Course Policies
WRIT 2510: Writing to the World Wide Web
Sections 3 and 4: (71564/ 72504)
Classroom: Russell Sage Lab 4510, M/Th 10-11:50
Professor: Janice Fernheimer
Office: Sage 4403
Office hours: T/Fri 9-10 am, 4-5pm, and by appointment.
These are your hours, so please take advantage of them. If they don’t work for you, please e-mail me to schedule an appointment.
Virtual office hours: Whenever I’m online, feel free to IM me, screenname—discojan using MSN messenger. If enough of you express an interest, I will maintain one regular virtual office hour!
E-mail: fernhj [at] rpi [dot] edu (best way to contact me!)
Course website address: http://www.rpi.edu/~fernhj/WWWWs07
Course Description: The Rensselaer Catalogue describes this course as one that “provides an introduction to website design with emphasis on the design of text and hypertext for personal and organizational purposes. The course offers an introduction to basic principles of writing, visual design, and usability analysis in addition to web technologies such as HTML, coding and image production and editing.” Gee, now you know exactly what we’ll be doing, right? Let’s try that description again.
Writing to the World Wide Web is a writing course that introduces students to the relatively new genre(s) of writing for the Internet. This class is, first and foremost, a writing class, and you will do a lot of it, so get ready and roll up your sleeves. We will work collaboratively as a class to learn about the Internet and the World Wide Web, their place in our culture, and how their development has impacted the way we think about writing, privacy, publishing, intellectual property, and the creative process. Students will develop an understanding of what Bolter calls the “late of age print” and how the innovation of the web contributes to what he calls the “remediation of writing.” Students will apply this understanding when designing and creating original content for the Web.
You will also get to create and publish a few things-- your very own website to be used for professional purposes, a revised entry for Wikipedia, several wiki postings to our class and other wikis, and a major website or site re-design done collaboratively with your peers. Sounds, fun, right? Of course this task requires students to understand both genre conventions and basic design principles while also developing technical skills. You will learn a variety of skills in the following major areas: Web Savvy, Collaboration, Technology and Technical Skills, Rhetorical Sophistication, and Written Expression (see course strands below for more details). In short, this class will prepare you to write for real audiences. It will also give you the technical tools and rhetorical sophistication to assess and respond to audience needs when designing and writing. We have ambitious goals, but your writing and design will improve as a result. And hopefully we’ll have some fun in the process. And don’t worry if you’ve never done any of this before, you can read my statement on technology and pedagogy to learn about how this former technophobe got seduced by technology and you can check out my teaching philosophy to learn what I think about college education and my role in helping you get one!
Assignments:
There will be three types of written assignments for this class. All percentages are advisory, see grading below.
1) Writing and Design (There are three major written assignments for a total of 50% of your grade):
a) a rhetorical analysis of a website (15%)
b)
an original Photoshop creation that represents yourself (15%)
c) the development of an original website or site redesign for an outside organization. (20%)
2) A semester long wiki project (20%) that enables you to practice and hone the writing and technical skills you will need for your major writing and design assignments. It will also allow you to develop familiarity and fluency with a variety of web genres.
3) A professional portfolio (20%) (developed as part of your Learning Record) which includes a selected portfolio of the work you produce for this class. It will demonstrate your progress and success as a writer, designer, and aspiring technical guru and showcase your best work. You will turn in a mid-term and final portfolio, which includes evidence from a variety of class materials
Attendance and the completion of all class activities (10%)
(including peer reviews/critiques, any in-class or homework, and your observations)
Textbooks
Faigley's The Brief Penguin Handbook, 2nd edition
Jay David Bolter’s Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print.
Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web Design.
Optional:
Richard Lanham’s Revising Prose and Lawrence
Lessig's Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity
(This text is available online for free, but I strongly recommend you purchase a copy so you can highlight, mark-up, and do whatever it takes to the physical text to better understand it.).
You should be able to find any of these secondhand for a relative pittance either at the RPI bookstore, or online at www.amazon.com or www.powells.com or ebay or wherever.
Hint: You can even write about your experiences buying online as part of your wiki project—two birds, one stone, right?
Grading
Grades in this course are determined on the basis of a Learning Record Online, which accompanies a portfolio of work presented both at the mid-term and at end of term. These portfolios present a selection of your work, both formal and informal, plus ongoing observations about your learning, and an analysis of your work development across five dimensions of learning: confidence and independence, knowledge and understanding, skills and strategies, use of prior and emerging experience, and reflectiveness. This development centers on the major strands of work in the course:web savvy, collaboration, technology and technical skills, rhetorical sophistication, and written expression.The criteria for grades are posted at the Learning Record portion of our class site.
Grades in our class are loosely based on a 1000 point scale. The suggested point breakdowns are available on the detailed inscructions for each assignment. However, since you will ultimately be making a case for your progress at the mid-term and the final, the final percentages and point values will be something you argue for. You will make a self-evaluation of your work to be turned in along with each of your assignments. You will evaluate your work based on the Grading Criteria and the explicit criteria articulated on the assignment or determined by the class. I will respond to your self-assessment in my comments to your work.
