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

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Quinn Warnick

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 our readings, and your enthusiasm for experimenting with digital media. This new class wasn’t perfect, and I will definitely make some changes to the syllabus based on our experiences, but I hope you feel a sense of accomplishment about what you’ve done this semester. You should be proud of your work; I know I am!

We don’t have much time left, so all of your attention for this class should be directed toward your Unit #4 project. Here’s how we’ll spend our time between now and our final:

  • On Monday, we won’t meet in our regular classroom, but the lab will be available for you to meet with your teams, so please feel free to use that time to make progress on Unit #4. I will hold team conferences with each team in my office (coming to the conference will count for Monday’s attendance), so please be ready to show me what your team has accomplished so far and discuss what you plan to do during the following week. If you have questions about anything related to Unit #4, this conference is the time to ask those questions and make sure you are on track for this project.
  • On Wednesday, we will hold a peer critique session. Each of you will work with several members of other teams to share ideas about the strategies you have used to promote your projects and get feedback about what you might change during the final days of this assignment. I will also introduce the individual memo of transmittal for Unit #4, which will be due at the beginning of our final exam.
  • On Monday, December 17, we will meet during our final exam (3:25–5:25 p.m.) to hear brief, informal presentations about your team projects. There are just a few simple guidelines for these presentations: each team should plan to speak for approximately 10 minutes, and every member of the team should take part in the presentation. Other than that, I encourage you to be creative and show us something that will inspire us. Before you come to the final, please make sure that your team has shared your Dropbox folder with me and that each member of your team has submitted his/her individual memo via Google Docs.

And that’s it! The first iteration of Writing and Digital Media will be done, and you will hold the distinction of being a pioneer and/or guinea pig, depending on your perspective. From my perspective, you will always be a group of intrepid explorers, and I wish you the best in your future endeavors, wherever they may take you!

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.