the course blog for composition 302 at Colorado State University

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I will be holding one final web help session tomorrow (Monday, May 10) from 6:00 – 7:30 pm in our regular classroom (Eddy 4). Note that this is a slightly later time than our previous help sessions. If you cannot make the help session and need assistance with your site, let me know and we can set up an appointment earlier in the day.

Here is a final bit of interesting information for those of you who are not burnt out on thinking about technology. This week’s On the Media had two interesting stories. The first is about ROFLcon, a conference about internet memes and why they go viral (keyboard cat, David after Dentist, etc), and the second is about copyright and the Hitler internet meme—all those video parodies that take a clip from the film The Downfall where Hitler is ranting about something in German and add subtitles that have him ranting about all sorts of things such as losing his house in the mortgage crisis. The third clip is a related story about whether or not it is disrespectful to victims of the holocaust to make Hitler humorous.

Here is a reminder about what needs to be accomplished the last day of class and then during our final exam time on Tuesday, May 11 at 3:40 pm.

First, a few things to remember:

• I am holding evening web help sessions today (right now actually, but no one’s here. sigh.) and Thursday from 5:30-7:00 pm. If you would like me to schedule a help session or extra office hours for Monday of finals week, let me know in class on Thursday.
• If you are having any problems working together as a group for the I&A project, please send me an email to let me know the nature of the problem and what I can do to help.

Our last class:

• Turn in all all required element of the I&A project:
  • The final analysis, including a discussion of what you discovered through your primary research. Please provide links to or copies of surveys, etc. See the I&A project page for more details on the analysis paper. (hard copy)
  • promotional materials (hard copy if appropriate, URLs if materials are online.–e.g., a Facebook group)
  • evidence of promotional materials distribution (photos uploaded to your Writing Studio group file folder, clearly labeled “distribution evidence.”
  • All previous commented on hard copy materials: group annotated bibliography and research summary, storyboards, design plans.
  • electronic copies of ALL documents uploaded to your Writing Studio group file folder

Our final exam time:

• There is no exam, but you will have the full two hours to complete your personal website project. You will need to submit the following (see the personal website assignment page for more details):
  • mood board
  • original design plan
  • all original storyboards
  • draft analysis paper
  • final version of your site uploaded to our class server space.
  • 3-4 page analysis of the process (hard copy)
• The course evaluation: if you are finished with your website, you only need to stay for 10-15 minutes to turn in your materials and complete the  course evaluations. If you are not finished you can use up to the two-hour time period to finish your site and then complete the course evaluation.

Finally, for fun here is Jon Stewart busting Apple for its facist reaction to the “theft” of its prototype iPhone. Enjoy.

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.

I created folders in the Writing Studio for our audio activity. When you visit our class page, click on “dropbox” and upload y0ur file in the “Audacity Activity 1” folder. If that folder is full, use the “Audacity Activity 2″ folder.  Upload your audio file as a “.mp3″ file NOT a “.aup” file.

Audacity Tips
Remember that your audio file needs to be 5MB or smaller in order to upload in the Writing Studio and it must 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 it’s too large, 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 to hit the 5MB mark you need to upload.

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.

I wanted to remind everyone about the personal website draft, which is due tomorrow (Tuesday, April 6). As I said in class on Thursday, we are being flexible about this due date because everyone is at a different stage in learning Dreamweaver, HTML, and CSS. I will accept drafts through the end of this week’s Thursday evening help session (see below for details).

At the very least you should come to class tomorrow with a draft of the website “copy” (the written text—resume, biography, etc.) that you will use on each page of your site. If you do not have any pages built yet, bring your text as a word document on your flash drive. In class tomorrow, we will continue to work on our sites, and I will show you how to upload your draft site to our course web server.

Do not forget about the draft reflection paper! (see the assignment page for details)

Three important things for this week:

• If you do not want your site to go live at the draft stage you can burn your site folder onto a CD and turn it in that way.
• Tomorrow before class I will create a subdomain for each of you to use for your website. I will use your full first and last name for your subdomain unless you email me to tell me that you would like something else. My subdomain would look like this: <http://carrielamanna.writingonlineatcsu.net> Yours will have your name, of course. If you have your own server space and do not need a subdomain, email me to let me know.
• I will hold evening web design help sessions Tuesday and Thursday this week from 5:30-7:00 pm in our classroom (Eddy 2). I will accept website drafts through the end of the Thursday work session so that those who want to get more help before submitting a draft can do so.

