The Research Process

The Research ProcessI. Ask a question. Don’t pose a topic

• Understand the question will structure the research plan and the answer

• Understand your limits as a researcher (what you don’t know/can’t know)

• Understand the burdens of truth your audience will expect

II. Develop a plan to answer the question
A. Primary data collection
B. Secondary literature review

•  Identify what information is needed to answer the question

• Identify the best sources of information

• Locate those sources
• Evaluate the sources and understand their organization

• Summarize and synthesize the sources

III. Analyze primary data through writing
IV. Integrate data and secondary literature through writing to generate a claim
V. Synthesize various components to construct your answer
VI. Polish style and delivery

Remix Cont.

I.Remix, individual authorship, originality

Here are some descriptions of writing assignments. What do they all have in common?

FYC Composition
Students will:
1. Develop an understanding of the rhetorical purposes of written texts in the academic community.
2. Expand their repertoire of writing skills by learning methods of rhetorical invention, drafting techniques, and strategies for substantive revision.
3. Learn analytical reading strategies that will help them comprehend, critically evaluate, and respond to information in academic sources.
4. Practice writing original arguments for academic audiences.
5. Learn to critically evaluate their own and others' work and to collaborate effectively with other writers throughout the writing process.
6. Practice and refine technical skills in areas such as grammar and mechanics.

FYC
Write original, well-developed, and grammatically correct prose in Edited, Standard, Written English (ESWE). Although the overall quality of writing will be evaluated, essays should not contain more than a few significant errors per page.

Write essays with a clear thesis statement that presents an original interpretation or argument that relies on relevant, specific, textual evidence, not solely on unsupported personal opinion, feelings, or speculation.

History
This course includes two papers, due on September 22 and November 20. You will be asked to answer a thematic question (on topics that will be assigned at least three class sessions before the paper is due) in between 4 and 5 pages. You are expected to base these papers on classroom lectures, discussions, and reading assignments; no extra research is necessary. This paper should make an historical argument, must have a clear thesis statement, and must use evidence to support that thesis. What is an historical argument? Historical arguments are well-defended, original interpretations of historical events based upon evidence. It ís not easy to make your own historical argument; this course will give you practice doing so.

Digital Citizenship
Citizenship is increasingly mediated by digital communication. Political parties interact with
members online; interest groups use Web sites and electronic mail to woo the public; media organizations perpetually update the news on their information‐rich sites; government makes vital information and documents available via the World Wide Web. Blogs, wikis, and Web 2.0 in general have helped redefine the media landscape, politics and the fundamentals of citizenship. Online information can provide the basis for community environmental or personal health protection, as well as alternate pathways to technological or other literacy. These and a wide range of other communicative functions are all aspects of the emerging digital citizenship.
For the papers, you will need to be able to draw on theory and evidence from all the class materials (readings, lectures, and in‐class or online discussions) to make coherent, original arguments about the concept of digital citizenship.

II. What are the affordances of various mediums?

• Section about text and video on p. 68
• Writing technologies affordances / limits & the means of persuasion
• books
•  video 

III. Two Economies: Gift and Sharing

• Platforms for participation
• User-generated content

Core Concepts of Writing and Reading and Their Change

Some Key Concepts
The Premise of Remix Culture
Democratizing Access
Concentrated Culture in Mass Communications
Read Only Culture
Intellectual Property
Read Write Culture
Multiple Modes of Persuasion & The Place of Text in a World of the Image
Appropriation: The Difference Between Reading and Writing
DRM & Control


Some Core Concepts of Writing (Read Only) in the Age of Print

The Text / Book
The Author
Originality
Ownership of Ideas
Scarce Distribution Mechanisms
A Filter then Print Model

How do these change in the age of Read / Write Culture?


Here are some of the things Lessig was talking about:

His talk on strangling creativity.

The endless love piece.

The mash-ups of Girl Talk.

Email for Discussion

As we have discussed, rhetoric and rhetorical analysis are useful as both a heuristic for the production of different kinds of texts and an analytic lens. Rhetorical analysis doesn't simply look at what message a text is conveying, but  *how* a text is conveying its message. One heuristic for analysis we have talked about thus far are the canons, which include invention, organization, style, delivery, and memory. All of these are in flux in the digital age. You can also think through the various means of persuasion, three of which we have discussed are ethos, logos, and pathos.


Dear Students,

Spring is definitely in the air! With these gorgeous sunny days, I have almost forgotten that we are in Wisconsin in the middle of March. With this feeling of spring comes the highly anticipated spring break. You have made it through the first part of a tough semester and have earned the right to relax and rejuvenate for a week.

If your plans include travel, whether on vacation or on an Alternative Spring Break, please pay careful attention to the State Department advisories about travel outside of the U.S. (http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis_pa_tw_1168.html), and respect the people, culture, and laws of the country in which you're a guest. Some of you may choose to stay home and work or study over the break. Whatever your plans may be, try to take at least a little time out for yourselves to have fun and re-energize.

