Want to build a website? Create a podcast series? Make videos around a specific career goal or activist agenda? Develop a webcomic? Take 407!
English 407 is designed to help you become more productive and critical at reading and writing in digital spaces. (Of course, “reading” and “writing” might be more accurately termed “producing” and “consuming” to account for the multimodal texts that now comprise most online discourse, such as video assemblages, podcasts, and digital compositions.)
This course examines online discourse communities and the ways in which people can write to them, in them, and for them. Students will enhance their understandings by reading and discussing critical theories of technology and contemporary rhetoric, and by analyzing and engaging in communicative practices online, with a particular emphasis on website / blogging designs and other “new media” composing options.
The course is intended for technophobes as well as technophiles, newbies as well as seasoned experts. So long as you know what the World Wide Web is, how to use email, and how to compose in a digital platform of any kind, you will be able to succeed. In the past, this course has been very popular among majors in English, education, CIS, journalism, and business.
Assignments:
Students in the course will learn its content by engaging in a mix of individual work and a sustained team project–one in which teams develop working digital content around a specific theme and within a context decided upon collectively. More specifically, students will be evaluated on (1) a series of short written responses to the readings in the course; (2) a collaborative digital project; (3) individual contributions to their own team’s project; and (4) contributions to another team’s project. (Students will have the option to be anonymous in all such contributions.)
Required Texts:
No texts to purchase. Readings will be made available in PDF.