It has been brought to my attention that several of you have questions about how to construct your website storyboards. My guess is that folks are making them more complicated than they really are (the hard part is building your site!:)). You are drawing a sketch of each page in your website as you would like it to look. Then, you are listing the elements that will make up the page. For example if you are including a head-shot photo of yourself on the page, under “images” you would write something like “head shot photo of myself” and any other details you know about it (black & white, JPG format, etc.). If you will have significant text on the page, under “text” you might write “academic biography, about 300 words.” That’s all there is to it.

We can talk more about the storyboards in class tomorrow, and if you need more time to finish them we can work that out too. So, bring your questions and your colored pencils to class!

I also wanted to give you an update on grades. As I am working my way through the manifestos and updating the gradebook, it doesn’t look like anyone who has turned in the poster and manifesto and been keeping up with the blogging is in danger of falling below a C in the course at this point. I have been unable to finish all of the grading that I wanted to over the break due to a wrist injury that limits my ability to write and type. (this is the most I’ve been able to write all day.) I have tendonitis in my wrist and thumb and have to see a special physical therapist to get treatment and a custom splint. According to the doctor, “Hopefully we caught it in time and won’t have to do surgery.” Yikes! I can work, but have to take lots of breaks to rest and ice my wrist, so everything is taking a lot longer than planned. If you have specific questions about your grade, email me and we can discuss. Otherwise, I’ll be returning graded work slowly this week.

An now I am off to find my ice pack…

First, I want to thank you all for sticking with me through the HTML and CSS explanations this week. I know not everyone finds code fascinating like I do. After the break we will learn how to use Dreamweaver to build our websites, and you will be glad that you learned a little bit of code once you start your work. Really.

So… do check out the W3Schools web tutorials over break. They are clearly written and give you easy hands on practice with HTML and CSS.

Finally, make sure that your revised technology manifesto is published as a page on your blog and let me know if you have any questions about the storyboard step in the personal website project. You can print the template and draw your storyboards by hand or adapt it to complete your storyboards electronically if you prefer. Either way is fine. Just make sure your storyboards are in color and that you use the space provided to clearly explain all the elements that will be included on each page of your website (text, images, video, audio, etc.). And make sure to title each page so that its purpose is clear.

Oh, and no blog posts next week.

As always, post a comment here if you have a question about anything discussed in this post!

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 posters. I will collect hard copies. You will upload a back-up to the Writing Studio dropbox. Don’t forget to make sure your reflection is posted in the Writing Studio forum.
2. turn in website design plans and mod boards
3. comment on a classmate’s blog
4. finish discussing the requirements for the personal website assignment
5. practicing HTML coding using the program Notepad on the computers and this sample file: HTML_examples.doc.

Below are examples of academic web pages that we will use in class today during our discussion of Patricia Sullivan’s article “Practicing safe visual rhetoric on the World Wide Web.”

Cynthia Selfe (university template)
Gail E. Hawisher (university template)
Lisa Langstraat (university template)
Anne Frances Wysocki (university template)
Katherine Gossett
Derek Van Ittersum
Spencer Schaffner
Danielle Nicole DeVoss
Douglas Eyman
Janine Solberg
Carrie A. Lamanna
Ryan Griffis
Deke Weaver
Joseph Squier

Here’s an update/reminder about a few things we talked about in class Thursday. Leave a comment if you have any questions!

• we changed the due date for the revised manifestos to Thursday, March 11, which is the last class before spring break.
• the three Photoshop tutorials are due by class time tomorrow (3/2). If you run into any problems completing the tutorials, bring your questions and your Photoshop files to class tomorrow and Joe and I will help you troubleshoot so you can successfully complete them. Remember to put your name on your image file when you put it in the Writing Studio dropbox so know who it belongs to!
• remember to email your blog questions to Joe. He will answer your question in person during the next class session.
• we will spend all of class time tomorrow on the poster assignment. Bring your Nondesigner’s Design Book to class as it will be helpful in working on the assignment.

See you all tomorrow!