English W412/W510

Assignment 1: Your Blog (20%) This online space will be a place for you to collect notes, observations, artifacts and musings about literacy and technology. Think of it as a public journal where you write, weekly. The emphasis here is on notes: I hope the space will be a place for us to see what we are doing as we read and write about what we read. As your independent research takes off, it will also be a place for you to record progress with your inquiry. You can get a free blog at http://uniblogs.org. You should post one or two posts a week (aim for 150-200 words; we’ll see how it goes). I will give you feedback on your blog at least twice during the semester (once around halfway through, once towards the end of the term).

Assignment 2: Technoliteracy memoir or biography (25%). Highlighting your own experiences or someone else’s, this assignment will let you explore the evolution of literacies and technologies through one person’s eyes. It will raise beginning questions about the forces that affect attitudes about and uses of literacy and technology.

Assignment 3: The Really Useful Technology (20%). When we read Stuart Selber’s essay on functional literacy, you’ll see a host of suggestions for functional, practical ways to think about technological literacies. Selber suggests that we teach and learn more about things like how to customize our word processing programs, how grammar checkers can be used, how social bookmarking might work. Your challenge is to identify one Useful Technology, large or small, learn it yourself, and teach the rest of us, via a demo and a wiki page. By the end of the semester, we’ll all know a lot more!

Final Portfolio and Researched Project (35%) : This collection of work brings together the semester. It should include a final reflection on literacy, technology, and your development as a writer/reader (in particular, your willingness to experiment with or venture into new forms of literacy and technology); any artifacts you wish to include; and a researched project (9-12 pages, or the equivalent in some other format) that showcases your abilities to research, analyze, and explore our course themes. You might profile an online community, for example, looking at norms, expectations, and writing; you might pursue a topic relating to identity and literacy and technology, or you might investigate aspects of gender and literacy. There are many themes swirling around our course, and this is your chance to pursue one that interests you.

For W510 students, the final portfolio should include a teaching philosophy statement that addresses literacy and technology. How do evolving notions of technology and literacy affect teaching English, writing, or language arts? The researched project might extend this philosophy statement or address other pedagogical issues arising from the course. W510 papers should be 15-20 pages long (or the equivalent in some other format).