The Internet and Drugs:
Genre, Rhetoric, and New Media
4-Week Assignment Sequence
Week
1 “YouTube, Text, and Genre”
For the first
assignment the class will be broken up into four groups. I will have each student select a playing
card from a deck. The students will be
divided according to the suit: hearts,
clubs, spades, and diamonds. Each
student will be required to find a youtube video according to the suit they
have drawn. (There will only be as many cards as there are students and, with
luck it, will be a number divisible by four: if not, I will find a way to make
sure that all the students get to interact with the other suits). The card suit will determine which “genre” of video the student will be
asked to find on youtube:
·
The hearts will look for drug
commercials
·
The spades will look for music videos
·
The diamonds will look for
videos from the news or other kinds of video reportage
·
The clubs will look for
medically informed or scientifically inflected videos. The medical or scientific videos SHOULD NOT
be commercials, but a researched lecture, a popular documentary, or perhaps
even, a purely expository video explain brain chemistry or metabolic processes.
Each video clip
should be NO LONGER THAN 8 minutes and NO SHORTER THAN 5 minutes. The students looking for medical or
scientific videos (CLUBS) may have a difficult time finding a video clip of
this length. The CLUBS will be allowed
to make a selection from a longer video and will be expected, if they choose to
make a selection from a longer clip, to discuss and justify there reasons for
making this choice.
After about 15
or 20 minutes each student will need to have found a video that interests,
puzzles, or affects them in some way (which may include levels of disgust,
excitement, enjoyment, boredom, anxiety, confusion etc.). Next, the HEARTS will
pair off with the DIAMONDS and the SPADES will pair off with the CLUBS into
groups of two.
In the student
pairs, the two students will share their videos with the one another, exposing
them to one another’s “text” and “video genre.” Both students should take notes on both video
clips and discuss these questions between one another after they have watched
both videos. Students will also be
EXPECTED to watch the clips at least three times with these questions in
mind:
·
What does each video look
like?
·
How is the information
presented in different ways? How is it
presented similarly?
·
Who is talking or conveying
information?
·
Who is the information being
addressed to?
·
Is there anything odd about the
clips or surprising?
·
How do you react to this
clip? How does it affect you or make you
feel? Again, the answer to this question
CAN BE boredom, confusion, disinterest, or even indifference. Just be prepared to say WHY you feel the way
you do.
After 30 minutes
of pair work, the students will free write INDIVIDUALLY for 20 minutes, using
their notes, to meditate on these questions.
Importantly, “free writing” means writing non-stop for 20 minutes EVEN
IF YOU RUN OUT OF THINGS TO SAY. The
point of the exercise is to get as many of your thoughts, contradictory or no,
critical or not, on to the page. The homework as well as next week’s activity
will build from the free writing exercise.
For the
remainder of class we will discuss some of the students free writes in order to
begin to generate questions, frameworks, and points of confusion that will lead
us into the second part of the assignment.
HOMEWORK:
Each student
should take their free write and generate at least two questions or confusions
that arose as they compared two different video genres. These questions, perhaps unlike the questions
that guided the free write, should address not only the issue of “genre,” but
also the relative ways in which “genre” is connected to the presentation of
“drug” in the video. Students should
post their questions to the class blog.
Week
2 “Prezi, Diagrams, Multimedia Presentations”
For
the second part of the assignment sequence, the students will begin by changing
partners. This time the HEARTS will pair
off with the SPADES and the DIAMONDS will pair off with the CLUBS. Again, these will be groups of two. Each student should have two questions they
have generated from his or her free write pertaining to two of the four video
genres from the pervious week. Because
we have changed groups, all four genres will have been accounted for. The goal here is that the students will learn
to convey information they gathered and learned in the first class to their
partner in order to generate a “re-version” of the information into a
multimedia presentation in “Prezi.”
In
pairs, each student will construct a paper diagram based on the free write from
the previous week. The students should
work together so that together they will generate a diagram that includes ALL
FOUR GENRES. The paper diagram should
look to ILLUSTRATE connections between genres, as well as differences and
points of divergence. The diagram SHOULD
NOT just summarize the free write, but, rather, should engage in global issues
rather than details. This is NOT just a
compare and contrast diagram, but a diagram that should highlight “meta-generic” problems, issues,
questions, and effects. Students should
write no more than 150 words per video genre.
The writing should work with other modes of communication (such as images, sound effects, graphs, or links to websites) in order to
ILLUSTRATE meta-generic conclusions
or confusions, points of connection or “meaning
effects.”
The
students should end up with a paper diagram of the four genres that they will
work together to turn into a PREZI. This
digital tool will help them to resituate they information they have synthesized
together into a digital, multimedia presentation. The student pairs will be expected to include
AT LEAST 3 types of media in their presentation of which writing is ONLY
one. Students may embed the original
videos they worked with or even, new videos.
