Craig Mod - Considering the future of books & storytelling. Digital Essay | English 211s: Digital Writing. Your second main project for this course is to compose a digital essay—a piece of writing meant to be read on the screen rather than on the page. So the question is: What new possibilities does writing for the screen open up? Clearly, one thing you can do as a digital writer is to combine modes of expression, mix your prose with images, hyperlinks, videos, and audio files. You can insert written text into a video or slide show, or write the script for an audio file, or layer writing over images. You can also experiment with structure. Web texts often seem less linear than print ones—that is, they seem to invite readers to choose their own paths through the materials they present rather than follow a single consecutive route through them.
But all that begs the really interesting question, which is: How can you use these new possibilities of expression in imaginative ways? Which raises the question of what it means to compose a digital essay. A digital essay is centered in writing. Tips For Teaching a Research Essay. By sithsheila I am an adjunct English instructor at a local community college. I’m finishing up my grading of the students’ research projects, and it is at this point I feel I’ve failed and feel like a fraud in teaching freshman how to write an effective research essay.
I think I do a good job having students practice integrating sources and using our MLA guides to check it, but when I grade, it seems I’ve failed. Maybe I need help making sure students are properly integrating sources, but I am afraid this “cry for help” to my fellow instructors will expose me as unqualified to teach. Is there some “clearinghouse” where instructors share their best lesson plans in detail? I got a few notes with the research papers from students telling me “I never had to cite paraphrases before.” I’m looking for help with effective teaching practices not a scathing critique of what I should know/be doing as a teacher, as I’ve received in the past. Tags: Confidence, Teaching Tips. Support. Create your own E-Book for your iPad. Collaborative Classroom eBooks on the iPad. Ibooklessons Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog.
How To Start Using iTunes U In The Classroom. Previously I wrote an article about the incredible potential of iTunes U for both student and staff learning. I posed the question: Why Aren’t We Talking More About iTunes U ? I was blown away by the many positive remarks in response to this article from others that have also experienced the benefits of iTunes U.
I was recently asked if I would write a follow up to that post. In essence, the request was for me to help those interested in learning more about iTunes U to take the next step and explore how easy it is to build a course. iBooks Author As an example, I wouldn’t use the terms straightforward and easy when describing iBooks Author. See another Edudemic article by Fred: ‘ The Early Results Of An iPad Classroom Are In In fact, it’s so easy that even this administrator is in the midst of creating his own course. This would be a good option for a teacher that wants to see what iTunes U is all about and how it might work in their classroom. Public Site Manager Collaborate! Takayoshi&Selfe. Literary Studies in the Digital Age | MLA Commons. Digital Storytelling, Multimodal Writing, Multiliteracies... 10 Fun Tools To Easily Make Your Own Infographics.
People love to learn by examining visual representations of data. That’s been proven time and time again by the popularity of both infographics and Pinterest. So what if you could make your own infographics ? What would you make it of? It’s actually easier than you think… even if you have zero design skills whatsoever. Below are my two favorite infographic-making web 2.0 tools that I highly recommend.
They both have pros and cons but in general are great for any beginner or novice designer. Click the name of each tool to learn more! Visual.ly One of the more popular ways to discover infographics, Visual.ly actually just launched a design overhaul of their website. Dipity Want to get a beautifully simply visualization of data over time? Easel.ly I absolutely love Easel.ly. Venngage Venngage (likely named for Venn diagrams) is a double threat.
Infogr.am Tableau Public Made for Windows, Tableau Public lets you (like Infogr.am) bring your actual data into the world of visualzation. Photo Stats. Visualising Zeus's infidelities: the Greek god's affairs as chronicled over the centuries, laid out as a graphic | News. Teaching Writing in a Digital Age | exploring pedagogies of new media and literacies in composition. Writing History in the Digital Age. Springing Into Digital Research Projects. Over the last 18 months in Media 21, students have created a variety of learning products: traditional research papers, collaboratively written research papers, digital learning portfolios (which included multigenre elements), and information dashboards (Netvibes). In thinking about this spring’s research project on veterans’ issues and how to meet our students are their point of need while pushing their thinking, Susan Lester (my co-teacher) and I decided to go focus on students creating a digital research project (see details above in the embedded project document).
After engaging in presearch for three days this week, students will choose a topic and then be grouped by common research interests. Like last semester, these teams of students will collaboratively investigate a common list of of research questions developed by Susan and to create a digital research project that reflects the findings of their research. Like this: Like Loading... Learning Through Digital Media. The Digital Essay « timhodson.com. If you haven’t seen it already, you should have a look at this Digital Essay by Will Self.
Not because you are a fan of Will Self or necessarily interested in Kafka’s Wound, but because you are interested in the way the essay can be brought to life through embedded references. I spent a good portion of a very interesting hackday at the National Archives in March, Talking to Helen Jeffrey from the London Review of Books. We talked about Linked Data and how these concepts when applied to something like an essay might make it a different experience. In the outcome of the hackday, I used a graph to illustrate the connections between letter writers in the ancient correspondence of Henry III (and others) between 1175-1538. Connections between people and graphs are natural bedfellows. In the digital essay a graph is used to illustrate connections between references to external sources.
