Author: David

Open post

Week Ahead: 3

3 9/9
9/11
  • note: 9/10 College add/drop/swap deadline
  • Individual conferences begin

For Tuesday, you should have published your Literacy Narrative essay as a page on your site. You should also have published your reflection post and sketch 2.

In class on Tuesday, we’ll spend a lot of class time on Randy Olson’s ABT thesis structure. You should be able to skim the Olson essay fairly quickly — the key idea is understanding the (bad) deductive structure that Olson describes and then his suggestion for improving it by utilizing a (good) inductive structure instead. I’ll post a student essay that I received in the past and we’ll spend a chunk of time in class with a hands-on activity restructuring that student’s argument into the ABT structure.

We’ll also look at two chapters from Unflattening by Nick Sousanis, who drew the book as his dissertation for Teachers College at Columbia University — it was the first comics dissertation ever and has since been published by Harvard UP and has won a bunch of awards. Sousanis took a job at San Francisco State University a couple of years ago and is building a comics studies program there.

Unflattening will serve as one of the theoretical frameworks for our analyses of comics. Be aware that this comic is quite a bit more dense reading than Brosh’s web comic or than you’ll find Stitches to be, so give yourself a little extra time to work through those 20 pages carefully. I’ll start off our discussion of Sousanis by asking you to consider how effective Unflattening is as an academic, philosophical argument. (Soon we’ll read another theoretical framing text, but in the form of a more traditional essay by Hillary Chute and I’ll ask you to consider how the two pieces are similar and different.) How do the words and images in Unflattening interact together?

We’ll spend most of our time in class on Thursday discussing the reading from Stitches, starting with the following questions:

  • Pick the single page that you find the most compelling or interesting or that you think is the most important in today’s reading. Describe the page in a few sentences. Why is it interesting or important?
  • How does Small establish character and setting in the introduction?
  • This chapter all takes place while David is 6 years old. What are the major subdivisions of the chapter though? You’ll probably decide that there are three (maybe four) major sections in these pages — what is the primary idea being conveyed by each section?
Open post

Resources for editing your website

If you haven’t already, you should change the front page of your site so that it’s a static front page instead of your posts page. Here is a support document that explains how to create a static front page (if your theme hasn’t disabled the Customizer menu, I recommend you follow the instructions for “Set the Homepage from the Customizer”). Note that you will likely need to create a new posts page along with the static page. In the screenshot of the menu below, you can just click on “+ Add New Page” and then create a page called “Posts” or something like that.

Your reflection essay should go in the static front page, so that it’s the first thing a reader sees if they just go to your sites URL. You can link from the reflection essay to specific works as needed.

You should also create a menu with links to all the major assignments for the course. Here is a help page on creating a menu in WordPress. Again, if the Customizer is available in your dashboard, I’d recommend using the Customizer to create your menu. You can organize the sketches using categories or tags in the menu, or you can just have a link to your posts page in the menu so that your reader can find them there. Make sure that your reader can easily find the three parts of your literacy narrative, your Tracing Pages essay, and the Halfa Kucha slides and reflection.

Open post

Start on your literacy narratives

Looking ahead to next week, you should be thinking about the fact that you have two assignments due on 9/9: sketch 2 and the first part of the literacy narrative.

The literacy narrative asks that you begin with a pre-writing exercise called “X-pages.” I’d recommend that you go ahead and begin doing that freewriting as soon as possible. The steps are clearly outlined:

  • Make a list of ten memories that you associate with reading and/or writing
  • Circle the memory that is most vivid
  • Answer 20 questions about that memory (I’ve even included audio of me reading the questions with pauses between them, so you can just jot down thoughts while you listen)
  • Do a brief freewrite about that memory, responding to some questions listed in the post

None of that is actually the literacy narrative itself. It’s writing you will do before you actually write the literacy narrative. Your literacy narrative might be directly about the subject you focused on for the X-page exercise, but it does not have to be. The pre-writing is to get you thinking and writing so that when you turn to the assignment itself, you are primed and ready to write.

Once you’ve written your 3-5 page (750-1250 words) literacy narrative essay, you will publish it as a new page to your site. Then you will write a reflection post about the writing process.