However, the embedded video DOES NOT COUNT as one of the 3 modes of media
composition. The video DOES NOT count,
because it is the mode or type of media that we have made our “text” and therefore, students should use
other modes to make observations about the “text.” This means that additional videos will add to
or complicate the “video texts” we
are working with in potentially interesting ways. Students who make this choice should be
prepared to say why they have included more videos and what these “new video texts” do to refine,
complicate, or challenge their original texts.
Remember, the original video texts SHOULD NOT BE overwhelmed by new or
additional video clips.
Part
of the PREZI composition will take place in class so that we can discuss the
best ways to organize information, how the technology works, how the technology
might not work, etc. This will be part
of a class discussion in which each group will be expected to share their
experiences, ask a question, or point out a potential problem as they begin to
work with this presentation format and organize their thoughts about video
texts, genres, and the representation of drugs in digital contexts.
HOMEWORK:
Depending on how
long the PREZIS take to compose, I will most likely ask the students to finish
their PREZIS together outside of class.
Additionally, students will be asked to post at least 250 words to their
student blogs. These posts shoul make
observations or ask questions that offer “meta-commentary”
or make some “meta-cognitive”
contribution. Ideally, these blog posts,
rather than addressing the content of their PREZIs or free writes, will focus
on the experience of using “YouTube” to find “video texts,” as well as the process of using PREZI to make a
multimedia presentation. As they write
their blog posts, questions or observations, students should think about:
·
How YouTube presents
information?
·
Where does this information
come from?
·
Who watches these videos?
·
What are the copyright
laws?
·
How do you properly “cite” a
“YouTube” video?
·
How does Prezi compare to other
multimedia software?
·
What advantages or
disadvantages does Prezi offer?
·
Who runs Prezi? Is it private or open source AND what
difference does it make?
·
What did you find confusing
about Prezi? Are there some icons, cues,
or menus that were difficult to use or hard to understand?
Week
3 “Presentations, Peer Review, Class Wiki”
For
the third week of this assignment sequence, the student pairs will present
their PREZI for the class, focusing on public speaking and presentation
skills. These skills include:
·
Presenting with your partner NOT for
them
·
Using PREZI to help communicate information while you are talking, rather than
either reading from the PREZI slides, or not talking at all. PREZI is a tool, not a robot substitute for a
public presentation
·
Presenting the information in a
clear, organized fashion. This does not
mean that the presentation has to be a paper or that you have to have “an
argument.” Rather, this means that
everyone in the class should be able to follow the story you and your partner are telling about each video genre AND how each of these stories might begin to provide a “meta-story” or “meta-narrative” about video
texts, genres, and drugs in
general. REMEMBER: there are no right or
wrong answers.
Following each
presentation, all the students, including the pair who has presented, will
write a peer review evaluation. This
short exercise will be 250-500 words in which I expect each student to provide:
·
A summary of the presentation
in terms of “stories” or “narratives”
·
What stories did the presentation tell about each of the four genres of video text?
·
What meta-story did the presentation tell about videotexts, genres, and
drugs in general?
·
What worked in the
presentation? What didn’t work?
·
Was the PREZI effective at
conveying information?
·
Did the students make good use
of different forms of media or communication?
·
What did you learn that was
new? What had not previously occurred to
you?
The peer review
response, which should take no more than 10-15 minutes based on the rubric
above, will not be used to evaluate the student presentations, but rather, to
help the class, as a whole, formulate a more general understanding of genre, videotext, metanarrative,
rhetoric and drugs in general. The goal
here is not just to think about what a “good presentation” looks like (though
this is indispensible), but also to begin to synthesize the data that we have
gathered, critiqued, and analyzed as a class.
In the format of
a general discussion, the class as a whole (during class time) will
collaboratively generate a “class wiki.”
The goal of this “re-versioning” moment will be to take all the
information from the group presentations and peer review responses in order to
create an open access, online space in which, as a class, we refine information
and draw conclusions together. The
“class wiki” will be contain:
·
a page discussing genre
·
a page discussing videotext
·
a page discussing metanarrative
and narrative
·
a page on rhetoric
·
a page on drugs
The goal here is not so much to make a
totalizing argument or definitive judgment on any of these categories. Rather, this wiki is designed to gather
together all of our observations as a class in a way that begins to thematize
the conceptual issues we have been working with for the past three weeks.
HOMEWORK:
For homework
this week, students should familiarize themselves with the Class Wiki and add
at least two observations or questions that occur to them or information that
seems to be missing from our observations.
