ENGL 4180/5180: Capstone Project in Electronic Rhetoric
Fall 2013M C Morgan
Timeline
- Week 1 - 3: Design of project, with required readings in background research
- Week 3: Draft of project proposal due
- Week 4: Revisions to proposal
- Week 5 - 8: Project proceeds
- Week 8: Mid-term project report due
- Week 9 - 14: Project proceeds
- Week 15: Final project report due
Description
Student and instructor will design a research or production project in Electronic Rhetoric or Writing, drawing on principles and practices studied in ENGL 3177/5177, ENGL 3179/5179, and ENGL 4169/5179.The project should take 10 weeks to complete. Artifacts must include
- a 3 - 5 page project proposal, plus a preliminary bibliography of readings and materials
- a 3 - 5 page mid-term project report
- a final project report, including an annotated bibliography of materials.
The project materials and artifacts may include
- daily or regular blog- or micro-blog posts
- concept maps, Prezi slides, timelines, diagrams, graphic strips, animations …
- video or audio products
- a dataset and analyses
- a website, wiki, or CMS content, as appropriate
- ...
The instructor may select assigned readings and materials in electronic and traditional rhetorical theory and/or method appropriate to the project. The student will collect further readings and materials appropriate to the project.
All products will be published online in appropriate modes and formats, preferably on the student’s managed site (weblog, wiki, or CMS), or set of sites.
Projects can be traditional, research-based investigations using primary sources and resulting in a PDF report. Results and artifacts will be posted to open web spaces for access by others. Students will be encouraged to make use of web-based, social networking, and social media-based tools for both their research work and delivery, and to produce multi-modal products.
Appropriate projects will focus on the principles and practices of electronic rhetoric, and must be collected and produced for the project. Some pre-existing material may be re-purposed, but the majority of the work must be new.
Projects can be investigative or experimental. Some examples:
- Enrollment in a massive open online course, and production of materials for that course
- Development of 20 - 30 page topic-driven website or wiki focused on rhetorical analysis.
- An extended rhetorical study of a genre, mode, or type of online interaction; for instance, the creation of presence in Twitter; or integration of word and image on a university website; ethical and non-ethical uses of Flickr for marketing.
- A set of analytical or scholarly weblog posts dealing with of electronic rhetoric, its manifestations, situations, or adaptations.
- A development of a hypertextual hand-list of rhetorical figures in Twitter
Inappropriate projects:
- a MN ePortfolio, or artist’s portfolio
- a commercial website
- materials created for use behind a walled garden
- a creative-writing based project such as poems, short stories, memoir, or films or audio sets that do not deal with electronic rhetoric, its manifestations, situations, or adaptations.
- a website, wiki or weblog that simply re-post pre-composed material; that is, no anthologies or collections of already-produced materials.
