Planning

Unit 3: Remix

Lesson Materials: See below

Lesson Objectives: 1. Introduce the affordances of multimodal composing; 2. Understand how to use Blogs@Baruch.

Connection to Major Paper/Project: This lesson will help you start to analyze the rhetorical situation particular to writing on a website. Hands-on activities will help you better understand assignment criteria and how to accomplish smaller tasks. 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. 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 these elements of a rhetorical situation.

Day One Activities:

  1. Introduction to Assignment 3: remix: Overview.
  2. Key Definitions: Review key definitions in the context of multimodal composing.
  3. What is Multimodality? Video: Watch this short video to learn what multimodal composing is
  4. Website Rhetorical Situation: Using this handout, analyze the rhetorical situation for your website assignment.
  5. Setting up your site with Blogs@Baruch: Your instructor will walk you through setting up your website.
  6. Best Practices for Web Writing: Review and discuss this web writing guide
  7. Additional Resources/Reference: Getting Started with Blogs@Baruch is a PPT presentation by Lindsey Albracht, a Blogs@Baruch specialist, and is useful for quick reference in setting up a new site.

Day Two Activities:

  1. Elements of strong visual design: Using a PPT, we will identify and discuss elements such as font choice and size, color, headings and subheadings. We will look at a sample website by a visual design specialist, Dr. Dan Liddle and discuss.
  2. Workshop websites

Day Three Activities:

  1. Establishing an (Academic) Digital Identity: In this activity we will think about the manner in which we engage, share, promote, and present ourselves online, and how an individual’s digital identity is intricately connected to their overall identity. 1. Read this short article about taking control of your digital identity. Take Notes. 2. Then, Google yourself and take note of what you find. 3. In pairs, you will compare what you found, and then have a discussion as a class.
  2. How to build a resume: We will look at a sample resume for students and a longer CV for an academic, and discuss differences and characteristics.