On that note, please have fun in a responsible way. If you choose to drink, know your limit and avoid dangerous situations. Do not horseplay, climb on balconies, or sit on railings. Take care of yourselves and each other. Additional resources about safety and health during spring break can be found at: http://www.safeu.wisc.edu. 

I hope you enjoy yourselves on spring break and remember that I expect to see you all back here after break in good shape and ready to finish out the semester.

Best wishes,
Lori

Lori M. Berquam
Dean of Students

There are some interesting articles about privacy and digital memory.

1. There are directions up for your Lessig paper, which will be in place of the synthetic essay. You can find instructions on Learn@UW.

2. All the portfolios are graded. The first batch of grades were sent out yesterday / this morning, and the final batch will be sent after class. The hard-copies will come back next week.

3. No class Thursday for the Conference on College Composition and Communication

4. Today in class:

•  FWS: Can there be such a thing as online community? Does it devalue what "community" should be?
• A blog post about digital memory and living in  a world of information 
• Review of introductions, with a critique of an online forum introduction
• Online community experiences
• What constitutes community?

Thurs. 3/11

• 50 word sentence: What must you know to survive in a world of rapid technological change?
• An introduction to introductions
• Create buy-in
• Locate problem the thesis purports to revise, solve, address, or complicate (general-->specific)
• Introduce an anecdote that complicates or introduces a larger problem (specific to general)
• Beware of beginning anything with statements so general they are commonsensical or mundane
• Typically in papers with a thesis statement, all parts of your introduction should build to the thesis
• Creating a map through rhetorical analysis.
• A rhetorical analysis doesn't necessarily ask: what is this part of the text saying? It asks: what is this part of the text doing?
• Jenkins
• Komito
• Two Class Examples 
• Short Genealogy of the Essay
• Final Course Calendar on Learn@UW

Today's Activity

One of the things image-based protocol was designed to show was the various ways multiple “modes” of communication (aural, visual, oral) are implicated in the writing process. Jenkins also points to the multiple mediums of communication that people now have at their disposal to make meaning, different kinds of manipulated images, blogs, podcasts, TV, viral internet videos, multimedia, etc. Computing technologies have made these media inexpensive to use.

This assignment is designed to make you think about how meaning changes as you move across different mediums of communication. Your groups are to take one of the main points from the Jenkins’ book and render it from writing  into a visual image. Here is an example of a politically charged Photoshop image that circulated in the wake of Katrina:

You can use the program Photoshop to make a collage, or otherwise manipulated image. You can pilfer and plunder images from the web and use them for educational purposes, but don’t post them on your blogs because there may be copyright issues. These will be pretty rudimentary, but they will also be fodder for discussion.

Some of the points you might consider that Jenkins discusses in various manifestations:

--Few of us know how to live in a world of convergence

--Students working from their bedrooms can influence the mediascape

--Corporations have tightened their grip on traditional mass media

--The Internet can provide a voice to those who are not in line with mass media, and this is good

--The Internet can provide a voice to those who are not in line with mass media, and this is bad

--Pop culture moves across multiple media in new ways because of the internet

--Everyday citizens now need to think about the legal dynamics of media production

--Grassroots media campaigns can influence politics

--Established institutions are trying to exploit the communicative practices of fan communities to leverage power

Writing in the Mediascape

As we move through the next text about modes and mediums of communication, we are going to keep the following quotation in mind:

"Writing is no longer just alphabetic text--writing is also audio and video. And writing is also hypertext and delivery of multimedia content via the internet and the web. And writing is chunks of tagged text and data floating within databases and underneath the internet in p2p spaces" (McKee and Porter, "Why Napster Matters to Writing" (179).

What kinds of affordances do we gain when we speak of writing like this? What might we loose? How does writing become aestheticized? How does speaking of writing like this change the rhetorical canons (e.g. invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery) of which we have spoken?

Learning in the digital age.

How might institutions of learning need to change to adapt to new information technologies?

Keywords from Davidson and Goldberg:

1)Self-motivated learning & hypertextual reading
2)Horizontal Structures & new forms of authority
3)From knowledge to knowledgeable
4)Lifelong learning

A vision of students.

A spoof of the office and teaching with technology.

Portals and Online Spaces of Writing

There are portals based around geography. There are portals based around share interest as well, like profession or profession.

Here is a link to Benkler.

Google Books

News about Google Books.

Books Made Sexy

Here is a trailer for a new book on digital memory.

Digital Labor

Why kind of work do you do online?

Privacy Issues

Looks like a severe problem with Google's Buzz and privacy issues.

The Future of Information

How do you plan for a future of information?

New Literacies

Here is a short summary of a current study at Stanford.

Class 2/11/10

I. The fifty word sentence and rating function: What is an author?

II. Changing Invention and Organization.

III. Better Pencil Cont.

Video from the first night

In case you wanted the link.

Teaching with Technology Parody