I’m happy to answer questions about the assignment in class on Thursday.

Open post

Week Ahead: 2

2 9/2
9/4

If you are looking for the welcome post, where you’ll find your homework discussed and where you’re supposed to leave a comment, you should click on the link earlier in this sentence to go there.

(Note: I fixed the error on the schedule page around the Labor Day holiday. My apologies for the confusion. I spend a lot of time planning out the syllabus, the schedule of readings, and the assignments and they are all interlinked with each other, so sometimes I make mistakes as I am shifting and rearranging all of that during the planning phase. If you catch mistakes around dates or whatever, always feel free to let me know and ask for clarification.)

I will not publish a post like this one every week, but generally on Thursdays or Fridays I will try to look ahead to what’s on the schedule for next week. I’ll copy & paste in the relevant cells from our schedule table, as I’ve done at the top of this post, and then I’ll try to briefly point out things you might overlook or questions I want you to consider as you read. I might also preview how the class discussions will go in the coming week.

Tuesday

The Andrea Lunsford reading about Rhetorical Situations provides a good introduction of some of the key terms we will use in our analyses this semester. It should be a relatively quick read for you and will probably go over terms like genre, audience, and purpose, that you are already familiar with but might do so in a slightly different way than you’re used to. We’ll apply some of those rhetorical terms to the reading by Allie Brosh and then see how that helps us to think about what she’s doing in her comic. Note that “Adventures in Depression” is a webcomic, which includes some prose writing along with drawings. You might think about whether this even is a comic, as I began to define the medium in our first class, or whether it’s something else.

I meant to spend a little more time on the first day showing you how this class website works and pointing you towards starting your own sites and why I want you to do that. We’ll circle back to that some in class on Tuesday — which is also my way of letting you know that if you’re confused by the website sign up stuff or the instructions on making an Avatar, don’t get too worried about it. You won’t really be behind if that’s something you complete after that discussion.

Also critical note: do not pay anything to WordPress for your site! WordPress is a free, open-source software but when you’re hosting the site on their servers (as you will) it follows a “freemium” model where the basic website is free but they will try to upsell you on “premium” features. For this class, you do not need any of those premium features. In the last couple of years, they have made it a little extra confusing during sign up so that if you’re not paying attention you end up on a screen that makes it look like you have to pay to launch a site. You do not need to pay anything for a basic website. If it looks like you do, look again more carefully and somewhere there will be a button to just proceed with the free service.

Thursday

Scott McCloud‘s Understanding Comics was an extremely important early critical examination of the medium of comics. I’ve assigned you the first chapter of his book, written in comic form, that attempts to understand what comics are and how they work. Note that you only need to read chapter 1, which ends at page 23, but chapter 2 is also included on the PDF that I uploaded to the library. Consider chapter 2 as optional additional reading — there’s a really good discussion in it of the ways in which we identify with the characters in a comic because of the ways they are simplified in drawing that might be useful in later discussions. We’ll discuss more of McCloud’s work later this semester.

We’ll also finish our discussion of Brosh as we turn to the second half of “Adventures in Depression.”

 

 

 

Open post

Welcome to The Secret Language of Comics

I look forward to working with you this semester.

Your homework to complete before we meet the next time, on Tuesday, September 2:

  • Read over this website very carefully as it constitutes the syllabus for this course. Note that the Syllabus page includes a number of subpages, covering such topics as: the course learning outcomes; the texts you need for the class; attendance, participation, and other policies; and how you will be graded. There is also a calendar of readings and assignments; and posts describing the three major assignments (literacy narrative in three parts, tracing pages, and halfa kucha) and minor assignments this semester.
  • Add this site to your bookmarks. Make certain that you can find your way back here, because you’ll be spending a lot of time visiting these pages over the course of this semester.
  • Sign up for a basic, free WordPress site. (See further information below about choosing a name for your site.) Do not pay anything for this site; choose the free version with an address ending in .wordpress.com. Make sure to hit the “Launch” button to publish your site to the web.
  • Leave a comment on this post asking a question about the syllabus. (Note that you need to be on the post page itself in order to leave a comment.) Put the URL for the WordPress site you created in the “website” line on the comment form. If you want to receive an email every time a new post goes up on this site, check the “Subscribe to site” box before you submit your comment. The first time you comment, it will not show up publicly until I’ve approved it.
  • Reply to the survey form at the bottom of this post, which both asks some basic information I’ll need in order to manage communications with you and also asks some questions that will help me get to know you a little bit better.
  • Read the following two texts: Andrea Lunsford, “Rhetorical Situations” and “Reading Rhetorically” from Everyone’s an Author and Allie Brosh’s, “Adventures in Depression, Part One” from Hyperbole and a Half. (Note that first link will take you to a PDF that I’ve uploaded to our electronic course reserves, so you will need to login with your Emory netid and password to access the document. The other link goes to Hyperbole and a Half on blogger. Allie Brosh has since published the story in her book, Hyperbole and a Half, which is excellent, but we can use this version on the web for this course.)