Please note, because we are using the portfolio system, you will only receive a formal "Grade" from me at the mid-term and at the end of term. You will receive an advisory letter grade on the first assignment, so we can be clear about where the "bar" is, but other than that you will receive only comments from me, except on the mid-term and final Learning portfolios. Of course, you are always welcome to come talk to me if you are concerned, but part of the reason I use the Learning Record is so you can be more active and involved in the evaluation process.
In order for you to fully contribute to both the workshops and class discussions, it is important that you are not only physically but also mentally present in class. I expect you will have come to class prepared to discuss the reading that was assigned. You also will need to complete all assignments on time.
Late Work
All assigned work, including informal writing, workshops, proposals, rough drafts, finished projects, peer critiques, the midterm LRO and final LRO must be completed and submitted on time to receive a passing grade in this course. If you cannot attend class on the date an assignment is due, arrange to have a classmate or friend drop it off during scheduled class time. There is no makeup of in-class work.
Since we are on a tight schedule and each assignment builds on the skills learned in the prior ones, it is essential that you complete all work on time. In principle, I do not accept late work—at all. I also recognize that sometimes crappy and unforeseeable things happen—people die or you have a car accident, or an act of the “forces that be” intervene. In those circumstances, or others that you persuade me are equally dire, I may consider accepting your work late, but I reserve the right to reduce the grade as a consequence (in general, I will reduce your final grade for the course by one letter grade for every 3 assignments turned in late), and the bottom line is essentially that “no late work will be accepted.”
Attendance
This course is a discussion, workshop, writing, and technical class and your presence is needed. Please be punctual, attend class daily, and participate in all workshopping, editing, revising, and discussion sessions. You are allowed to miss two classes no questions asked (though if work is due that day, it needs to be turned in, even if you aren’t there). Save your absences to use when you are sick, or when you have an emergency. If you find that an unavoidable problem prevents you from attending class, please discuss the problem with me. After your third absence, your participation points will be docked. After four absences, you cannot earn more than a D for the class. After five absences you will automatically fail the course.
If you are late to class, your attendance points will be docked by .50 automatically (even if you have not used your "absences"). Two tardies equals one absence. If you are more than 10 minutes late for class, it will count as an absence (though you should still show up because you won’t want to miss the valuable things that are happening in class).
Format
We will be turning in assignments in a variety of venues. For the most part you will house and maintain your own course-management site in the form of your professional homepage (url). You will turn in all wiki posts to the class wiki and include hyperlinks or screen shots of the experimentation you conduct. When you write and turn in formal writing assignments, they should be typed in MS Word (which comes on your laptops, in 12 point font, Times New Roman. You will turn them in electronically to the class drop-box. Your web assignments will be housed on the server space allotted to you as an RPI student, and you will link to these materials from your homepage.
Computer Stuff and ‘Netiquette”
A note about e-mail: Regardless of how you address your friends, family, or peers, remember that in this class e-mail is an officially recognized mode of communication for class business. It’s an electronic letter and should be treated as such. When you e-mail me, please make sure you include a subject, i.e. “WWWW, Class, Your student,” so I know it’s one of my dear students trying to reach me. In the text of the e-mail itself, be sure to use an opening and closing salutation, i.e. “Dear Dr. Jan:, or “Hi Professor Fernheimer,” and “Sincerely,” or “Thanks.” Most importantly, make sure that you sign your name, so I know to whom I’m responding. This part is especially important if your handle is something like “sugarspice or cooldaddy@hotmail.com.” Of course, if you’ve got a handle like the aforementioned, you probably want to consider opening an official RPI account for class-related correspondence.
A note about our classroom: If I lived in Dr. Janland, we would not be having class meetings in a classroom that looks the way ours does (don’t worry we’ll talk about this design issue in class), but we don’t live in my fantasy world, so we have to deal with reality. Under no circumstances should you be using IM to chat with your neighbor (or your boy/girlfriend, or your friends across the sea, or….you get the idea) while we are having class, unless of course, I’ve specifically asked you to communicate with one another in this way, which I may. I will walk up and down the aisles, mainly because I don’t like to be the only one talking and it will be easier for me to engage you that way, but I will also be doing some mild “big sister” to make sure we’re all on task. It may seem elementary for me to spell things out this way, but when you’re in class I expect you to be “in class,” which means both mentally and physically present.
Also, our class has acoustics that leave a lot to be desired. You will need to use your outside voices to project over the whir of the computers and the gurgling of the air conditioner. We’ll do our best to make it work (and it will work just fine), but you’ll need to be patient and enthusiastic simultaneously. When we are having explicit discussion of the reading material, I may ask you to leave your computer stations and come sit in a circle at the front of the room. If it’s nice and you can stay focused, I will occasionally have us meet outside (consider that an incentive). Consider yourself warned, and you may want to dress accordingly as a consequence (short skirts and kilts may make this task less comfortable).
