ENGL 505B

We talked about some interesting websites to use in class to motivate students and teach them about new media, such as Chore Wars, RPG Maker, Machinima, and Pmog. Are there any other good sites that either the students could use or teachers could use to design games for students?

This video supporting the Obama campaign (though not produced by the campaign) was passed on to me recently. I thought it was useful to do a rhetorical analysis on with the students. This also could be used with ideas of remixing and reappropriation from the visual rhetoric assignment.

www.dipdive.com

Here's an activity I used that goes along with the chapter in CDA about composing processes. It's a fun way to get the students to think visually about their composing process and compare with others. I adapted it from an article I read by Paul Prior ("Chronotopic Lamination- Tracing the Contours of Literate Activity" at http://wac.colostate.edu/books/selves_societies/).

I find that my students are still struggling with the idea of context. I think one thing that is confusing is that the book seems to talk about context in two different ways. One is the context of the reception of the message, like a classroom, business meeting, or sitting and reading. The other is context as the greater social and political environment of the message. I used the idea from the CDA teacher's manual that looks at the design of Yahoo's and Google's search engines, and how they conceptualize the context of the internet and their audiences differently.

Sommer’s discussion of the revision strategies of experienced writers resonated with me. I’m one of those people who typically plan and think things through extensively before I start my composition, and then when I write it’s all done in a single draft. I think over ideas, cross some out, make connections, and then diagram the idea structure of the whole essay. After I’ve thought it all through it’s just a matter of putting those ideas into the right words. My revisions are just the tweaking of sentences.

I agree with Newkirk that student preparation is important to conference success. In the cases he examined the students did not seem to understand what was expected of them in the conference, and as a result the student and teacher had communication difficulties. The students took a passive role, seemingly expecting direct advice on what they needed to do to improve their paper. I don't think they understood that the teacher was there to help them work through their ideas, and negotiate an improved paper.