable digital texts in a variety of media and topics.
Course Outcomes
In this course you will:
- Summarize, critique, and synthesize readings on the connections between theories of digital rhetoric and emergent composing practices from contemporary technologies
- Display understanding and application of core knowledge, vocabulary, and concepts in digital rhetoric and writing studies
- Develop skills in composing with attention to multiple and layered elements of digital writing conventions as you create rhetorical, digital, multimodal texts
- Develop perspectives and strategies for incorporating digital multimodal composition into your pedagogical, professional, or community professional practices
- Advance your proficiency in scholarly methods of research and inquiry
Required Materials
- Gallagher, J. R. (2019). Update Culture and the Afterlife of Digital Writing. University Press of Colorado. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvvh85pr (Available at the campus bookstore)
- Gries, L. E., & Brooke, C. G. (Eds.). (2018). Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric. University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt21668mb (Available online in ebook format via the Bell Library)
- Active student account to access University resources (email, network, library, student support), including an active Microsoft Office 365 account (free from TAMU-CC)
- We will work with a variety of open tools as the class finds its own direction A spirit of tinkering and experimentation around both what we read and what we build will be at the heart of everything we’ll do and is a valuable “required material.” No particular technical expertise is prerequisite for the course: Beginners Welcome!
Grading and Assignments
I will use the following percentages to calculate your course grade, and will use the grading system as described in the TAMU–CC Catalog. If you have questions about grades or grading throughout the semester, please don’t hesitate to ask.
Regardless of medium, all projects are required to include a correctly-formatted bibliography according to APA guidelines. Please consult the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed); I will provide a version of these guidelines for you to work from.
| Assignment | Due Date | Distribution |
|---|---|---|
| Reading journal | Weekly throughout the semester | 15% of course grade |
| Project 1: Online presence | Throughout semester and Week 16 | 30% of course grade |
| Project 2: Annotated bibliography | Week 6 | 25% of course grade |
| Project 3: Digital project | Week 12 | 30% of course grade |
Short summaries of all projects are below. Full descriptions are provided on Blackboard.
Reading journal
10% of final grade (Weekly)
Your active participation in seminar discussions is required both for your own success in the class, and for the success of the class as a whole. I assign a healthy amount of reading and expect you to be ready to discuss, apply, and ask questions during class meetings as part of my general expectations for graduate students. Part of your preparing to do so will be writing about assigned texts, and I will give short prompted writing tasks for most weeks (usually weeks for which we don’t have other writing due). In general, these prompts will ask you to write about 300 words summarizing and responding to assigned texts. These texts are due before the beginning of class each week in a Blackboard journal entry.
Project 1: Online presence
20% of final grade | Full description
Produce, distribute, circulate, and manage an ongoing online writing presence throughout the course of the semester; progress should be made each week. This assignment is designed for you to write on a consistent basis beyond the confines of the classroom and encourage you to enact or engage with the theories and concepts we’re studying in the course. You will present the results of your learning at the end of the semester to the class.
Project 2: Annotated bibliography
25% of final grade | Full description
Find some local digital writing practice and/or culture that could be explored or examined through the theories and frameworks we’ve studied. Collect five scholarly sources on the subject in addition to readings assigned for class and compose an annotated bibliography of at least ten sources that reviews the scholarly conversation. You will also compose a synthesizing introduction that summarizes and engages with that conversation. This project is intended to lay groundwork for Project 4.
Project 3: Digital project
30% of final grade | Full description
Extend the work in your literature review and research by making a digital, multimodal project that uses digital rhetoric as an organizing and interpretive principle. This might be:
- an expressive digital object that enacts the theories and frameworks we have studied,
- an extended research and critical analysis of the digital writing practice and/or culture from your annotated bibliograpy,
- an analysis in which you explore other questions developed out of the theories and frameworks we have studied,
- a project growing out of lines of inquiry inspired across multiple courses this semester (e.g. extending work you’re doing in Dr. F-D’s Online Language course)
You might create a digital map or timeline, curate a digital archive, code a short video game, write a digital poetry exhibition or interactive piece of fiction, create a scholarly webtext, draft a proposal and IRB for a larger study, and so forth. Expressive projects must be accompanied by a statement of goals and choices that contextualize the product in terms of course goals and the student’s literature review.
Late work and extensions
Late work will not be accepted except in extenuating circumstances—a tricky phrase that is ultimately situation-dependent. I will deal with extensions on a case-by-case basis with individual students. If you have trouble or lack experience with self-advocacy, please let me know and I will help you.
Attendance
Consistent and serious presence and participation are an expected and necessary part of the course. Class meetings are about facilitating your learning, and we use class time for active discussion of course readings and assignments, as time to engage with each other on your projects, and as active workshop spaces.
I fully expect you will come to class for every class meeting. Your overall course grade will be reduced by one letter grade (10%) for each unexcused absence recorded beyond one.
This is an in-person class, not a hybrid or online course; it is not permissible to attend via Zoom in lieu of in-person attendance. If you have a documented illness that precludes your ability to attend class, please let me know and I will excuse your absence.