Writing Online

As I have explained in class, you have two remaining opportunities to raise your grade:

1. Web 2.0 research project: revise posts 3 and/or 4 of the annotated bibliography portion of the project
2. Independent project revision: revise either the copyright paper, or the personal website, or the sound project

Below are the details you need for each opportunity.

Web 2.0 research project

Revisions must be posted by the start of class, Tuesday, December 7

You will receive your annotation comments via email and at that time can decide whether or not to revise one or both of the annotations (you may revise annotations 3 and/or 4). If you think it will take you more than an hour to revise an annotation, it may not be a good use of your time. Look carefully at your grade on the project and do the necessary math to see if revising will significantly raise your grade.

If you decide to revise, you must do the following:

1. print out the annotation(s) before you revise and give them to me in class Tuesday. I must have the original annotation in order to evaluate your revision.
2. revise your annotation post(s) by the deadline above using my comments as a guide. I am happy to answer any questions you have and read revision drafts if you send them to me by the end of the day Sunday.

Independent project revision

Revisions must be submitted by 5:00 pm Wednesday, December 15 (you may submit your revision early if you wish)

No matter which project you are revising, you must schedule a meeting with me to discuss your revisions during the last week of class. I have a meeting sign-up sheet available in class this week. Below are details for revising each project.

The copyright paper: you must turn in your original paper with my comments along with your revised paper. Both must be submitted in hard copy. I will be in my office Wednesday, December 15 from noon to 5:00 to collect revisions.

The personal website: You must have all your revisions uploaded to the server by the deadline. You must also submit a list of exactly what you have changed on each page of your site so I know what I am reevaluating. When listing your changes, you must provide a brief (1-3 sentence) explanation of why you made the change. Some changes will be obvious (fixing typos and items that did not load or display correctly) but other changes (changing a color palette or menu structure) will require explanation that refers back to your design plan (audience, purpose, and context). Your revision explanation document must be submitted in hard copy. I will be in my office Wednesday, December 15 from noon to 5:00 to collect these.

The sound project: You must have your revised audio uploaded to your personal website by the deadline. You must also turn in a copy of the original audio. I should be able to download your original audio from your website at our revision meeting, but if I cannot you must provide me with the original mp3 by the revision deadline. You must also submit a written document (up to one page) detailing the changes you made and why. This document must be submitted in hard copy. I will be in my office Wednesday, December 15 from noon to 5:00 to collect these documents.

You may have noticed that I was a bit befuddled in class last week when as we were going over the blog reflection requirements I saw that the due date on the assignment page said that it was due this Thursday. That is because the assignment page says Thursday, November 16th, and the 16th is actually tomorrow, Tuesday. Our daily schedule correctly had the blog reflections listed as due tomorrow. I have corrected the assignment page.

All that said, I will honor what I said in class an accept the blog reflections on Thursday, November 18 without a late penalty; however, given that your website revisions and sound projects are due Thursday, it is in your best interests to turn in your blog reflections tomorrow if possible and get that assignment off of your plates.

Below is a summary of what is due this week so that you can go away for Thanksgiving with the everything completed except for the final project.

Tuesday, 11/16
Blog reflections (I will also accept these Thursday without penalty due to my error.)

Thursday, 11/18
Personal website revisions and reflective analysis
Sound argument project and reflective analysis

___________________________________________________________________________________

Remember that I will be available at the following times this week to assist you with your website revisions and sound projects:

Monday
5:00-8:00 pm: lab open
5:00-6:00 pm: I will be in the lab to assist during this time and at 7:00 I  will check in with folks who stay later to continue working.

Tuesday
3:15-4:15 pm

Wednesday
5:30-7:30 pm

Thursday
3:15-4:15 pm

As promised here are the times that I will be available in our computer classroom next week so that you can receive help with your website and sound projects.

Monday
5:00-8:00 pm: lab open
5:00-6:00 pm: I will be in the lab to assist during this time and at 7:00 I  will check in with folks who stay later to continue working.

