I hope you’re enjoying your Thanksgiving break! With Unit #3 behind us, we can focus all of our energy for the remainder of the semester on Unit #4, the Scholarly Webtext. I’ve given you a great deal of freedom on this assignment, both in terms of your topic and the format in which you present your argument. All that I ask is for you to use that freedom wisely, to do something you haven’t tried before and to take seriously the prospect that you can reach an audience beyond your classmates and your professor.

We’ll spend most of Week 14 helping you refine your plans for Unit #4 and make progress on your individual project. Here’s how we’ll use our time in class and what you need to do to prepare:

• On Monday, your one-page “plan of action” for Unit #4 is due at the beginning of class. As you think about your project (both the topic and the format you will use), look for models of nontraditional argumentation on the web, using these examples as a starting point:
  • “A Vision of Students Today,” by Michael Wesch and his students
  • “5 Scientific Ways the Internet Is Dividing Us,” by Dennis Hong and J.F. Sargent
  • Feminist Frequency, by Anita Sarkeesian
  • “Columbus Day,” by Matthew Inman (aka, The Oatmeal)
  • An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments, by Ali Almossawi
  • “Straw Men, Shills, and Killer Robots,” by Tim Carmody
  • “Fish,” by Robin Sloan
  • “Media literacy: Arne Duncan’s SxSWedu Keynote,” by Jac De Haan
  • “The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens?” by Evgeny Morozov and RSA Animate
• Before you come to class on Wednesday, you will receive my feedback on your Unit #4 plan of action. Please review it and, if needed, revise your plan accordingly. During class, we will complete an exercise designed to help you focus your argument and synthesize outside sources in your project. To prepare for this exercise, you should review at least four sources you plan to cite in your project and draft a one-paragraph summary of each source. (Please put these summaries in your shared Google Drive folder.) [Update: Here is the Google Doc for the exercise we will complete in class. And here is the end-of-semester survey that the Innovation Space would like us to complete regarding our classroom environment.]

If you have questions about these plans, or if you would like to discuss your Unit #4 topic with me before you draft your plan of action, please email me. Otherwise, I’ll see you after the break!