cdmandrews.github.io

ENGL 5362, Fall 2023

Project 1: Online presence

Purpose of this assignment

To encourage you to produce, distribute, circulate, and manage an ongoing online writing presence that is ongoing—that is, repeated, fluid, and evolving. Unlike your typical classes wherein your writing stops (i.e. you turn it in to a teacher or professor), this assignment asks you to do digital rhetoric and write on a consistent basis beyond the confines of a classroom, confronting the issues of circulation, ecology, design, and digital rhetoric that we will be talking about in class. The project is intended to help you think about writing beyond the words on the page; writing can be pictures, memes, coding, and design. Writing can be managing your content and contending with comments, reviews, trolls, and communities. In this light, you are being graded on your ability to articulate how you do these things rather than on a page length or word count.

I expect you to spend 1-2 hours per week on this assignment throughout the course of the semester; progress should be made each week. You will report on your work in a series of progress reports to me over the course of the semester and will present the results of your learning at the end of the semester to the class.

Requirements

  1. 10 progress reports (10%) to me (Dr. Andrews) over the course of the semester. There are no particular due dates, but I expect the following:
    • 3 in September, 3 in October, 3 in November, and 1 in December. You cannot submit more than one progress report in a week. If you miss the goal of 3 for each month, you cannot make them up. They are to be no longer than 2 pages single spaced and at least 300+ words long
    • As long as your reports are coherent, you will receive 1% for each one turned in.
    • Links and screen-captures are strongly encouraged
    • The purpose of these reports is to inform me of what you do on a weekly basis (note there are “free” weeks in there).
  2. A statement on either comment management or ways that you will try to create a community/readership (5%). Due by October 5. Choose from the following:
    • If you start a personal site, you can explicitly write out a comment policy for your website, blog, youtube channel, etcetera
    • A reflection on the way you will explicitly or implicitly contend with your audience’s feedback (or your perception of the way your actual or intended audience reads your online content)
    • A proposal to me about other ways you will manage your online content in light of community or readership building
  3. Twenty individual acts of composition (10%, .5% each), including
    • A video (of at least 3 minutes)
    • An audio file (of at least 3 minutes)
    • A photo collection (at least 5 photos)
    • A 250+ word text
    • Advertising your text by dropping the link to at least 10 different locations (screenshots required)
    • a-d are open to negotiation dependent on the rhetorical situation
  4. On the final day of class, you will give a digital “poster” presentation (a single PowerPoint slide) about your semester experiences, what you learned about writing online, and why you will (or will not) continue it. This slide will be projected at the front of the room, so text should be minimal and legible. (5%)

[1] Based on an assignment by Dr. John Gallager at University of Illionois Urbana-Champaign

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.