All day doing 101 with the bamboo

Written on March 11, 2008 by Devon Adams

We worked all day on the English 101 online curriculum, and we did make progress. Let’s see. First of all, I believe the required text will be: Latterel, C. G. (2006.) Remix reading and composing culture. Bedford St. Martin’s, New York. ISBN-10:0-312-43018-3. which upon initial review felt like a rhetorical reader to me, and, frankly, it’s black and white. Shelley pointed out that that would make is cheaper for the students, too. I have to remind myself that many MCC students fall into the Digital Divide that Henry Jenkins discuss through his media program at MIT and in the most recent NEW magazine cover story. We decided on four modules, with the first being a tradition 1,500 word paper that addresses a developed prompt from the text book. The other three include informative argument, informational identity module, and an exposition on the journal of a food item (entitled “Juicy Tomatoes”). We dropped the final portfolio idea, in lieu of more time on the modules, but I sustained a developed survey.

The 16 week session break down is as follows:
Orientation, Information: Weeks 1-2
Module 1: Weeks 3-5
Module 2: Weeks 6-8
Module 3: Weeks 9-12
Module 4: Weeks 13-16

We included a weekly Rhetoric out on the Town assignment, a teacher generated tech tip of the week, and a copywrite activity/assignment. We agreed that copy write in an important topic, and, frankly, until recently I felt like I could careless about copywrite. I always argued that enough people would pay the exorbitant fees that I could not pay them. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for paying the artists, but I sure ain’t ready to pay all of the middlemen. The further we move online the more I know I need to pay more attention to copywrite. Hence our assignments. One of the coolest things we added to our repertoire is a weekly vid cast. These casts will typically not include our faces (thank, God), but we will use them to generate tutorials to teach new Web 2.0 tools. A couple of us will break these down this summer, so we don’t all have to make them all. I think this will be good because if they’re used by multiple professors then there’ll be a variety of casters.

What else did we add? Ah, we added a CD-rom from St Martin’s/Bedford that includes an analysis of visual elements.  The students will review an analysis section per week, and they will be linked to the Rhetoric on the Town assignment. There’s another small book, but frankly I’ve not reviewed it all. Shelley tends to like it as a required supplement, and it’s only $5.00 more. Back to the digital divide. Eh?

Posted in composition, copyright, curriculum, eng101, vidcasting