Due Dates
November 14: Project Proposal
November 21: First Draft
December 5: Finished Capstone Project
Technical requirements
- Multimodal web text
- 1200-1500 words
- 6-10 secondary sources
About this assignment
The goal of this assignment is for students to conduct research based on their own interest in new media topics to create a multimodal webtext. Some examples of this particular medium for academic writing include these texts we have read from the publication Kairos.
- What’s in a Name? The Anatomy of Defining New / Multi / Modal / Digital / Media Texts
- The Facebook Papers
- Multimodality in Motion: Disability and Kairotic Spaces
If you imagined your Unit 1 project as something that could be submitted to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, you might imagine this project as something that could be submitted to Kairos.
Possible approaches to take
During Week 12, you will submit a Project Proposal to identify your research goals, potential sources, and plans for your project. This proposal will allow me to give feedback on the appropriateness and feasibility of your potential project, and provide guidance on how to successfully achieve your goals.
Students have some freedom in the purpose and topic of their project, based on your own research interests. The project must be based on scholarly research on new media topics, but there are several avenues you can take to get there.
For example:
- You may choose to create an autoethnography of your own new media writing practices. Examples:
- Izabela Olejnik, From a Diary to an iPhone: The Extension of Journaling to Digital Forms (Issue 9.2)
- Jessi Batterman, *Insert Caption That Will Make All Your Followers Like Your Picture Here*
- You may choose to analyze or investigate research questions about online discourse communities. Examples:
- KJ Rawson, Transgender Worldmaking in Cyberspace
- Barbara Guzzetti and Margaret Gamboa, Online Journaling: The Informal Writings of Two Adolescent Girls
- Lehua Ledbetter, The Rhetorical Work of YouTube’s Beauty Community
- You may explore the rhetorical environment of online writing platforms. Examples:
- Daniel Lu, Reddit’s Diverse Platform: Transforming the Social Media Landscape Through Its Communities
- Jennifer Joy Thimell, Looking for Love With All the Wrong Rhetoric
Don’t let those above categories limit you. There are dozens of other ways students may research and write about reading and writing in new media environments. Any sources, topics, or assignments that we’ve done this semester that inspire you to explore your own research question are also fair game for this project.
Requirements and Scoring Criteria
- Length of 1200-1500 words
- Rhetorically-effective integration of multimodal elements
- A clear and focused purpose related to reading and writing in new media environments
- Meaningful transitions and connections between parts, a logical organization of ideas
- 6-10 credible sources integrated meaningfully and cited with hyperlinks
- An appropriate combination of rhetorical appeals to the emotion/values (pathos) and logic and intellect (logos) of the audience, while writing in a voice that is fair-minded, knowledgeable, and appropriate in tone (ethos)
- A language style that is appropriately professional, clear, and fair
- Evidence of careful sentence-level editing with few grammatical and/or mechanical errors. The sentence structure is varied and the words are carefully chosen.