Participation (10%)
- full attention to lectures, screenings and discussions
- involvement and preparedness in class discussions and exercises (do the reading!)
Blogging (20%)
I will provide blogging prompts and/or exercises to help you think critically and creatively about the themes each week. Blog posts should be approximately 250-500 words , demonstrate a solid understanding of the readings/screenings and the ongoing themes in the course, be crafted as mini-essays with proper grammar and spelling and include relevant links, media inserts, “featured image” and metadata (tagging, categories).
As upper-level university students at a Tier 1 research institution, your writing proficiency should reflect that status. We will discuss what makes good blog writing throughout the course.
A:
-posts are a proper and timely response to the week’s reading(s) and prompt
-posts are developed arguments with (if required) supporting evidence (quotes, embedded videos, images etc.)
-posts are around 250-500 words
-posts are formatted with a featured image, blockquotes, external links (where appropriate), categories, tags
-you make 5-10 comments on classmates’ (in your group) blog posts (during the semester)
B: significantly deficient in any one of the above areas
C: significantly deficient in any two of the above areas
D-F: significantly deficient in all 3 of the above areas
“The Future of the Book” Mini-Essay: 10%
Drawing on the readings about the book’s evolution (from cuneiform to touch-screen tablet) and with your current way of making/reading/watching/playing digital technology, what do you imagine a “digital” book will be in 20-30 years? This question requires you to look toward what you want from immersive experiences for learning, playing and imagining.
This is to be a speculative, maybe even fictional, mini-essay. Write as if you are living in the future and comparing the digital book experience of that future to your experience now and to the book as non-digital material object in the distant past.
- the mini-essay is to be at least 1500 words, and no more that 3,000 words.
- use images, diagrams, sketches to support your idea
- the future does not necessarily exclude the analog!
- quote from “The Book”
- discuss what the experience of future authors and readers will be like, but also address the technological production of books. who will publish these texts?
Public Domain Publication: 20%
In this project, you and your group will create a a theme-based EPUB collection of stories, poems and/or essays that are in the Public Domain. The students in the group will work on the collection together, but each student will upload their own version of an EPUB with their own design and illustrations. Accompanying a version of the group EPUB, each student will write a blog post describing the group process and and what they did in the effort.
*The EPUB file will need to hosted on a server, so let me know if you do not have your own DTC server directory.
Multimodal Publication (small groups): 20%
For the Multimodal Project, you will be working in groups of 3-5 students. As a publishing team, you are to come up with a web-based publishing project that uses different media (text, image, video, animation, audio, interactive media, etc) to express, address and/or educate about a single topic. The topic could be a “how to” explanation or demonstration of skills, a collection of works of digital fiction or art that share a theme, a multimedia exploration of a moment or period of history, or an engaging resource of information around a topic. The final publication must…
- Involve the collaborative efforts of each student in the group, with planned editing workflows and responsibilities
- Address design issues around Hyper and Deep attention of readers
- Design should include a designed cover of the “book” as well as media as illustration and/or interactive demonstrations of ideas.
- Take care in the quality, clarity and accessibility of text, media and web design
- Be presented in a designed web interface
- Have an about page with the roles of each student, date and other publishing information
- Be promoted through DTC Slack channels with engaging multimodal messaging