A little more on naming your WordPress site

You can choose a URL based on some version of your name (i.e., janestudent.wordpress.com or johndoe.wordpress.com) if you’d like. Using a version of your name has the advantage that you will be building a digital identity on the web based on your name, which can be really helpful. On the other hand, it also means that this site that you’re building will likely come up near the top of web searches for your name, so consider whether that is something you would like.

If you don’t want to publish your coursework on a site with a version of your name, you can also use some sort of pseudonym for your domain name.

It is also perfectly acceptable for your domain name to be a short word or phrase that is easy to remember and spell, and which speaks to some interest of yours or an aspect of your character (for example: my friend Audrey Watters, a noted educational technology scholar and researcher publishes a site called hackeducation.com or one of my favorite art and design blogs is called thisiscolossal.com). If you’re going to choose a title or phrase as your domain name, make sure you think about it very carefully so you don’t show up on one of those lists of the most unfortunate domain names ever, like the design firm called Speed of Art that ended up with a domain name that sounds like it’s about flatulence in a swimsuit. Note that in the case of your site, you’ll be publishing a page that’s a subdomain of WordPress.com, so if Audrey Watters were in this class her site might be called hackeducation.wordpress.com.

Student Information Survey

Student Information Form
Do you already use Google Drive?
Have you ever done any photo editing before?

Open post

Sunday Sketch Assignments

1: Avatar (due: 9/4, tag: sk1)

2: Sunday Sketches (due: 9/9, tag: sk2)

3: Visual Note Taking (due: 9/16, tag: sk3)

4: Combophoto (due: 9/23, tag: sk4)

5: Triptych (due: 9/30, tag: sk5)

6: What’s in your bag? (due: 10/7, tag: sk6)

7: Quadriptych (due: 10/21, tag: sk7)

8: Data viz from everyday life (due: 11/11, tag: sk8)

9: Recreate a movie scene (due: 11/25, tag: sk9)

10: Mix Tape (due: 12/2, tag: sk10)

11: Assemblies (due: 12/9, tag: sk11)

Open post

Sketch 10: Mix Tape

Due: 12/2

Tag: sk10

This week, I want you to think about using audio for particular rhetorical situations by creating a mix playlist with a group of songs.

Rules (all of which are breakable, if you have a good justification for why):

  • I usually think of a mix tape as about an hour of music, but for our purposes let’s aim for 45 minutes or so
  • Preferably no more than one song by a single artist
  • Create some kind of consistency and an audio progression as someone listens from beginning to end

Just as giving a speech, writing an essay, or publishing a photograph are rhetorical acts, choosing particular pieces of music in particular situations can also be a rhetorical act — and choosing to curate a specific list of songs that you put together in a particular order, with a particular emotional or intellectual affect in mind, is certainly a rhetorical act.  In the case of the music mix you are producing for this assignment, the rhetor is you, the medium is your playlist, and the audience is probably your peers in the class (though you can decide to address some other, fairly specific, audience if you would like).

