In-class March 24
1. Proposal for adjusting grading rubric:
Current Grading Rubric
60 points: weekly performance grade (up to 5 points per week for doing the basic work on assignments)
30 points: research journal: information you gather or produce to feed your blog
30 points: reading journal: public and class blogs that you’re following and Huffington Post Guide (guided journal)
15 points: technical project and presentation (can add points for extraordinary service)
20 points: final exam
35 points: Portfolio of your own 10 text blogs and your own 5 best post titles
10 points: List of 5 best-of-class blog posts and 5 best-of-class post titles—and your commentary
Total: 200
Suggested Revision
60 points: weekly performance grade (up to 5 points per week for doing the basic work, esp. class blog and in-class)
60 points: your blog writing (up to 5 points per week for posting and commenting)
30 points: research & reading journals: information you gather or produce to feed your blog
15 points: technical project and presentation (can add points for extraordinary service)
15 points: final take-home exam on blogging rhetoric
10 points: Portfolio of your own 5 best blog posts and your own 5 best post titles with reflection statement justifying your choices
10 points: List of 3 best-of-class blog posts and 3 best-of-class post titles—excluding your own—and your commentary on why
Total: 200
2. Google Docs Upload for Reading/Research Journals. Go to gmail account. Choose Documents. Choose Upload. Choose Share (read only) with susan.romano@gmail.com.
3. New groups:
#1: Nathan, Alex, Jamie, Victor
# 2: Sam, Justin, Matt, Geoff
#3: Shannon, Shay, Joe, Lindsay
#4: Sergio, Lori, Wendy, Regan
Name your new group so that I can re title class blog groupings.
4. The statements of two twentieth-century rhetoricians, Kenneth Burke and Richard Lanham, have become household words in the rhetoric community.
Here’s Burke’s most famous statement about what it means to engage in rhetorical practice, his Burkean Parlor statement:
“Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”
The Philosophy of Literary Form 110-111,
You may know Richard Lanham as the paramedic guy (paramedic treatment for bad prose) or for his Q Question article on the relationship of virtue to good speech. More recently, he’s gained attention for his observations in The Economics of Attention. Here’s Lanham:
“Economics, in the classic definition, is the ‘study of how human beings allocate scarce resources to produce various commodities and how those commodities are distributed for consumption among the people in society.’ In an information economy, what’s the scarce resource? Information, obviously. But information doesn’t seem in short supply. Precisely the opposite. We’re drowning in it. There is too much information around to make sense of it all. Everywhere we look we find information overload. . . . What then is the new scarcity that economics seeks to describe? It can only the human attention needed to make sense of information” (6-7; my emphasis)
Other writers target young readers like you specifically. This citation is from the Columbia Journalism Review--Bree Nordenson’s Overload!
“The idea that news consumers, even young ones, are overloaded should hardly come as a surprise. The information age is defined by output: we produce far more information than we can possibly manage, let alone absorb. Before the digital era, information was limited by our means to contain it. Publishing was restricted by paper and delivery costs; broadcasting was circumscribed by available frequencies and airtime. The Internet, on the other hand, has unlimited capacity at near-zero cost. There are more than 70 million blogs and 150 million Web sites today—a number that is expanding at a rate of approximately ten thousand an hour. Two hundred and ten billion e-mails are sent each day. Say goodbye to the gigabyte and hello to the exabyte, five of which are worth 37,000 Libraries of Congress. In 2006 alone, the world produced 161 exabytes of digital data, the equivalent of three million times the information contained in all the books ever written. By 2010, it is estimated that this number will increase to 988. Pick your metaphor: we’re drowning, buried, snowed under.”
Use both statements as lenses through which to get acquainted with your new blogger mates. Enter the parlors; say what get’s your attention. We want this time, however, to do some astute self observation to see not “how you’re supposed to read or force a courteous reading” but “how you DO read” when you enter these Burkean parlors?
--Each person should “enter” 2 blogs.
--Take notes about where your eyes take you—what you do first, second, third—what you are inclined to abandon or ignore, what you are inclined to focus on. 10 minutes for a very quick look around.
-- Now in an all-group session, look at each blog (each has 2 readers) one by one. Readers provide commentary on how they read (not what they like/dislike). No right answers here—just self observation. If you do not read long posts, say so. If you ignore visuals, say so. If you go straight to the videos, say so. Each person’s reading practice will be different—none is right, none is wrong.
5. If there’s time, we’ll look at a couple of Matt’s posts in Committed to Celluloid.