Additionally, students should return to YouTube and select a video for
their final project. Students are more
than welcome to return to one of the original videos they watched in the first
week or any other video that has shown up over the course of the assignment
sequence.
The video for
the final project must:
·
fit into one of the four genres
of videotext from the first week
·
must, by extension, discuss,
address or tell a story about “drugs” in some way
·
not be no longer than 8 minutes
and no shorter than 5 minutes
Week
4 “Reading, Research, Paper”
The
final week in this assignment sequence is designed to make the students realize
that each week, as a class or in groups, we have ALREADY been engaged “reading,
research, and paper writing” practices.
This week will be about how we understand the value of each step and,
simultaneously, how, as we begin to write, each student will use the class blog,
the prezi presentations, and the class wiki as a RESOURCE for their own
papers. All these digital spaces have
become permanent archives of:
1) how a “videotext” might or should be read;
2) what kinds of generic expectations or “meaning-effects”
a genre might make; and 3) the critical language we have developed in common,
as a class, for understanding “metanarratives”
and the position of a given “genre”
of “videotext” in a broader, cultural
field of drug rhetorics.
For the first step each student will “read” the video that they have selected
for their final project. The “reading”
should not just be focused on genre or content, but should pay particularly
close attention to the details of this video.
·
How is it sequenced?
·
What story does it tell?
·
Does music play a part in the
video? If so how and to what
effect?
·
Who is featured in the video?
·
Who is speaking and to
whom?
Each student
should produce 250-500 words that informally document these detailed “readings”
of the “videotext,” keeping in mind
that the “details” are the building blocks for “story,” “genre,” and the
“metanarrative” concerns you WILL BE
tracking. Students should include at least
a sentence on how they are beginning to formulate connections between specific
details of the video clips and how they relate to or illustrate the broad rhetorical strategies we have
identified.
For
the next step the students will be “researching”
more explicitly than we have in previous weeks.
After they have produced a “reading” of the video for their final
project, they will need to think more in depth about the “context” of the video. Context
includes social, political, economic, and historical considerations, beginning
with “where does this video originally come from?”
In
the “research” portion of this
assignment, students will be asked to perform two different modes of research:
1)
What are the social, political,
economic, and historical contexts of this videotext? How was it originally received and what
effects has it had?
2)
What is the digital context of this video? Who originally made it? Who posted it to YouTube? Is it a pirated video? Where was it originally broadcasted or
shown? How many YouTube views does it
have? What sort of advertisements and
related videos accompany it?
For this portion
of the assignment, the students will begin to think through and track down
issues in class. Obviously, they will
only have a limited amount of time to conduct these investigations, but, at the
minimum, they should be able to answer the specific questions above.
HOMEWORK:
Students
should continue the researching the video for their final projects. The research outside of class should be aim
to connect the broader contextual questions to the video’s “meaning-effects.” This does not merely mean connecting a detail
from the video to, for instance, a political or social context; rather, it
means understanding the political or social context as part of what conditions the “meaning-effects,” understanding
the political and social context as in some way generating the rhetoric of the videotext.
Again,
research does not have to be exhaustive, but it should at least be able to
understand what the material conditions, historical moment, and digital context
are for the videotext. The students
should write 500 words summarizing their research findings and post it to the
class blog. Students should be starting
to make connections between the videotext
AND the researched contexts, citing
at least four different sources NOT INCLUDING the YouTube videotext.
FINAL
PROJECT
In
the final sequence of this assignment, the students will pull together the 500
word “reading” of their videotext, the 500 word “research” summary of context,
and the information gathered on the Class Wiki.
The paper should be no longer than 1000 words, so, given that they have
already produced 1000 words they will need to “re-version” their reading and research responses in order to incorporate the conceptual and critical
language we have developed as a class on the Wiki.
In
class we will work on emphasizing connections between the reading and research
responses both individually and as a group.
Once we have draw out some of these connections more explicitly,
students will be asked to formulate these connections in our shared conceptual and critical language. Students
will be required to do a free write, draw a diagram, or write a more formal
response (which ever technique they prefer) for 20-30 minutes. We will discuss a few examples in class and
attempt to emphasize, in one sentence, a statement that brings together and
makes an observation or argument about the videotext
in terms of reading, research, and critical language.
HOMEWORK:
Students should
“re-version” their reading and research findings into 1000 word paper based on
and beginning with the one sentence, synthetic statement developed in
class. The best papers will make
explicit connections between the details of the videotext, the contextual
conditions of the videotext, and the over arching critical language in order to
describe rhetorical practices that
combine to represent the drug. All papers should be able to address in some
manner this question:
In what way do genre and context shape our conception of the drug both in the videotext and in general?
No comments:
Post a Comment