Craig Mod - Considering the future of books & storytelling. 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.
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? 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.
Takayoshi&Selfe. Literary Studies in the Digital Age. 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. 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. Visualising Zeus's infidelities: the Greek god's affairs as chronicled over the centuries, laid out as a graphic. 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. 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.
Bones Simplifies the Process of Creating a WordPress Theme. Hybrid Pedagogy: A Digital Journal of Teaching & Technology. Digital Writing Uprising: Third-order Thinking in the Digital Humanities. “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.
The Digital Humanities. Digital Humanities Now. 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. 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.
Electronic Literature: New Horizons For The Literary. 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. 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. ‘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.