Just a reminder about something you all hopefully already know: time for our class ends on Monday at 5 pm Michigan time! Make sure everything is wrapped up!
And if you are already done for the class or if you have other questions, feel free to leave a comment here.
Be sure to watch this video where I describe the “end of time” (which is 5 pm Michigan time on April 30!) for the term:
Monday, April 23, the last day of classes during the regular term:
By the end of time for our class (April 30, 5 PM Michigan time), the following is due:
So, if you have questions or concerns as we head into the end of the class, now is the time to ask!
Just to keep this simple, I’m going to keep the groups for this last part of the individual content strategy assignment. So, here’s how it will work:
Rebecca A.; Steve A.; Paul L.; Marcia L.
Gabe B.; Michelle C.; Shelby N.; Janae B.
Shannon J.; Alyse L.; LaVonne S.
Basically, you want to do the same thing you did before: post links to your content strategy contributions in progress no later than midnight on Wednesday (remember! late projects will be docked a letter grade!) and then comment on each others’ drafts by the end of the day Friday.
And let me also point out that I commented on and graded everyone’s social medial essay project. Visit emuomline and find out what I thought!
This part of the week is really all about getting stuff done. You should be working on the next round of contributions for your content strategy assignment, which will be due on Wednesday! While you’re doing that, I’ll be reading, commenting on, and grading your social media essays. I browsed through them quickly over the weekend and I’m looking forward to getting more into them.
In the meantime, I thought I’d share three “for what its worth” kinds of readings I came across last week. First, there was this article from The Atlantic magazine very relevant for what we’ve been talking about with this unit, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” It’s kind of long to just browse here, but it’s probably a piece I’ll have students read the next time I teach this class.
Second, there’s this entry on the blog boing-boing, “How to blog,” by Rob Beschizza. boing-boing is an extremely popular blog, so Beschizza knows what he’s talking about, and his advice here is really solid. Again, a piece I’ll probably have students read the next time I teach this, and if you’re interested in blogging beyond this class, you too will want to read this.
And last, this brief video about HTML5:
It’s a pretty basic introduction, but since you now know more about HTML5 (even if you, like me, really struggled with that HTML5 Programming book!), you can watch this movie as both a refresher and as evidence that you know a lot more than you might think.
Just a reminder as we are (kind of) heading into the weekend:
We’re heading toward the end of the term here, and (besides finishing the social media essay that’s due this Friday, of course) you should also be wrapping you the HTML5 exercises. Now, I know that most of you are behind on this– I was for quite a while too– and I know that this is a lot more complicated than the HTML and CSS stuff we did in the previous book. But I am expecting you to at least make an honest try at completing these chapters, and, as I think my own descriptions/follow-alongs with the chapters suggest, if that means simply uploading the working exercises in the textbook and linking to them, that’s okay.
Two things to mention for now:
Marcia L. is the one and only graduate student in the course this semester (which is unusual– I usually have 3 or 4 at least in this class), and as part of her “graduate experience,” she needed to complete an interview project. She’s done that and I want to encourage you all to go take a look at it on her web site. It’s an interview with Chris Grindem of The Utmost Group. I think it’s pretty smart stuff, especially the things he has to say about college and university web sites.
One of the things that’s kind of different about the way I set this class up is the last couple weeks of the term are really all about getting everything done. It’s not necessarily an ideal way of doing things, but I don’t really know what alternatives we have. After all, you can’t really write a lot about your experiences with social media without spending some time with it, and you can’t really make stuff on the web in response to the content strategy assignment until you learn a bit about HTML and such. As I’ve mentioned before, this class isn’t so much a sequence, where one thing leads to another and then another, but rather it is more of a web where lots of points are connected.
Writing for the web; get it?
Anyway, where we’re at for this coming week is mostly to get stuff done. After the break, a couple of thoughts on what that might mean.
Sorry this has taken me a little longer than I intended to get into place– it’s a busy time of the year for sure! First, here are the peer review groups for the social media essay, and the pages I’ve set up for each group to do the peer review:
Rebecca A., Gabe B., Shannon J.
Marcia L., Steve A., Michelle C., Paul L.
Alyse L., Janae B., LaVonne S., Shelby N.
Here’s how this will work:
Be sure to finish commenting on each others’ content strategy contributions so far by the end of the day today! But while you’re doing that and as we progress through the rest of this part of the week, I want to draw your attention to a couple of other things you need to do by Wednesday, as I spell out on the schedule.
First, how are those HTML5 Programming chapters treating you? The assignment says you need to be done through chapter 7 by Wednesday. If you get there, that’s awesome, but I can also understand if you’re not quite there yet. But here’s the important thing: you need to at least give these exercises an honest try! It looks like most of you have started with these but still have a ways to go– that’s okay, but try to get a little more caught up soon. And if you haven’t started yet, do! And if you need help with them, ask!
The other thing we need to start talking about is organizing your English 444 wordpress.com portfolio. We haven’t talked much about this– beyond just setting it up in the first place– but this is itself a writing assignment worth 250 points and one that is different from the other assignments. I describe this in the syllabus; read on after the break. Continue reading