There is a lot of music in the world, and there are lots of ways to combine music together and lots of people doing so. If you are struggling to come up with ways to craft your mix, I encourage you to either respond to a very specific rhetorical situation (“a mix for my good friend who just went through a bad breakup,” for example, or “a mix to apologize to my friend for not locking up his bicycle when I borrowed it so it get stolen”); come up with a very specific narrative or emotional hook that you want from the songs you include in your list (“songs about the summer” or “songs to prepare for exams to” might work well as hooks that are topical right now); and/or to make up some specific rules for yourself to spur greater creativity (“My Halloween mix can only include songs with the word ‘pumpkin’ in the title” or “all the songs need to include the words ‘new’ or ‘old’” or “every song must be 2 minutes and 42 seconds long“). As Robert Frost once said, “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down,” so creating rules for yourself about choosing songs might help you to structure the game that you’re playing to make it more fun.

What do you have to turn in?

Create your playlist however makes sense for you — it can be a Spotify playlist that you share via a link; you can use Mixcloud (which will also import Spotify playlists) or Soundcloud; or you can record your vinyl onto MP3s and upload those files to Google Drive or send them to me to host on my server, then embed them on your site from there. Publish a post on your site with the link(s) to the playlist and a numbered track listing that names the songs and artists.

Your mix tape needs an image to serve as the album cover. If you were recording your mix onto cassette tapes, I’d ask you to use gel pens to draw a cover that you’d stick into the little plastic case, but you’re not, so instead create a square image that has the title of your playlist and that serves as a compelling visual representation of your mix. Do not just use the image that Spotify automatically creates from the album covers included in the mix — design your own album cover.

Finally, write a reflection to accompany your mix — explain the rhetorical situation you are addressing, what rules you established for yourself, and how you went about solving the problem your rhetorical situation presents. Articulate the choices you made and why you made them. Finally, think about your mix as an argument (even though it’s not a direct, academic argument) — what are you conveying in your mix and how?

Open post

Literacy Comic Reflection

Now that you’ve completed your Literacy Narrative Comic, publish a reflective blog post of about 500 words about the writing process, paying special attention to how the work you have done has helped you to meet the Learning Outcomes for this class. That post should link to the page with your literacy comic.

Some other questions you might respond to:

  • How was it different to write your literacy narrative as a comic?
  • How did you think differently once the visual component was added?
  • How did that help you to see the story you were trying to tell in different terms?
  • Was your analytical thinking process any different?
  • How have your thoughts about your alphabetic literacy narrative changed in the process of transforming it into a comic?

I’d also like you to discuss choices you made in creating your comic and to explain why you chose the way you did. Especially if there’s something you were really trying to do in your comic which you felt you couldn’t realize as perfectly as you would if you had a lot more time, more resources, or if you could have hired an illustrator to turn your vision into exactly what you wanted. If there are aspects of your comic where you have a clear sense of what you were trying to accomplish and how you would have done so if some things were different, then explain that in your reflection. Doing so allows you to demonstrate that you have the knowledge you need about this sort of writing even if you have not yet developed all the skills necessary to make that knowledge visible in the final artifact you’ve produced.

Open post

Halfa Kucha Reflection

Due: Friday 12/2

Export your halfa kucha slideshow as a set of images (in Powerpoint: File > Export… and then in File Format select jpeg and “save every slide.” Powerpoint will create a subfolder where you tell it to and save each of your ten slides as images). Then in your WordPress dashboard create a new post and upload those images to a Slideshow block.

If you used Google Slides, you can embed the slideshow by going to File > Publish to the web and then selecting settings. It will give you an embed code that you can paste into an HTML block in your post.

Then write a couple of paragraphs reflecting on the process of writing and then giving the presentation. How was it different to construct an argument that you were giving to the class as a presentation than to write an essay? How did you make choices about the structure of your argument? If you made a choice to organize your presentation in a certain way so that your audience would follow it more clearly, is that something that you could also make use of in your written work? Was your analytical thinking process any different?

What decisions did you make about the visuals for your presentation? How did you go about creating an impact for the slides that accompany your spoken words?

What did you learn by giving this type of presentation, where you had no control of the timing of the slides and couldn’t put much in the way of text on your slides, as compared to other presentations you have given? What did you notice about your classmates’ presentations that you might think about incorporating into your own presentations in the future?

What do you think you could have done better in your presentation?

Halfa Kucha assignment prompt

Posts navigation

1 2 3 4
Scroll to top