Tuesday
3:15-4:15 pm

Wednesday
5:30-7:30 pm

Thursday
3:15-4:15 pm

This is a reminder that in class Thursday you will continue to work on your information and advocacy campaign project. If you were absent today it is crucial that you be in class Thursday so that you are able to participate in your group’s project design.

Today you turned in rough design plans, and I will provide each group with feedback on those design plans Thursday so that you can further refine them if necessary and begin work on your website storyboards.

At the end of class, John asked me an important question about my reference to “research questions” in the design plan section of the assignment page. I went back and reread that section and realized that I did not explain that adequately. I revise this assignment each semester, and I apologize that I did not update that section correctly. I have revised the paragraph to read as follows:

During class your group will compose your design plan (see below). Next you will write up four or five research questions. You will revisit the research you completed in Unit 1 and decide what additional information your group needs to gather in order to effectively make your argument. For example, if part of your argument is that teenagers spend too much time online and that it is detrimental to their long-term academic success, you may determine that you need to know more about how much time teenagers spend online each day. So your research question might be: how much time does the average U.S. teenager spend online and are their particular subgroups of teenagers that spend more time online than others? Is there research that supports our claim that the amount of time teenagers spend online has a negative effect on their academic success? Each group member will take a research question and find additional sources that will answer that question. You will discuss your research questions in the reflective analysis.

So, after completing your design plan and initial storyboards, your group will compose the research questions, gather the information necessary to answer them, and begin composing the textual portions of your argument.

Here is a story from NPR’s All Things Considered about an egregious violation of copyright on the internet.

Cooks Source, Copyright And Public Domain
Cooks Source, a Massachusetts-based food magazine, recently published a story about apple pie. Problem was the story was copied and re-edited from the Web without the author’s knowledge. The editor of Cooks Source says “the Web is considered public domain.” For more on the legal issues here, NPR’s Melissa Block talks to intellectual property lawyer Margaret Esquenet.

Today I will walk you through the basic steps of using the sound editing program Audacity. To prepare for the in-class activity, please download the following sound files to the computer you are using. These are the sounds you will remix in Audacity to create a unique 10-30 second audio file. You can also visit the website Freesound to get more audio clips if you like.

Door slamming

siren

wind and rainthunder

whispering in Spanish

woman speaking in Dutch with answering machine beep

scary voice

children in a store

“angels”

To learn how to use the program, you will watch the following tutorial video. I will walk you through this process and answer any questions you have. I will also show you how to upload the sound remix that you create during class to the Writing Studio so that I can hear what you have created.

Audacity Tips
Remember that your final audio file needs to be in the correct file format: “.mp3″ or “.wav”. Mp3 is the best file format for most online spaces because it creates a smaller file that loads faster. So, export your file from Audacity as an Mp3 and check the file size. If you think it’s too large after exporting, go to the “preferences” section of Audacity, choose the “file formats” tab and lower the “bit rate” under “MP3 Export Setup.” Now, export again; the file should be smaller this time. Continue to lower the bit rate and export until the file is the appropriate size. Lowering the bit rate also lowers the quality of the audio file, so only lower it as much as necessary for the file to load in less than a minute on your website.

When working in Audacity, exporting as an Mp3 will not affect your original Audacity file. However, if you make a “quick mix” before exporting (this collapses all your separate audio tracks into one track) and save it, you are changing the Audacity file itself in a way that will make it really difficult to do further editing. The best thing to do when you are ready to start quick mixing and exporting is to open your Audacity project, choose “save as” and save it under a new name. This way, if you accidentally alter the Audacity file in a way you don’t want to during the exporting process, you can go back to the original. When you begin work on your formal audio project it is good practice to start each work session by doing a “save as.” This way, if something goes wrong you won’t have to start over from scratch—at worst you will lose only a few hours of work.

