Author: David

Schedule shuffling

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A photo of a train schedule board.

Note that I rearranged the schedule slightly today. Since we had a snow day on Wednesday and discussed the projects today, I moved Wednesday’s reading to Monday. If you completed the reading for the class that was canceled, then all you need to do this weekend is work on your Sunday Funnies map and think about revising your Persepolis project. Other readings over the next couple of weeks shuffled around slightly, so make sure you check the schedule.

Over spring break, the only reading you’ll need to do is one chapter of Fun Home. You will need to revise your tracing project and you might start to think ahead toward how you’ll tackle mapping Fun Home as well.

 

(image credit: “Train Schedule” by Flickr user Q Family)

Sunday Funnies 5: Mapping Tracing Persepolis

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Map of Iran with diagram of places visited

Due: 2/29

For this week’s Sunday Funnies project, you will make a map of one of your peer’s Tracing Persepolis projects.

  • First, go this spreadsheet and add your name in the right-hand column next to the student project that you will map. By the end of tonight, every student on the left-hand column should have one and only student signed up to map their project in the right-hand column.
  • Find the student’s post in the course feed, read that student’s statement about his or her goals for the project, and follow the link posted to the splash page. Read carefully through the pages and subpages that make up the project and think about the claims this student makes.
  • Draw a map, or a diagram, that visually represents the project as a whole. You can draw your map by hand and then scan it to include in your post, but I encourage you to think about using mind mapping software (like bubbl.us, text2mindmap, or XMind) to create your diagram. Part of the purpose of your diagram is to create a reverse outline ((Here is a handout on reverse outlining. It does not apply exactly, because it assumes a linear, thesis-driven argumentative essay, which is not exactly what you are doing with the Tracing Persepolis pojects. However, the basic outline for how reverse outlining works are still applicable.)) of your peer’s argument, so one component of your map should be to include a list of the main ideas for each page of the project. Try to also represent the ways in which the different pages relate to each other (especially if they are internally hyperlinked to each other, represent the paths of those hyperlinks as best you can).

Your primary purpose with this Sunday Funnies assignment is to create a visualization that will help your classmate to see his or her argument as clearly as possible so that opportunities for revision become clear. Your peer should be able to hold your visualization up against his or her project and use it as a tool to ask whether the argument is laid out as clearly as possible, whether claims are fully supported, whether there are additional points to pursue from here, and whether the argument is convincing. (You do not need to answer any of those questions for them, but your visualization should help them to answer those questions for themselves.)

Your secondary purpose is to better understand how your peer has shaped this project with an eye towards better understanding and revising your own argument. Hopefully, in the process of mapping out a peer’s project, you will identify aspect of your own argument that you might think about differently.

(image credit: “My trip to Iran” by Flickr user Örlygur Hnefill)

 

Citations, Pages, Post…

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A photograph of a book with post it flags stuck in its pages.

Citations

Where applicable, use MLA Formatting and Style principles in your writing for this class. Obviously, you should not worry about such issues as headers and margins and the other stylistic requirements that apply to the printed page, but when you quote sources, use the MLA in-text citation guidelines just as you would if you were writing a traditional paper.

If the only source you are quoting from in your tracing project is Persepolis, you do not need a Works Cited page for this project, but you should have an MLA citation for the text on your splash page. ((If you want to include that citation as a footnote, you might install a plug-in called Civil Footnotes.))

If you have relied on other sources in your project and they are not online, then you should include an MLA citation for those sources as well. If you have relied on online resources in your project, link internally to that work as you do so and include an MLA citation for those sources.

Pages

Once again, all of the Tracing Persepolis project should exist on your site as pages, with a splash page and then a series of subpages underneath that page. The splash page and subpages should be included as menu items on your site for the class.

Post

After you are entirely finished with your project, by midnight tonight, write a blog post that includes a link to the splash page for your project. This blog post will syndicate to the course feed and will serve as mechanism by which you “turn in” this project. Besides the link to the splash page, you should also link to the assignment page. Tag your post “tracing persepolis” and with any other tags you want.

I also want you to write a paragraph or two of reflection in that post–explain what your main goals for the project were, what you found challenging about meeting those goals, and how you attempted to solve those challenges.

 

(image credit: “231 by Flickr user Jay Peg)

Down the Graphic Novel Rabbit Hole

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A friend of mine, who teaches a senior-level course on comics and graphic novels at Georgia State, was at the ELI conference with me this week and showed me a video one of his students made comparing comics and film:

“Down the Graphic Novel Rabbit Hole We Go” by Andrew Lee:

This video is grounded in a response to a few pages from Scott McCloud‘s Understanding Comics, wherein McCloud grapples with the initial difficulty of even deciding exactly what we mean when we call something a “comic” or “sequential art.” Here are those few pages from the first chapter of the book:

Visual Notes from My Conference Session

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Derek Bruff attended the panel where my colleagues and I presented about Domain of One’s Own at Educause Learning Initiative and posted these sketchnotes about the session to Twitter. As far as I can tell, he took them in real time while we spoke and he captured the essence of what we talked about. As you can see, there’s a fair amount of text still, but with just a little bit of doodling and diagramming, he’s sketched out relationships and concepts instead of writing out lots of words.

I retweeted the heck out of this image, to be honest. Being able to give people a sense of our entire panel in a single image is a real gift Derek offered to us by tweeting it out.

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