ENGL 3120    ※   Digital Writing & Publishing   ※    George Pullman





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Assignments

This class is front-end loaded. Most of the assignments happen in the first nine weeks, but 40% of the final grade is determined by what you accomplish between Week 9 and week 15, your final portfolio, your HELLO WORLD moment. You need to get started right away and stay focused. You can't do all this in the last week of class. I will start grading each week's work Saturday morning. There are 28 students in this class, so it may take me to Monday to finish.

In what follows, when I offer examples, I use technical writing as the context because I am a rhetoric prof, this class is in the Rhetcomp division of English, and the most practical application of Rhetcomp is technical writing. Regardless of what field you are pursuing, you should create your own AI-assisted information. My examples are just examples no matter how relevant they might be to you.

It is a good idea to read each week's assignment before you do anything else. Just read. Don't click. Just read. Then start doing. You might want to keep a todo list for each week. Weeks 5, 6, 7 and 8 will likely require the greatest discipline and concentration. But week 9 gives you a chance to catch up and then if worse comes to worse, you sill have spring break to fix whatever is broken. DON'T PUT ANYTHING OFF. Seriously, you will hate yourself (and me).

Week 01 - Sites.gsu.edu DUE 5 pm, 01/12

You will be turning in and sharing your weekly progress using WordPress, provided by GSU for free. Knowing how to use WordPress is a marketable skill. So learning it is worthwhile. Because you are using WordPress, your writing is public. You, and the world, can see what everyone in this class has written. Be supportive. Learn from and help each other.

WordPress has easy to install templates. Try out lots of them. Have some fun. What does each one tell the world about who you are? Pick one that feels right. My only requirement is that the most recent post is the top post. Your post titles should include the week (Week 1, Week 2, etc.). I need to read and keep track of 28 blog posts a week, which means I need to get oriented quickly.

I'm looking for diligence, details, and precision. So typically a longer post will be more successful -- though noise doesn't count.

To set up your blog: Go to Sites.gsu.edu. Click on "Get a Personal blog." Login in using your GSU user id and password, same as you use for iCollege. You might want to play the video that's linked there. Click on Getting Started (Rocket Ship Icon) and then perhaps Pages and Posts. Click around. Experiment. Have some fun. But remember this isn't a diary. You are not the audience. A quick lesson in practical rhetoric: There's what you think you say, what you say, and what they hear. Same with writing: what you think you wrote, what you wrote, and what they understands as they read and what they remember. It is hard to make what you say match what they hear and still less what they remember. You have to understand a great many things about who they are, their context, their needs, how they filter the world, in other words. When you are communicating in person, you can rely on tacit knowledge -- a shared context, assumed roles, plausible assumptions. When writing you have to build context, create or anticipate roles, and scrutinize assumptions. When what you think you are communicating isn't what they understand, the fault may be yours, theirs, some linguistic or cultural difference, or some technical error. To make matters more complicated, you may not know they didn't understand your message as you intended, unless they can leave comments or have some other way to reach you. You need to think about how your message will be received and not just what you want the message to be. The message is just one part of the communication. Even knowing everything you can, you may still trigger responses you didn't anticipate, especially online where anonymity and animosity rule.

Your first blog post should be about your career aspirations, what you know already, and what you think you need to learn and do in order to get your first career-related job. If you have no idea what you want to do post graduation, you have a couple options. One is drop this class. We offer it frequently and you can take it when you do know. The other is use this class to carefully research a plausible career choice and create a portfolio that might get you there. You don't have to follow through. If you don't know what you want to do, email me now so we can discuss ideas for your portfolio. Keep in mind that while you will likely be spending most of your time creating the portfolio, what you put in it is actually more important. Content, content, content. What kinds of digital objects have you made and what skills and abilities does each one demonstrate?

Among all the digital objects you might included in your portfolio, consider introducing yourself via a short-form video -- like a TikTok.

If you don't have anything to put in your portfolio, we should talk (gpullman@gsu.edu). I can help.

GRADE: This assignment is PASS / FAIL. Either you added your Sites URL to the class list or you failed the first assignment.