- Note: Detailed descriptions will appear here, including requirements and evaluation criteria.
- Also see: Tech Support page
“Exercise” Assignments (500 words & 10 points each)
These informal assignments serve to illustrate both attentive reading and effort toward attempting the ideas and practices that course introduces. Evaluation will correspond accordingly, with credit assigned
(1) for submitting work on-time; (2) for demonstrating both attention to assigned reading and to class discussion topics, particularly by describing insights and connections; (3) for providing thoughtful and relevant responses to prompts, with (4) specific examples from media within and outside of class, while (5) minimizing and/or avoiding summary, repetition, digression, and any unnecessary discussion. Supplementary details for prompts from textbook will be appear online, including deadlines and submission method (unless noted, posted by class time on student’s blog).
- Exercise 1 (due 13-Sep):“Obtuse Meanings” (p. 46)
- Exercise 2 (due 20-Sep): “Memory Glimpse” (p.90)
- Exercise 3 (due 18-Oct): “High Concept” (p. 198)
- Exercise 4 (due 29-Oct): “Lyric” (p. 223) & “Being Singular” (p.241)
- Exercise 5 (due 24-Nov): “Automatic Emblems” (p.253) & “Default Moods” (p.290)
Project 1:
- Reflexive Mapping: Position within Family and Career Discourse
- Description Page
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- Due: 04-Oct; 1000 words, 25 points
Project 2:
- “High Concept”: Entertainment & Community “Mash-up”
- Description Page
- Due: 08-Nov; 1000 words, 25 points
Project 3:
- Culture Update: “Emblem” & Concept Remake
- Description Page
- Due: 10-Dec; 1500 words, 35 points
Part I — WideSite
“Design an emblem that evokes the look and feel of your mystory.” (p. 246)
“Design a website version of your image of wide scope (a ‘widesite’).” (p. 19)
- • “The widesite in electracy performs [the] function…as a virtual ‘potential space’ that augments the basic trust or ontological security needed in order to be creative. The ability to read and write this space digitally has the potential to do for the emotional body what the ability to write concepts did for analytical reason.” (Ulmer, p. 247)
Part II — Concept Remake
Using your emblem as a guide for decision (intuition), take responsibility for “re-inventing” or “updating” a topic from Career Field or a specific aspect of 20th- century culture (“television age”): avoiding judgment (ideology or reason) & blindness (ATH) in favor of expressing the affect (lived dimension) of experience.
→ an “Experienced Concept,” syncretic & performed in Electracy
- • Topic should extract from one dimension of Popcycle (likely Career/Discipline) one specific issue to refashion in electracy mode. The “assemblage expression” digital composition will include heterogeneous elements, using cultural & experiential materials from entire paradigm: narratives (2 min.), “scholarly discourse” (2 sources), autobiography, and multimedia (e.g. found & original content, such as videos & digitally-manipulated images).
Our heuretic premise is that it should be possible to use the wide image principle as a way to make a new work (the widesite). Our minimum claim is that making a widesite provides a significant learning experience, within humanistic commitment to self-knowledge. The maximum claim is that people who know their wide image may use it to make decisions and solve problems in their professional and personal lives.
— Ulmer “Office” p.42
Blog Entries (10 minimum; 200 words. Credit/no credit assigned.)
- » Blogging Overview and Tips page
» Fakebook initial entry
Every student will create and maintain a blog throughout the semester, beginning week 2 and due each Wednesday except when noted (e.g. project weeks). Entries are informal and ungraded, except for credit. This is an on-going “Research Journal, ” testing ideas and compiling “materials” for the projects: associative links and media, questions and hypotheses; observations and insights—particularly connections between media within and outside of class. Blogging serves a key function in our learning process, as a manifest form of reflexive knowledge: compiling notes on “relays” for later application, recognizing relevant models from all of our databases, and testing new types of writing with media and web design.
The “Inventory” of notes on “relay” techniques is the formal record for compiling “materials” and ideas for the projects; updated periodically (check schedule), and essential for group presentations. (more instructions here)
While WordPress.com is preferred, other sites are acceptable (excluding Tumblr and Facebook).
Extra Credit Opportunities
- Participation credit:
- comment upon a classmate‘s entry; discuss daily class topic; reply to comment received on blog.
- Respond to a classmate’s “Exercise” entry, (150-200 words; for assignment credit).
- — Replies must be productive, relevant, and above all respectful in order to receive credit.
- Compose additional “Exercise,” discussing media internal/external to class, on week without an assignment (2 maximum; contact me for prompt.)
