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Assignment Design Workshop + Digication: 09/15/17 notes

Greetings, Colleagues — 

We met for the first DWRD session of the academic year this morning and began with an Assignment Design workshop: Maria Prikhodo generously shared her Prologue: “Sense of Place,” a WRD 104 assignment with a multilingual emphasis, and Hannah Lee generously shared her “Summary & Response Essay” a WRD 104 assignment that leads to a synthesis project. We read the assignments aloud, in good writing-workshop fashion, trying to imagine what a busy, distracted, 18-19 year old writer might be looking for, and what questions she might have right out of the gate. We looked at the assignment typography and arrangement — what should come first? What should come next? what can wait until the end? what do you want them to remember? — and made suggestions along those lines. 

Part II: Digication

In our 2nd hour, we were joined by Scott Markwell, Alex Naylor, and Lauren Hahn for a Digication workshop. Because all of us are more-or-less in the same place, implementation wise — we either introduced it to students last week or are preparing to introduce it next week — we tried creating a workspace/portfolio on the fly, from scratch, focusing on step-by-step actions that all students will need to do:

  • Logging in
  • “Create” a portfolio button
  • Noticing the layout: navigation bar, left-hand-side customization settings, editing and settings functions 
  • Adding text and an image to the Home page (interesting Digication designers’ assumptions about what students might or might not want on that Home page — it’s easy to alter, though)
  • Adding a new page for an Assignments and sub-pages for drafts 
  • Changing fonts
  • Adding background images and background color

We agreed that that’s about 90% of what students will need to know in order to get started. What we didn’t get to, but might next time: working with and resizing slides, manipulating and editing text (typography!), and trying out the new fonts for readability. 

We’ll have another 2nd-hour Digication workshop at our next D-WRD session if you’d like to join us:

Friday, October 6, 10:00 a.m.-noon 300 SAC

  • Strategies and platforms for Peer Review — both F2F and in online courses; updates on screencast software
  • Hour two: Digication open workshop

The 2nd hour Digication part is an open agenda — whatever you need.

Textbook query: 

Are any of you using — or thinking about using — Wysocki and Lynch’s Compose, Design, Advocate: A Rhetoric for Multimodal Communication? The new 3rd Edition just came out — https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/program/Wysocki-Compose-Design-Advocate-3rd-Edition/PGM30519.html — the Preface and Instructor’s Manual are attached. Note that the Manual includes sample syllabi, lesson plans, rubrics, and models for responding to multimodal compositions.  I ask because I’ve used this book a few times — 1st and 2nd editions — and want to use it again. It would be great to have someone with whom to compare notes. Let me know?

Thanks for reading!