Survey: What Makes you Happy?

Hi again. I was thinking about Jamie's comment to my last post in which she suggested that we try to incorporate other disciplinary approaches because the majority of our students will not be humanties majors.

Anyway, if you click on the title of this post it will take you to a digital art project on surveys (by Chris Jospeh), which I think we could use. This project is obviously more creative than a typical survey, but it did actually survey people in one city about different things that made them happy, and it might be interesting to ask students to analyze the data, summarize it, and/or describe what the numbers suggest. (We could take it a step further and ask them to question the methodology: does this survey really tell us anything abot happiness?) We could also ask them to make their own surveys and/or answer these surveys. And then perhaps analyze or think about the survey as form (maybe also by looking at more "serious" surveys).

I'm just throwing out ideas. I'm not sure how viable any of them really are.

Karen

Inanimate Alice

I think the comics idea is great, Fiona. It might also be a good way to teach summary and citation. We could have the students create a comic and then change that comic into narrative form, thinking about what visual cues need to be explained in language and what quotations should be inserted in the text. Jamie showed me a website that provides templates for creating your own comic. (What's the website, Jamie?)

Also, my friend Joanna referred me to the website that's linked to in the title of this post. (Inanimate Alice: http://www.brad-field.info/) It's an interactive digital novel (a review calls it "digital storytelling") that's still in the process of completion, but the first few episodes are up, and I think it would be a great tool for a number of possible lessons. I've only seen the first episode so far. The page also has several links to other projects as well. I'm completely new to this world, but has anyone heard of Kate Pullinger's work?

Karen

library and comics

Two things, the first, a proposed agenda item and the second, a reading material suggestion:

1. What about library research? I see that there are library sessions scheduled in the sample syllabi, but I'm curious to know how we can frame these sessions so that they can go beyond the how-to lesson (which no one seems to get anyway), but also as a means of understanding how online catalogues and databases are organized, and possibly applying that to how we might categorize our body of work for the consumption of others. This opens up to the questions of how things seldom fit neatly into single categories, why something is assigned to one category and not another etc.—think also about how we categorize/split ourselves with the multiple email addresses we have for personal/school/work and multiple online personas on blogger/facebook/Blackboard (okay, I'm free associating at this point). Another point to be driven home with library research is that despite the vastness of the Internet, a Google search won't turn up everything (there is, of course, Scholar and Book Google—even so, the question of full accessibility remains)—even in a seemingly democratizing cyberworld, the Academy continues to exist as a gated community...

2. Assuming that we still have the option of using print text (albeit scanned and uploaded onto a digital platform), another possible reading assignment: Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which was written as a guide to the genre, has some pretty neat sections explaining visual rhetoric—I'm thinking specifically of "The Vocabulary of Comics" chapter, which explains sign/signifier/signified without the terrifying jargon, which would go well with Jesse's celebrity icon lesson plan.

FYI, the first chapter of Understanding Comics, which discusses the juxtaposition of text and image, is excerpted in Seeing and Writing 3—a great way to approach the comparison/contrast essay.

Digital Archives

I was browsing through the MLA sessions for the 2006 conference, and I noticed that there's a panel on teaching cyber composition. I couldn't read any of the abstracts, but there was one panel entitled something like: "Mark Twain's Digital Archive in the Composition Classroom". I know that a lot of universities have been digitizing their archives and making them public, so perhaps we could have a unit utilizing some of these resources.

(An idea, but also an excuse to see if I logged on to this blog correctly.)

Karen

ps. I'm not going to the MLA this year, but if any of you are and have a chance to go to this panel, I'd love to hear what was said.

NY Times Article on User-generated content

I'm not sure if there's much new in this article, but it might serve as an interesting reading for a unit on YouTube/MySpace.