English 444: Writing for the World Wide Web

I know, a pretty crazy week, but here’s how the schedule for the class describes it:

Due Friday:  Semester of Social Media Project First Progress Report! By Friday, everyone needs to post to their English 444 Portfolio a progress report on this project.  As a part of this 500-750 word update, be sure to name and describe the Social Media(s?) you are participating in.

Three things about this:

• I’m running a little behind myself, so if these brief progress reports aren’t posted until Saturday or so, that’s okay with me.  But I do think it’s important to keep up with it all, so make sure these are in very soon, certainly before the end of the weekend.
• Remember that these can be very short– 500-750 words is 2-3 pages, which is really nothing as far as I’m concerned– and you simply need to explain what social medias you are following and why.
• You need to post these on your wordpress.org site, and that means that pretty soon, you are going to need to figure out a way to organize your site to be a “good” one for the purposes of our class.

Take a look at this video where I give a bit of a pep-talk about the XHTML/CSS exercises. Here’s who has gotten through the first four exercises so far:

• Marcia L. (though it’s 444, not 344!)
• Michelle C.
• Paul E.

Hi everyone–

I’m really sorry about missing the hangouts I said I was going to be at tonight. Long story short: I’m chairing a search committee for a new faculty position in our department, I got completely swamped today, and after I got home late and sat down for dinner, I completely forgot about all of this. Again, not a very good excuse, but my only explanation. Sorry about all that.

So, I tell you what I am going to suggest:

* I will log in now (about 9:40 on Tuesday night), so if you happen to get this message in the next 20 or so minutes, let’s give the hangout thing a shot.

* Tomorrow should work better at least for me, and I have a lot more time when I am going to be around my house and catching up on lost work. So if you email me tomorrow (Wednesday, 1/25) individually between about 10 am and about 5 pm and you want to try to hangout just to see what it is all like, we can make that work. Give me a little bit of time, but I should be able to get online and work with you individually or in small groups.

* I’ll try again to do the group hangout tomorrow night at 9 pm and 10 pm to try and catch anyone who might be missing.

The key thing is I want everyone to try to experience this to see what it’s like and to see how it can work with collaborating with your group, and I also want people to take advantage of this technology to collaborate with your group.

Seem like a deal?

Sorry again about missing this tonight,

–Steve

I’ll be hosting two Google Plus Hangouts tonight tomorrow night, one at 8 pm and one at 9 pm.  What you want to do is connect with me first on Google Plus– do a search for me or try clicking this link here– and do this before tomorrow night.  Then I’ll add you to a circle and you should get a notice from me to join my Hangout.  That might not be as clear as is ideal, but hopefully, it’s clear enough to get you started.

Our “hanging out time” tomorrow will be short, so if you can only make it for 15 or so minutes, that’s fine.  And if you can’t make it at these times, let me know and I’ll try to set up another time yet this week.  The important thing here is I want to make sure that everyone tries this out and gets kind of familiar with it because this is how I think you and your group members should meet!  Or at least some of your group members should meet.  I think trying to coordinate a face to face meeting with everyone is going to be difficult and really unnecessary especially with tools like Google Plus.

I’ll probably email this to everyone too, but it never hurts to pass along announcements in multiple places, right?

• I’ll be out of town this weekend (as a tangent– free wifi at the Wendy’s in terminal B at the Detroit airport– sweet!) and with pretty sketchy internet access until Sunday night.  That shouldn’t be a big deal, but I thought I’d tell you all anyway.
• The make-up of the different content strategy groups are likely to change in the next week!  This is because, basically, students often reconsider taking an online class like this once the realities of it start to sink in.  And that’s fine, by the way– I know it’s nothing personal one way or the other.  But what it means is I might have to shift some of the collaborative teams around since it wouldn’t be very fair for a group of two or three to do the same as a group of five or six.
• It looks like I’ll try to host another Google Plus Hangout on Monday, January 23, at 11 am and then another one or two on Tuesday night.  I originally was going to do this based on group, but that really doesn’t matter much– the idea here is to give it a try so you and your collaborators can use this amongst yourselves.

I have my iPhone so if you want to email me about something, go ahead and I’ll try to get back with you.  Otherwise, keep posting here about this week’s readings, start reading Shirky, and keep working on those exercises.

I emailed this to everyone, but I thought I’d post it here too:

(more under the read more break):

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