Also remember that Audacity saves your project in two parts: a “.aup” file and a “data folder.” You need both of these files/folders in order to open and work with your Audacity project. So, if you are working at home and then bringing your project to class to continue working, make sure to bring both with you. The two files will look something like this:

Finally, Audacity often creates a backup file with the extension “.bak”.Never, never open this file or use it in any way. Doing so could corrupt your project files making them impossible to open!

Portable Applications
If you want to get Audacity for portable use on your USB flash drive, you can get the portable applications from the network drives in Eddy 300, 2, and 4. Go to one of these rooms, click “My Computer” and then on the network drive, and then on the folder “Portable Apps.” Drag the Audacity folder to your disk or USB flash drive. You can then run the program from your disk or USB drive on any computer without needing to put the program on the computer itself.

Just a reminder that you have two small assignments due on Thursday:

1. The sound analysis
2. The design plan for your audio argument project

On Thursday we will be looking at a few more sound examples and learning how to use the audio editing program Audacity. If you have no experience working with audio it is critical that you be in class to learn this program. Please bring headphones to class Thursday if you have them! Our classroom computers do not have speakers. I have three or four pairs of headphones that folks can borrow, but not enough for the whole class. I will bring the audio recorders to class for you to check out, so if you want to work on your project over the weekend and don’t have any other way to record audio, you will need to get a recorder.

I also want to clarify the most important parts of the sound project so that you can take them into consideration as you write your design plan:

• You will use the same topic as you did for your poster. Your topic will be the same, but the purpose, audience, and context can be different. For example, if your topic was bicycle safety and the poster was aimed at college students riding their bikes to campus and the purpose was to persuade them to follow the traffic rules so they don’t get hit by a car, your sound project could be aimed at all commute cyclists in Fort Collins and the purpose could be to persuade them to wear helmets.
• You must use more than one form of sound as categorized in McKee’s article “Sound Matters” (i.e., the project cannot be all music, all sound effects, etc.)
• The project must be 1-3 minutes in length—no more, no less.
• The project must persuade your audience to take some form of action on the issue
• The project must fulfill the rhetorical objectives you outline in your design plan.
• You will have more space to include information in the sound project than you did in the poster, so you might consider interviewing someone that can provide an outside voice (literally and figuratively) to your piece. You do not have to include and interview, but if you do please review the interview tips on the assignment page.

Finally, here is a fun video about the “new” technology of the book. A medieval monk calls the help desk because he can’t figure out how to use the new book that is in his office.

I have published the Unit three schedule, which I hope you will find refreshingly simple. I also wanted to clarify what the due dates are for the personal website project (this is especially important if you were not in class Tuesday!):

As I explained in class, my “evil plan” in order to get you all to jump into the website project with both feet was to have a quick due date (tomorrow, 11/28), and you will still need to have your website ready to upload to your server space tomorrow (I will show you how to do this in class), but you will have the next two weeks to revise it before I assign a final grade. The reflective analysis is now due on the day the revised website is due. So the new schedule is as follows:

• Thursday, 11/28: website draft uploaded to your class server space. I will review all the drafts and provide you with suggestions for revision.
• Thursday, 11/18: final revised website and reflective analysis due. This is the same day that the sound project is due. You will have the entire class period to finish the sound project, your website revisions and add your sound project to your website portfolio.

The plan for today is code, code, code.

We will learn how to do a little bit of old-fashioned HTML coding so that when you learn to use Dreamweaver, you will understand the basics of the code that the program is writing for you. Think of computer code as a foreign language: our goal is to develop basic reading and grammar knowledge of the code, and not necessarily the ability to do advanced composing in the the language.

So, here is the order of business:

1. turn in website design plans, storyboards, and website analyses.
2. practicing HTML coding using the program Notepad on the computers and this sample file: HTML_examples.doc.
3. discuss the Lynda.com Dreamweaver tutorials that you will complete over the weekend