Lesson Materials: PowerPoint
Lesson Objectives: 1. Understand how to use CUNY Academic Commons and customize your individual sites; 2. Discuss characteristics of digital composition
Connection to First Major Paper/Project: This lesson will help you create a site on which to host your semester’s work and display your progress through this course. Thinking of the specific characteristics of online writing will help you start to analyze the rhetorical situation connected to writing in this sphere. Hands-on activities will help you better understand assignment criteria and how to accomplish smaller tasks. A review of sample websites will help you visualize what your own website might look like.
Connection to Course Goals: This lesson fulfills the course goal of learning to compose in a variety of media and examine how the places we write affect how we write and how we display that writing. Today’s activities will help you prepare to compose on a website, paying attention to audience, purpose, and genre and to how the act of publishing online affects the elements of a rhetorical situation.
Activities, Day 1:
Review homework assignments:
—Review annotation strategies and reasons for annotating. Introduce hypothes.is as an annotation resource.
—Check that everyone was able to sign up with CUNY Academic Commons.
- Getting Started with the Academic Commons: By now, you should have signed up for CUNY Academic Commons and created a site. We will go over how to add pages to your site and review other students’ sites for inspiration of what your site might look like.
- Review Sample Portfolios: Via this PowerPoint, you will be able to access ENGL 110 sites from previous semesters. We will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of a couple of the sites.
- Best Practices for Web Writing: Review and discuss this web writing guide.
- Buzzfeed Style Guide for Online Writing: Learn about the set of standards for the internet and social media described in The BuzzFeed Style Guide.
Homework, to be completed before next class:
—Read Establishing your (Academic) Digital Identity: This article should get you thinking about the manner in which you engage, share, promote, and present yourself online. This article makes the case that an individual’s digital identity is intricately connected to their overall identity. 1. Annotate the short article. 2. Then, Google yourself and take note of what you find.
Next class, you will compare what you found in your workgroups, and then have a discussion as a class.
—Read Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue.” Annotate either by downloading the PDF and writing on it or by taking notes separately. What stands out to you? Be ready to share your general reactions to the text in class.
