Week 11: What happens when we “remediate” a printed text as a website? And then remediate it again as an oral presentation?

Our exciting adventures with the Tapestry platform have come to an end, but I hope you will continue to share your outstanding work on your social networks over the next few weeks. When a little time has gone by, we’ll check in with the people who run Tapestry and ask them for the statistics on how many people have read, liked, and shared your tap essays.

At this point, your work on Unit #3 should be progressing well, and by Monday you should have a rough draft of your essay. Next week, our class sessions will focus on the concept of “remediation,” which we will apply to your websites and oral presentations. Here’s a quick description of our plans for each day:

  • Your homework for the weekend is to upload a draft of your Unit #3 essay to your shared Google Drive folder and read Chapter 1 of Remediation, by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin. You can choose to print out that PDF or download it to your iPad, but you should come to class ready to explore the key concepts Bolter and Grusin advance in that chapter. In class on Monday, we will discuss what it means to “remediate” a text, then I will introduce the oral presentation style we will use for Unit #3.
  • Before you come to class on Wednesday, please watch several rapid-fire oral presentations and tweet a link to your favorite one(s) using the #engl3844 hashtag. There are lots of places to find these presentations (just search for “Pecha Kucha”), but two sites in particular have great collections: PechaKucha Night and Ignite. We will spend most of Wednesday’s class workshopping your Unit #3 presentations, so make sure you have access to your written text and screenshots for Unit #3. If you prefer to work on your own laptop, please bring it to class. [Update: Here is the PowerPoint template we will use for this project.]

Last but not least, I promised that I would begin providing you with ideas for your weekly blog posts, so here’s an easy one to get you started: write a post that answers the four simple questions posed by “The Setup.” (Read a few examples to get a feel for the genre.) Please note that this is not a “required” topic for one of your blog posts; I’m just trying to help those of you who said you needed a little extra motivation.

If you would like to talk about your Unit #3 project, please let me know — I’d be happy to meet with you during office hours (T 1-4; W 9-12). Otherwise, I’ll see you in class!