One of the challenges a lot of instructors have is that they must teach from a set curriculum–a curriculum that may not always be conducive to moving forward into the 21st century and using new media in the classroom.
But traditional writing assignments can be adapted to new media ones. In this post I’ll share some guidelines for how to adapt assignments, an example of how I adapted an assignment, and some of the work my students produced.
From wordle.net
Guidelines for adapting a traditional writing assignment to a new media form:
- Figure out what the learning objective of the original assignment is. Make sure that objective will still be fulfilled even as you transfer the assignment to a new media approach.
- Brainstorm new media approaches that may help meet this objective–perhaps better than the original assignment.
- Choose one of the new media approaches and revise the original assignment sheet, paying particular attention to the new media genre attributes and to the advantages of new media.
- Adapt your lesson plans to allow for time to teach new media principles.
- Once the students have completed the assignment, evaluate it and be willing to make changes the next go round.
An Example: from Rhetorical Analysis to Blog Post
Part of the curriculum for the class I teach–a university freshman writing course, includes a rhetorical analysis. 4-6 pages analyzing the audience, intent, and rhetorical techniques of an article.
Instead of using an article from a reader, I gave my students a list of twenty online texts that they could choose from. They could also approve their own text with me–though only 1 student choose to do so. The students still were tasked with analyzing the audience, intent, and rhetorical techniques, but for the rhetorical techniques they were expected to also consider visuals, web layout, or new media aspects of the text.
Rather than just typing it up and turning it in to me in MLA format, the students turned in the final rhetorical analysis as a blog post–with blog formatting, an awareness of online readers, and at least 1 visual or graphic.
The problem with transferring this assignment online is that blog posts are typically short–and to meet university curriculum requirements, I had to have my students turn in 1200-2000 words for this assignment. A few students managed to pull it off as an engaging, long blog post–others still did a good job, but it felt rather long on the web. Next semester I may do something suggested by James Goldberg, one of my fellow teachers, and do what he did for this assignment–had the students post several blog posts, all analyzing the same text, that hyperlink to each other and each focus on a particular aspect.
For some of the students, publishing it as a blog and then trying to get readers felt rather arbitrary–in part because they largely just wrote a traditional rhetorical analysis and posted it online. The students that really took advantage of the blog genre were much happier with sharing their posts on blog form.
I allowed students to turn in the final blog post either on the class blog or on their own blogs.
Will I make changes next semester? Certainly. But I was quite happy with the results.
From My Students: New Media Rhetorical Analyses
I gave the best grade average that I’ve ever given on the rhetorical analysis assignment–my students really did good work. Here I’ll highlight just a few of my students that in one way or another, did awesome things with new media.
1. Josh’s “The Onion Makes Me Shed Tears…of LAUGHTER!”
Engaging voice, hypertextual (with great use of hyperlinks and visual cultural allusions), and a great mixture of fonts, font size, bullet points and other methods of emphasis, and playing with location on the screen. This felt like something that could be posted on a blog with regular readers, something that could help get a following online. Plus it was an insightful, in-depth analysis.
This also had multiple comments from people that Josh doesn’t know. For example, one commenter wrote, “Very Clever, witty. Overall really enjoyed it. I’ve never read the site before and you’ve got me hooked. You seem to be a scholar keep it up.”
2. Jessie’s “Cinnamon Rolls 101, Broken Down”
Matching form meets content–since she was analyzing a blog recipe site, Jessie framed her analysis as a recipe. Great use of engaging visuals that help us see what she’s analyzing. Once again, great analysis.
3. Maressa’s “Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty” and Charlee’s “Rewriting Beauty”
Both Maressa and Charlee analyzed aspects of the Dove website. Maressa spent a lot of time analyzing the use of the color blue in the campaign–so every time she used the word beauty in her analysis, she made it blue. Charlee used a parallel technique, putting key quotes in color, and bolding a few key uses of the word beauty. Both girls used images strategically.
4. Emily’s “There’s Hope”
Emily posted on her own personal blog–the tone she used for this post matches the tone she’s established for her blog.
5. Zach’s “Looking Closely at Obama’s Health Care Reform”
Zach decided that his tone most closely matched that of news bloggers, and so styled his post like that of a news blog columnist, choosing for him image a reporter-like image of himself.
6. Kendrick’s “Making the IOC a Laughing Matter”
Kendrick manipulated images from his source to combine them with quotes from the article he was analyzing and strategically placed them throughout his analysis.
