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Blog Archives

Week 15 and Finals Week: Wrapping Up the Online Advocacy Project

This is it, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the final website update of the semester! For the past 14 weeks, you have impressed me with your willingness to be pushed out of your comfort zones, your insight into

Posted in Weekly Updates

Week 14: Open Source Culture, Creative Commons, and Remixing

Going into our day of team conferences on Wednesday, I was a little nervous about what types of projects you might propose. This assignment is totally new for me, and I wasn’t sure you would share my vision for what

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Week 13: Online Advocacy and Team Conferences

I trust that this weekly update finds you taking a well-deserved break from the rigors of college life. Our peer critique exercise last Wednesday left most of you in good shape, so you shouldn’t have too much work to do

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Week 12: Humor, Internet Memes, and an Equally Hilarious Peer Critique Session

I hope our analysis of several educational/instructional comics has helped you think about your Unit #3 projects, and I hope you’ve been making good progress on your comics. At this point, you should have a solid idea of (1) what

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Week 11: The Genre of Comics and a Comic Life Workshop

I’m glad we took a slight detour in class yesterday to discuss how social media is affecting the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. As usual, your comments gave me a lot to think about, and I hope you’ll keep tracking some

Posted in Weekly Updates

Hurricane Sandy Links

Here are a few starting points for exploring how social media and collective intelligence are influencing an event happening right now: Wikipedia entry Google’s Crisis Map CrisisWiki Twitter stream for #sandy Reddit’s Sandy subreddit MetaFilter Check-in Thread Instacane Mayor Cory

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Weeks 9 and 10: Oral Presentations and Finishing Net Smart

I think our intense focus on peer review during Week 8 is going to pay off when you submit the final drafts of your Unit #2 projects; I hope you feel the same way. Next week, we will enjoy your

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Week 8: Peer Critique Extravaganza!

Our plans for next week are incredibly simple, but incredibly important: help you finish both deliverables for Unit #2. In order to do that, we will spend most of our class time conducting peer critique sessions. I know these activities

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Week 7: Thinking Multimodally with Google Sites and Pecha Kucha

Now that we have collectively critiqued Twitter and several word-processing applications, your attention should be squarely on your assigned application for Unit #2. At this point, your preliminary draft should be complete (or nearly complete), and you should be thinking

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Week 6: Writing about Technology

I hope our Twitter critique activity on Wednesday helped you think about how you can analyze your assigned application for Unit #2. Next week, we’ll take a brief break from our readings in Net Smart to focus on writing about

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Week 5: Participatory Culture; Interrogating Twitter

With Unit #1 behind us, it’s time to turn our attention to Unit #2 and the process of using technology to write about … well, technology. Here’s how we’ll get started: On Monday, we will discuss participatory culture on the

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Week 4: Peer Critique, Wrapping Up the Digital Literacy Narrative, and Crap Detection 101

We’re in the home stretch for Unit #1, so your digital literacy narratives should be nearly complete by now. Between now and next Monday, when we will critique one another’s narratives, you should complete the following tasks: Go to the

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Week 3: Do I Have Your Attention?

In class this week I shared some tips for using Twitter, but if Twitter hasn’t “clicked” for you yet, I recommend reviewing the following sites: A Beginner’s Guide to Twitter 10 Tips on Using Twitter Wisely Twitter Basics (the company’s

Posted in Weekly Updates

Week 2: Literacy Narratives and PowerPoint Experiments

I think we got off to a great start during our first two class sessions, and I hope we can maintain the same level of participation and interaction throughout the semester. Next week, we’ll make sure that everyone in class

Posted in Weekly Updates

Welcome to Writing and Digital Media!

Welcome to ENGL 3984: Writing and Digital Media. This website will function as the online headquarters for our class this semester. Each week, I will post an update to the website with details about coming week, deadline reminders, links to

Posted in Weekly Updates
Where am I?
This is the class website for English 3984: Writing and Digital Media, taught by Quinn Warnick at Virginia Tech in fall 2012.
Worthwhile Reading
The links below are the most recent additions to my collection of bookmarks that are relevant to this course. You can find a complete list of ENGL 3984 bookmarks on Pinboard.

