#multimodalcomposition

Navigating Makeademia Course Tumblr

Welcome to the course blog for the Summer 2018 section of Advanced Exposition at the University of Florida! This course is designed to practice public writing, digital rhetoric, and multimodal composition. All of the required course assignments and readings are in the schedule. In addition, all required course tools are free for students, including Canva, Arduino, Instructables, Cura, and Tumblr. Assignment prompts and student responses are all tagged and searchable for future educational purposes.

(This course Tumblr is designed as a closed, secondary group blog, meaning that students need a Tumblr account and an invitation to access, and no external replying is allowed.)

Please contact the instructor, Emily Brooks, at emilyfbrooks [at] gmail [dot] com if you have any questions!

Top Navigation Bar

Posts

- You can scroll through all of the instructor- and student-generated posts in reverse chronological order.

Syllabus- This page has all of the course information including description, goals, policies, and resources

Schedule- This page has a course schedule outline with daily, weekly, and unit topics, links to assignments and readings, and homework (HW) assignments

Archive- This page allows you to view the course posts at a glance; you can select options in the dropdown menu to organize by Month and Filter by Post Type: Text, Photo, Quote, Link, Chat, Audio, Video

More Navigation

Additionally, you can search the posts with the following links:

makeademia.tumblr.com/tagged/<tag>

makeademia.tumblr.com/search/<searchterm>

Activity and Assignment Tags

Based on your readings of “Introduction to Zines” and “Bibliocircuitry the Design of the Alien Everyday” and your viewings in special collections of paper magic in Special Collections, (e.g. 3D glasses, pop-ups, QR codes, augmented reality), you will construct your own zine persuading your reader to join your cause to bring magic to people's lives. In order to persuade, you will also need to explain details about the project.

Option 1: Recruit for an an already existing project (Streetlight at UF Health, Dance Marathon, UF GRiP, Gator Pals)

Option 2: Design and propose your own project to bring magic to people's lives through creativity and/or technology. These can be small random acts of kindness or sustained projects. Play to your strengths and interests.

As mentioned in the reading, the format of zines are up to you. You may incorporate photocollage, hand-drawn illustrations, royalty-free images, etc. Pay careful attention to your layout and design based on your readings “Thinking With Type: Letter, Text, Grid, Extras.” QR codes can help you link to URLs if the project already has a website, pop-ups can create visual interest, paper glasses can reveal hidden images, HP Reveal can add 3D models, images, or text to your book, paper circuits can illuminate specific points.

I recommend designing in Canva custom dimensions (5.5x8.5″) (multiples of 4, 16 minimum), exporting as PDF Print, and printing as booklet on 8.5x11″. There may be slight registration issues, so it is best to design with extra white space to allow for printing margin errors.

Students often enter English classrooms with preconceived notions of 12-point Times New Roman, Microsoft Word essays about literature by "dead white guys." Similarly, there is a preconceived notion of what one might encounter in a makerspace: 3D-printed Arduino robots soldered by "rich, white guys." However, many multimodal composition scholars like Cheryl Ball, Cynthia Selfe, Jody Shipka, and Anne Wysocki have demonstrated the potential not only for students to be makers but also for English classrooms to be makerspaces. If we understand making to encompass analog materials as well as digital technologies, we recognize a greater potential to prototype arguments. 

The best practices to appropriate from makerspaces to English classrooms are to make new technologies unintimidating by scaffolding projects and to foster collaboration for peer-learning. Significant outcomes of this maker approach are that students come to recognize how much of what they consume on a daily basis is mediated and designed, they gain a newfound appreciation of the difficulties of making everyday objects, and, most importantly, they seem proud to share what they have created.

-EB

Navigating Making Media Meta Course Tumblr

Welcome to the course blog for the Spring 2018 section of Advanced Argumentative Writing at the University of Florida! This course is designed to practice public writing, digital rhetoric, and multimodal composition. All of the required course readings are open access and linked in the schedule. In addition, all required course tools are free for students, including Canva, Adobe Color CC/Capture, and Tumblr. Assignment prompts and student responses are all tagged and searchable for future educational purposes.

(This course Tumblr is designed as a closed, secondary group blog, meaning that students need a Tumblr account and an invitation to access, and no external replying is allowed.)

Please contact the instructor, Emily Brooks, at emilyfbrooks [at] gmail [dot] com if you have any questions!

Top Navigation Bar

Posts- You can scroll through all of the instructor- and student-generated posts in reverse chronological order.

Syllabus- This page has all of the course information including description, goals, policies, and resources

Schedule- This page has a course schedule outline with daily, weekly, and unit topics, links to assignments and readings, and homework (HW) assignments

Archive- This page allows you to view the course posts at a glance; you can select options in the dropdown menu to organize by Month and Filter by Post Type: Text, Photo, Quote, Link, Chat, Audio, Video

More Navigation

Additionally, you can search the posts with the following links:

makingmediameta.tumblr.com/tagged/<tag>

makingmediameta.tumblr.com/search/<searchterm>

Activity and Assignment Tags

Autobiography Cover #autobiographycover

Meditation on Mediation #meditationonmediation

Telos Icon #purposeicon

Logic Definition #logicdefinition

Cereal Box Analysis #cerealbox #rhetoricalanalysis #visrhet #visualrhetoric

Comparative Visual Rhetorical Ad Analysis #adanalysis #visrhet

Color Scheme #colorscheme

SWOT Analysis #swotanalysis

Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature Visit #BaldwinLibraryofHistoricalChildrensLiterature #uflib #specialcollections

Concrete Poetry #concretepoetry OR #wordcloud

Critical Reading #criticalreading

Keyword Definition #keyworddefinition

AR Activism #aractivism

Unpopular Opinion Proposal #unpopularopinion

Epic Rap Battle #epicrapbattles #infographic

Rhizcomics #rhizcomics

Spotify Listicle #listicle #Spotify

Welcome to Night Vale #welcometonightvale

Metagaming #metagaming

Unpopular Opinion Infographic #unpopularopinion

Logo/Resume #logotype #design

Feasibility #feasibility

Final Project Proposal #proposalpresentation

Writing Is Making #writingismaking

Core Media Literacy Skills Part 1 #medialiteracy

Core Media Literacy Skills Part 2 #medialiteracy

Final Project #metaargument

As you're conferencing about your rough drafts, offering peer review feedback, and revising your own P1, I think you might find this multimodal causal argument interesting. Hewlett et. al. recently published this article for the Harvard Business Review. They are writing with their own rhetorical situation in mind, of course, but they do have a goal similar to yours in P1: They make a clear causal argument, as summarized in the title. They also back their claim up with evidence: "But 38% of black professionals also feel that it is never acceptable at their companies to speak out about their experiences of bias — a silence that makes them more than twice as vulnerable to feelings of isolation and alienation in the workplace. Black employees who feel muzzled are nearly three times as likely as those who don’t to have one foot out the door, and they’re 13 times as likely to be disengaged."

In the end, Hewlett et. al. do speculate about future positive effects of creating more open discussions about race in the workplace. This underscores the importance of the conversation without taking away the focus on the present environment they’ve analyzed.

1) If you don't know exactly how a specific medium works, learn. Most social media and online platforms have extensive troubleshooting guides and many accompanying YouTube tutorials. Let's say, for example, I can't remember how sharing settings work for Prezi. When I google "share a Prezi," voilà:

Similarly, I faced an issue trying to view a Windows Media Player video on my Mac. I quickly learned that I needed a new video player, VHL, which was free and easy to find online. You have knowledgeable communities— and the power of Google— to help you with any issues you face with the new technologies you are using. Be proactive and a problem-solver.