A Note about Cellphones: I understand they are helpful and useful, but please turn them off or at least to silent during class. Consider yourself warned that this is a pet peave of mine, and recognize it will not do wonders for your ethos as a student in my class if your phone rings. Also, If your phone rings in class you will be responsible for the whole class taking a pop quiz. I’m not a dragon, even if my policy on phones seems draconian, so if you have an emergency (someone is in the hospital or something of that nature of dire consquences), please let me know and then feel free to put your phone on vibrate and step out of class to answer your call.
Backing Up Your Work
Technological failures are bound to occur and you’ll need a back up. If you follow my advice and back up to two places, you’ll be amazingly unbothered when your hard drive crashes or your roommate spills coffee on your laptop. Trust me. You are required to save all work in at least two places: two separate CD-R/RWs, a CD-R/RW and in your public account on the RCS server, your public folder and a jump drive, or any of the above and a copy e-mailed to yourself. Please note that those of you with RPI laptops are entitled to free back-up services up to 8Gs by using the Easy snapshot program.(Not enough to take care of your itunes collection, I realize, but more than enough to keep your files for this and other classes safe).
I strongly recommend that you purchase a jumpdrive to transport files—you can get one with a lot of memory for less than $40 bucks these days. “My computer crashed” is today’s equivalent of “the dog ate my homework” and neither will be accepted as excuses for late or missing work!
Additional Requirements:
Your RPI email account
Your RCS user id (the name that precedes the “@” in your email address) and password.
Your library id (to do research).
Access to Dreamweaver and CS2 (provided in our classroom, Sage 4510).
Access to Microsoft Office.
An HSS-issued password to access the class drop-box remotely, in order to log in to the computers in our classroom.
Computer Use and Availability
Computers are available in the following locations, though as far as I know Sage is one of the few places that has both Macromedia Dreamweaver and Photoshop on the machines.
Plagiarism
The Rensselaer Handbook of Student Rights and Responsibilities describes what constitutes academic dishonesty and what the penalties are. We will be learning proper citation methods in this course, and I will expect you to follow them. You are responsible for making sure you follow proper citation methods, however, for all materials whether or not we explicitly discuss them in class. If you ever have a citation question, please come talk to me. Plagiarism is serious stuff, and I’m always happy to talk with you about citation so that everyone’s ideas are properly credited and cited.
Any material you use from someone else’s work must be appropriately recognized as such or you will be committing an act of plagiarism (regardless of whether you intended to or not). Any time you use someone else’s exact words you must put them in quotation marks. Any time you use someone else’s ideas but express them in your own words, you must provide the name of the author and the page number where you read about them. If you fail to follow proper citation methods, you will put yourself in danger of failing the course.
Collaboration is something we will be doing a lot of in this class. Collaboration differs from collusion, which is an unsanctioned kind of working together that becomes an act of academic dishonesty. I have explicitly asked you to collaborate on the wiki, and that’s fine. Collusion would involve a case where two of you turned in the exact same assignment without acknowledging one another (i.e. it has the same structure, form, and uses the same examples even if the wording is not verbatim). If you have a question about the nature of the collaboration you are engaging in, please come talk to me, BEFORE you turn in your assignment.
My Research
Professors at RPI and other universities have made valuable contributions to research in teaching writing. Some of this work has found its way into research journals and books intended to help improve writing instruction. If you’re interested, you can read some of my own research about the use of blogs in the writing classroom online: “Bridging the Composition Divide" and "Welcome to the Blogosphere." These collaborative projects grew out of the teaching I did in the Computers, Writing, and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. Recently I gave a talk called "Open Soucrce Pedagogy: An Introduction to the Use of Technology in the Writing Classroom" to several groups of writing and language instructors in Israel. Of course, I won’t be offended if they’re not of interest to you, but I did want you to know the research is really happening. As part of my research agenda, I sometimes use student work to write articles about how technology impacts the teaching of writing. To give you a head’s up, I’m particularly curious about how our use of the wiki will turn out.
To continue this research, I ask you to sign the following release:
"All work that you produce for this class and in online class discussions is public and archived for future research. Faculty and graduate students who teach in computer classrooms are conducting on-going research to make writing instruction more effective. These and other researchers may read and quote from these archives. Signing the release is optional, and your anonymity will be protected if your work is selected for use in any research materials. This agreement stipulates that your work for the course, including Internet postings, is in the public domain and may be read and reproduced (edited as appropriate) in future publications by researchers. RPI will not assume responsibility for personal views or any offensive material that you may post to a public forum as a result of your work in this class. Neither will RPI assume responsibility for further distribution of any work that is posted to a public forum."
Students With Disabilities
Upon request RPI provides appropriate academic adjustments for qualified students with disabilities. For more information, contact the Office of the Dean of Students.