My one criticism is that I cannot seem to work out why things in the table of contents are connected. Bones Simplifies the Process of Creating a WordPress Theme. Hybrid Pedagogy: A Digital Journal of Teaching & Technology | Home. Digital Writing Uprising: Third-order Thinking in the Digital Humanities | Collaboration. “The intellectual is still only an incompletely transformed writer.” ~ Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero There could be many epigraphs hailing a discussion of digital writing, many pithy observations about its nature, becoming, qualities, mysteries, dilemmas. From Oscar Wilde: “A writer is someone who has taught his mind to misbehave.” Virginia Woolf: “We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.” Gertrude Stein: “They thought they were welcome and it did not make any difference.”
First sentences, on the other hand, are hard. Digital writing is a rebellion.Today there is no value to our writing except as it is made useful.Essays quake and tremble at the digital. The problem with first sentences is that they are either alluring and declarative, or simply declarative. Because digital writing provides no road map.
And so when I say digital writing is always communal, I do not mean it is always so by consent. [Photo by visualpanic] The Digital Humanities. Digital Humanities Now. Assignments | Technologies of Text – S12. I. Social Media Engagement Scholars in the field known as the “digital humanities” are, not surprisingly, active online. Many share their scholarship through blogs or social networking sites such as Twitter. In the Digital Humanities Compendium (which drives Digital Humanities Now), you will find lists of notable blogs and Twitter feeds. When we tweet about this course, we will use the hashtag #s12tot. II. Throughout the term, we will engage with the ideas of the course through public writing on a course blog.
Your written responses should reflect on our course readings, in-class discussions, the scholarly feeds that you follow, and your own experiences working on your course project. Blog posts are due each Wednesday by 6pm. III. During most lab days, we’ll be working through a specific activity, either individually or in groups. IV. This assignment was designed collaboratively and/or in tandem by Brian Croxall and Dr. You may choose to work on one of the following projects. V. Kafka’s Wound | A Digital Literary Essay by Will Self. Electronic Literature: New Horizons For The Literary. A visible presence for some two decades, electronic literature has already produced many works that deserve the rigorous scrutiny critics have long practiced with print literature. Only now, however, with Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary by N. Katherine Hayles, do we have the first systematic survey of the field and an analysis of its importance, breadth, and wide-ranging implications for literary study.
Hayles's book is designed to help electronic literature move into the classroom. Her systematic survey of the field addresses its major genres, the challenges it poses to traditional literary theory, and the complex and compelling issues at stake. Through close readings of important works, Hayles demonstrates that a new mode of narration is emerging that differs significantly from previous models. Electronic Literature: New Horizons For The Literary :: Essays.
The first reason to teach electronic literature is practical: digital media are the most rapidly growing forms of communication, and they will only grow in their influence and pervasiveness. Most of our students are fairly skillful with electronic technology, but as we all know, skill is not literacy. Literacy includes the ability not only to perform in a given medium, but to think in and beyond that medium, to be able to critique and extend the medium. The unprecedented growth and ubiquity (soon computers will be more common in homes than TVs) of electronic technology demands an enlightened, an educated and responsible use of the media. Further, many teachers find themselves attempting to improve their students’ understanding of academic discourse by bridging the gap between the academic world and the world of popular culture. Electronic technology is the dominant medium for popular culture. Another practical matter concerns an old problem in the literature classroom. Remixing Writing: A Digital Essay.
In late February, English teacher Jim Burke posted a discussion thread on the English Companion Ning sharing his initial thoughts on a new digital essay assignment he planned to try with his students this spring. Today, Burke Tweeted one of the student digital essays created in Prezi; you can read the digital essay, which utilizes text, graphics, and videos, to remix and create a new kind of essay. What other kinds of literacies do you see embedded in this work? I think it would be insightful if somehow the student could share her thoughts on how this medium worked for her and if she felt her Prezi creation captured the voice and ideas she wanted to convey to her audience; it would also be interesting to know if she prefers writing and composing in this way to traditional writing and how this medium may have impacted her writing and thinking processes.
Like this: Like Loading... ‘On the digital essay’, a panel discussion at the LRB. A panel at the London Review of Books bookshop last week saw literary thinkers tackling the problems thrown up by an experimental online essay. Kat Sommers asks what’s really being disrupted, here. Nicholas Spice, publisher of the London Review of Books and chairman of a panel discussion last Thursday on digital media and the literary essay, doesn’t pull any punches. In the middle of the discussion, and after a few defences of the concept of a ‘digital essay’, he asked: “Does visualising words weaken how they work on our brain?” Also on the panel were Will Self, the novelist and writer of Kafka’s Wound, a recent experiment in the form, Helen Jeffrey, an Associate Publisher at the LRB, and Dan Franklin, Digital Publisher at Random House. The question of visualising the written word is also at the heart of the essay Self has written, the LRB’s addition to cultural and arts website, The Space. The result is impressive.
It is a bold experiment nevertheless.