Week ahead: 12

A carving of a circular Mayan calendar
12 4/6 Vietnamerica (to p. 225)
4/8 Vietnamerica (to end)
4/10 Writer/Designer chapter 8
4/12 Due: Sunday Funnies 9

This week we’ll finish up Vietnamerica. Down the stretch of the semester, then, you’ll have stuff to write and revise, but you’ll have minimal reading assignments for the last two weeks.

I created a Doodle poll to see if it’s possible to find an alternate time for our final meeting on 4/30, 5/1, or 5/4. Note that the times overlap–just indicate any 2-hour window during those days when you are free. If there’s a time where every single person in the class is available, then we’ll schedule it for then. If not, we’ll stick with the designated time on 5/6.

(image credit: 12-12-12 * Calendario Circular by Flickr user jacinta lluch valero)

Week Ahead: 10!

Painting on street: "101010"
10 3/23 Vietnamerica (to p. 47)
3/25 Vietnamerica (to p. 82)
3/27 Workshop time for Mapping Fun Home.

Writer/Designer chapter 6

3/29 Due: Sunday Funnies 7

This week, you should be working on your Mapping Fun Home projects as we begin reading G.B. Tran’s Vietnamerica.

You’ll have time in class on Friday to work on your projects and to ask questions about them as you progress, so please come to class with your ideas developed. The better your sense of what you’re trying to accomplish, the better your classmates and I will be able to help you to accomplish your goals and to push your ideas further.

As we begin reading Vietnamerica, you might want to check out the trailer for the book.

VIETNAMERICA from Joe Tomcho on Vimeo.

Note that there are page numbers in the book, but only intermittently. It might be worth adding page numbers to your text or using post-it notes so you can find specific pages in class.

(image credit: “10-10-10” by Flickr user woodleywonderworks.)

Week ahead: Ides of March Edition

Marge Simpson looking angry "Beware the Eyes of Marge"

(A version of this post was in the queue on Sunday but I didn’t manage to publish it on time, so now the joke of the feature image is sort of ruined. I’m going with it anyway.)

9 3/16 Fun Home, “The Ideal Husband”
3/18 Due: Completed revision of Tracing Persepolis.
3/20 Fun Home, “The Antihero’s Journey”
3/22 Due: Sunday Funnies 6

Note that I revised the schedule slightly. Since we didn’t really talk about “The Ideal Husband” much in class yesterday, I moved back finishing the book to Friday and moved the revision deadline to tomorrow. We’ll discuss “Ideal Husband” in class tomorrow and then on Friday finish the book. We’ll talk some on each of those days about Mapping Fun Home.

(image credit: “Beware the Eyes of Marge“)

Looking ahead to the fourth week

photo of fireworks over Cinderella's castle at Disney World
4 2/2 Persepolis 135-172 (“The Shabbat” through “Tyrol”)
2/4 Persepolis 173-206 (“Pasta” through “The Horse”)
2/6 Writer/Designer chapter 3

This week we’ll be continuing our discussions of Persepolis on Monday and Wednesday. Be starting to think about which pages you’ll want to trace.

Remember that Cheryl Ball, one of the authors of Writer/Designer, will be on campus this week on Thursday and Friday (2/5 & 2/6) leading discussion and workshops for faculty and grad students around designing and assessing multimodal assignments. She’ll also give a public lecture on Thursday evening, starting at 6:00pm in the Jones Room on the 3rd floor of the library, entitled “The Asymptotic Relationship Between Digital Humanities and Computers and Writing.” I’ll offer extra credit to anyone who attends the lecture and then writes a paragraph or two on your blog about the event–summarize what she spoke about, what you learned, anything you found interesting about the talk. Ball is a very dynamic and fun speaker, and that title is meant to be at least a little bit puzzling and provocative, so you should consider attending if you can.

You do not need to publish a Sunday Funnies assignment this week. However, as we discussed in class Friday, you need to gather data that you’ll use for your personal infographic assignment next week. Track your daily schedule, noting throughout the day the times you spend on the following activities:

  • Sleep
  • Class
  • Study
  • Work
  • Exercise
  • Leisure
  • Other

The more detailed and accurate your notes are, the more you’ll have to work with when you go to visualize that data. You won’t need to show anyone your raw data unless you choose to do so, so for this week just keep as careful track of how you spend your time as you can.

