Because this course is a graduate seminar in English studies, it is in some resepects subject to the forces of institutional and disciplinary norms. This means, for better or worse, that there are normative constraints placed upon the primary scholarly activity you do to complete the course. Typically, a seminar of this nature demands a deep engagement with extended disciplinary discourse--ie, the seminar paper. But this course is also one in which we are investigating new media technologies and their relationship to education and literacy, and the subject matter itself compels a deeper engagement with new media both in form and content.

So for this major project, you will need to engage in both the form and content of new media scholarship; you will need to produce an academic argument relevant to the theme of this course, one that might ultimately be published. And you are to do so in a form that would be appropriate to the audience you are targetting. This means that if you are trying to reach the "tech savvy" community (say, the readers of Kairos or Computers and Composition Online), you'll likely be producing a webtext, utilizing whatever tools are available to you. On the simpler end of things, you might simply put together a Wordpress webtext, one that could be converted at a later date for publication. If you are more adept technologically, you might work with other tools and/or platforms to produce a multimedial, multimodal argument. Either way, you should be developing and supporting your argument in ways that take advantage of the media within which you are working.

Task:

You will compose a digital disciplinary argument in which you examine an issue relevant to the sub-discipline of computers and composition. (This means that you will situate yourself and your writing in a conversation, or series of conversations, that usually are invested in examinations of rhetoric, writing, pedagogy, institutional work, and politics, to varying degrees.) This should take the form of a new media based scholarly article, and it should aim toward being publishable in an apporpriate online journal. It need not be a journal that is focused strictly on computers and composition (such as Hawisher and Selfe's journal of that name), but it should be a journal that can benefit from your contribution to its conversations.

Length:

In multi-media assignments, length is difficult to pin down. (How long is John Zuern's "Ask me for the Moon"?) Nevertheless, to give you an approximate guide, aim for what would translate into about 20 pages of double-spaced text if it were stripped of all images, video/audio files, etc., and put into MLA print style. (ie, 5000 words)

Grading

You will be graded according to how rhetorically effective you are in meeting the established conventions of the genre within which you are working, how effectively you engage with the scholarly materials you are exploring, and the degree to which you develop and sustain your ideas in a way that is relevant to the community of scholars and practitioners you are targetting.

Due

page last updated Spring 2011