Week 15 - Posting 15

In this final blog posting of the semester, I'd like you to reflect on your progress throughout the course. What do you feel you have really improved on within the fifteen weeks? What do you still struggle with? Explain. (Consequently, the answers to these questions can pertain to your writing process, the way you conduct research, organizational skills, critical reading skills, or whatever else you can think of). Lastly, provide a suggestion or several suggestions for how the class could be conducted more efficiently in the future. Is there an assignment you think could be reworked? Would you have benefited from more conferences? Less conferences? Etc. etc.

Week 14 - Posting 14

For this week, I'd like to give you folks the opportunity to do some more pre-writing for your portfolio reflections. So, pick ONE of the following questions to answer: What strategies did you develop to analyze the data for your mini-ethnography? What is your favorite piece of data (or data source) and why? (i.e. people you interviewed, observations you made, academic sources you read, etc). What do you feel is the best piece of writing you've done in the class (Exploring Subcultures, Annotated Bibliography, Research Proposal w/Literature Review, or Mini-Ethnography) and why?

Week 13 - Posting 13

As I've mentioned to several of you during the conferences, the mini-ethography will essentially be you (the researcher) telling the reader the story of the your subculture using your personal voice, the voices of your informants, research, etc. So, to practice doing this, tell the story of your most significant experience as a fieldworker observing one of your fieldsites. Make sure to use sensory details/descriptions, balance your voice with the voices of your informants, and try to see if you can bring in some points from the research you've done to supplement what you're saying. Good luck and have fun with this.

Week 12 - Posting 12

What is your understanding of the word "rhetoric?" What is your definition? What do you think constitutes rhetoric (is it our appearance, the way we dress, the things we say, the way we act, etc.)? Where do you hear the word rhetoric being commonly used in American society? Is its use generally in a positive or a negative context? Do you think there might be a rhetoric that coincides with your subculture? If so, what is it? How might you utilize rhetoric in constructing your mini-ethnography or your final portfolio?

Week 11 - Posting 11

Way back in week one I asked you folks to discuss a paper you had written for a previous class and your writing process. Now, in week eleven, I'd like to hear about your writing process again. Has your writing process changed since we started this course? If so, how? Did any particular assignments give you trouble (both in terms of the type of assignment and how it might have conflicted with your specific writing process)? Were any assignments unexpectedly easy? And now, the million dollar (somewhat philosophical) question: Why do you write (aside from it's a requirement of this class and higher education in general)? What role does writing play in your life? What role do you think writing will play in your future (in terms of a career, family, etc.)?

Presentations

Students,

The presentations from Thursday, March 26th are posted on Blackboard under "Course Documents."

D.

Group Multimodal Mini-Project

Students,

Just to reiterate some points during class:

You and your group members are required to compose a collaborative multimodal document (one which incorporates any combination of words, images, videos, multimedia, etc.) for the purpose of generating discussion and instructing the class on how to formulate a research question and how to write a literature review. You can choose to emphasize either the research question or the literature review...it's up to you and your group (Don't forget, we also had this reading for formulating a research question: http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/researchroom/question/).

Again, I realize I'm giving you a very short amount of time to do this, so I'm not expecting anything dazzling here, but you should try to make your creation presentable. Some possible multimodal documents include, but are not limited to:

• A PowerPoint presentation
• A digital poster (http://www.glogster.com/)
• A digital newsletter (http://letterpop.com/)
• A small webpage (http://www.weebly.com)
• A short video

By giving you folks the opportunity to work together and teach the class, I think that you will learn more about what is required for your Research Proposal (plus, it's more fun than just hearing me talk). We will spend most (if not all) of Thursday's class finishing up these little projects and presenting them to each other. Finally, if you don't get to the other readings assigned in the textbook, that's okay (just try to catch-up on them over the weekend).

I'm looking forward to seeing that you folks come up with!

D.