So you can begin to get a sense of what you might do with this data, here are two examples of daily routines infographics:

(image credit: “Happy July 4th” by Flickr user Don Sullivan)

Week 3

the number 3 in different fonts as a collage
3 1/26 Persepolis 33-102 (“The Letter” through “The Key”)
1/28 Persepolis 103-134 (“The Wine” through “Kim Wilde”)
1/30 Writer/Designer chapter 2
2/1 Due: Sunday Funnies 3

I hope you’ve all had a great weekend. The coming week will be our first “normal” one, since we had no Monday classes in the first two. We’ll spend some significant time discussing chunks of Persepolis this week and get into what will be our fairly regular rhythm: Mondays and Wednesdays focused on reading, analysis, discussion and Fridays focused on your own writings.

On Friday, we will actually spend some time discussing the first two chapters of Writer/Designer. Cheryl Ball, one of the authors of that book, will be on campus next week on Thursday and Friday (2/5 & 2/6) leading discussion and workshops for faculty and grad students around designing and assessing multimodal assignments. She’ll also give a public lecture on Thursday evening, starting at 6:00pm in the Jones Room on the 3rd floor of the library, entitled “The Asymptotic Relationship Between Digital Humanities and Computers and Writing.” I’ll offer extra credit to anyone who attends the lecture and then writes a paragraph or two on your blog about the event–summarize what she spoke about, what you learned, anything you found interesting about the talk. Ball is a very dynamic and fun speaker, and that title is meant to be at least a little bit puzzling and provocative, so you should consider attending if you can.

(Speaking of looking ahead and extra credit. You might want to mark your calendars now for another event: British Poet Laureate Carol Anne Duffy will be giving a reading in Glenn Auditorium at Emory on February 21 at 4:00pm. I’ll offer extra credit if you attend and reflect upon her reading too.)

I’ve been really enjoying your triptychs this week! We’ll talk briefly about them in class tomorrow, so please take a few moments to scroll through your classmates’ photographic comics–and leave comments in response.

I believe almost everybody’s eng101 subdomains are now linked from the Student Work page and are syndicating. The syndication plugin checks for updates about every hour, so if you post something on your subdomain and it’s not showing up after a couple of hours or so, let me know, please. If you’re running into troubles with creating those posts or with configuring your sites, besides just finding time to work on it, then let me know.

By the way, if you’ve been just pasting URLs into your blog posts so far, then it’s time now to start learning how to create links instead. It’s not terribly complicated, but using links is a fundamental web literacy that you need to know how to do. (I’m not going to force you to learn the manual HTML for using links in comments, even though it wouldn’t be a bad idea for you to do so. I am going to require that you use links instead of URLs in your posts and pages.)

Note that for your next Sunday Funnies assignment, you might need to plan ahead a bit because you’ll be turning one set of class notes into a set of drawings or visualizations. These do not need to be polished or elaborate, but you’ll need to make sure to take good notes in one class (besides mine) this week and if you’re going to hand draw your visualizations (which is perfectly fine), you’ll need to build in enough time to go scan your drawings to insert into a post.

(image credit:”3 Mosaic” by Flickr user Leo Reynolds)

Looking ahead to week 2

I hope you had a happy Martin Luther King, Jr holiday!

Remember that your first short assignment is due by Tuesday. Once you’ve created your badge, upload it to your blog.

Come to class on Wednesday having read Persepolis pages 3-32 (“The Veil” through “Persepolis”) and bring your book with you.

On Friday, you’ll need to come to class having read the first chapter of Writer/Designer. We’ll spend the class session going over plans for your web sites and will discuss the reading.

When I was showing you the course site on the first day, I explained briefly the relationship between my primary domain and this subdomain that I’ve created for this course and I mentioned that you’d be creating your own subdomains too. The time for that is this week.

By Friday, I want you to create a course subdomain (you can call it what you like, but eng101.yourdomain.com is a sensible choice) and install WordPress again, this time into the subdomain. [N.B. The second time you install WordPress in Installatron, the location field will autofill directory as “blog.” Make sure to delete that line. If you leave “blog” there, then your site address will be eng101.yourdomain.com/blog/ instead of eng101.yourdomain.com.]

Repeat the process of configuring your WordPress on the subdomain, just like you did on the primary domain. Give your subdomain a title that is not “My blog.” Create a static front page and designate a posts page.

Create a menu on your subdomain and add a link in the menu back to your primary domain. Create a page on your primary domain called “Courses” and add a link to your subdomain for my class, either on the page itself, as a menu subpage, or both.

Most of the work that I explicitly assign you over the rest of the semester, starting on Friday, will go on your subdomain.

By Sunday, you’ll post your second Sunday Funnies assignment, as a blog post on your subdomain. Note that I’m switching around the order I was planning to do Sunday Funnies #2 and #3. Look for a blog post with the assignment to go up very soon.

(image credit: “Obscurae Gallery’s 2nd Annual Art Lottery” by Flickr user hrckyowian.)