  • Buffy vs Edward Remix Unfairly Removed by Lionsgate
    A long, carefully documented saga about fair use. Great case study.
  • The Always Up-to-Date Guide to Managing Your Facebook Privacy
    Nice guide from Lifehacker: "First, we'll walk through the basic privacy settings that determine what you share, then look at a few lesser-known settings you'll want to tweak, and finish with a few third-party tools that will help keep your Facebook information private."
  • The enduring mystery of Roberto Clemente's bat
    Great writing by Kevin Guilfoile, but also a beautiful example of multimedia storytelling.
  • tapestry: a new way to write
    John Borthwick explains what tapestry is and collects some examples of great tap essays: "When we started developing tapestry it struck us that there weren’t many native reading experiences on the iPhone or iPad. Our goal is to build such a tool. A space to slow things down and let you create or experience, short, tappable stories in a simple, clean, distraction free reading environment."
  • All You Need Is (Facebook) Love: ‘Compliments’ Accounts Go Viral at Colleges and Universities
    Time magazine reports on an encouraging trend: college students setting up Facebook pages to collect compliments for/from their fellow students.
  • Demand a Plan
    Online effort to improve gun control, started in response to the Newtown school shooting.
  • Causes.com
    "Causes is a free online platform that provides easy-to-use tools for driving change. We help passionate people share ideas, find supporters, raise money, and make an impact."
  • What Ancient Greek Rhetoric Might Teach Us About New Civics
    Ethan Zuckerman: "If we want to prepare people to be effective citizens, we need to think about teaching this new civics as well as older forms of civic participation. Citizens need to do more than watch or read about the issues and then vote. They need to know how to report, to advocate, to coordinate, to propose and test solutions."
  • SPOT Survey - Fall 2012
    Students: If you haven't completed the SPOT evaluation for this course, please do so during class on Wednesday. I take this feedback very seriously, and I use it to revise my classes each semester, so please be specific about the aspects of the course (and my teaching) that you found successful and unsuccessful.
  • Popcorn Maker
    New web-based app from Mozilla: "Popcorn Maker makes it easy to enhance, remix and share web video. Use your web browser to combine video and audio with content from the rest of the web — from text, links and maps to pictures and live feeds."
  • The People's Bailout
    David Rees explains how the Rolling Jubilee works: "OWS is going to start buying distressed debt (medical bills, student loans, etc.) in order to forgive it. As a test run, we spent $500, which bought $14,000 of distressed debt. We then ERASED THAT DEBT. (If you’re a debt broker, once you own someone’s debt you can do whatever you want with it — traditionally, you hound debtors to their grave trying to collect. We’re playing a different game. A MORE AWESOME GAME.)"
  • Understanding Digital Civics
    Ethan Zuckerman: "I’m beginning to think that certain types of civic participation are simply organic to the internet. Once we have the ability to create and share our own information, we create and spread media to promote the causes we care about and raise money to support the causes we value."
  • Google Docs Stories Builder
    Fun little tool to create text-based stories in which various characters interact within a Google Doc. (Sound confusing? Yeah, you kind of have to see it in action.)
  • Twitter Is A Truth Machine
    John Herrman: "Twitter is a fact-processing machine on a grand scale, propagating then destroying rumors at a neck-snapping pace. To dwell on the obnoxiousness of the noise is to miss the result: That we end up with more facts, sooner, with less ambiguity."
  • The Fallacy of Digital Natives
    Amen to this: "Sure, there may be a larger percentage of Millennials that tap into technology first compared to their elders, but oversimplifying the division of generations to suggest one prefers an all-technology learning style whilst the others use it when necessary is preposterous. Learning and technology has nothing to do with generational divides."
  • Click and Drag
    An amazing, endless xkcd comic.
  • Nice piece in Transom explaining Cowbird
    Annie Correal: "Our goal is to build a public library of human experience, so the knowledge and wisdom we accumulate as individuals may live on as part of the commons."
  • Being Online Has Become So Common That Some People No Longer Identify It As Being Online
    Techdirt, quoting a study by Forrester Research: "Our analysis revealed that 'being online' is becoming a fluid concept. Consumers no longer consider some of the online activities they perform to be activities related to 'using the Internet.' In fact, given the various types of connected devices that US consumers own, many people are connected and logged on (automatically) at all times. The Internet has become such a normal part of their lives that consumers don’t register that they are using the Internet when they’re on Facebook, for example. It’s only when they are actively doing a specific task, like search, that they consider this to be time that they’re spending online."
  • Reddit's balance of power: community values are tested as a troll is unmasked
    Links to all of The Verge's coverage of the Violentacrez debacle.