New Media Writing
Syllabus: Spring 2018

Course Information

WRIT 4250 / 5250

We meet

• Monday, 3:00 p.m. - 4:15 in Montague Hall 209;
• Wednesday, 3:00 p.m. - 3:50 in Montague Hall 209 (3:50 - 4:15 in Bohannon 104)
• occasionally in an alternative room to be announced

The course home page can be found at: <http://www.d.umn.edu/~cstroupe/sp18/4250>.

Resources Needed

• Software Takes Command, Lev Manovich, MIT Press. # ISBN-13: 9781623567453
• The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture. Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson, Editors. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2015.
• Printouts of shorter texts available as PDFs via the course Moodle site. You are required to print these texts out and bring them to class.
• a USB drive for saving and transporting your work
• occasional access to a digital camera, which can be checked out from ITSS.
• access to a printer, or funds for printing
  
  

Grades

• 10% Social Creativity Project
• 15% Dramatic Modularity Project
• 25% Writing in Augmented Space Project
• 20% New Media Writing Project
• 15% Midterm Exam
• 15% Participation, including your completion of the various exercises, reading responses, quizzes, and participation in class generally: in-class activities and contributions, online discussions, attendance, conferences, peer workshop responses, online discussions, class discussion, promptness.

Note that each unexcused absence in excess of the allowed number will deduct 2% from your overall grade

Purpose

This course examines the emerging practices of writing in digital environments such as social media, video games, web sites, mobile apps, and augmented reality. Students learn both theory and practice through readings, discussion, exams, and software tutorials, as well as by producing a series of creative online projects. The course requires no prior knowledge of web design or specialized software.

Writing and Design

As described on the schedule, this course is organized as a set hands-on projects and exercises, combined with a series of critical readings. The exams give you opportunities to demonstrate and consolidate your grasp of the readings and major course concepts.

Projects

The projects are larger pieces that you'll complete individually over a period of three or four weeks using the skills you've learned from the exercises and insights from the readings and class activities.

The online schedule will be updated throughout the semester. Please note that often digital projects will be due on non-class days.

There is a two-point penalty per day for late projects. Projects over a week late will receive no credit.

• Digital projects are late if the URL is not posted to the correct online discussion as of the day and exact time specified in the schedule. A digital project that's five minutes late is the same as one that's 23 hours late. Changes made to the projects after the assigned day/time may or may not be included in the evaluation.
• Paper-based projects need to be submitted as a hard copy at the time and place assigned. I will not accept e-mail-attached or electronic copies of paper-based projects.

Exercises and Tutorials

Exercises will generally be done in class and, if necessary, completed as homework. We will trouble-shoot them in the next class meeting. Exercises will be due (that is, available on the Web, the URL posted to the correct online forum) by midnight on the due dates. Each day an exercise is late will deduct 20% (a point for a five-point exercise, for example), with no credit given after five days.

Technical Production

We will learn enough basics of software such as Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Audacity to enable you to edit existing pages, templates, and sites, and to maintain them.

You are not required, however, to use any of these particular software to create your projects. If you prefer, you can use Wordpress, Google Sites, or any other means you have to create web pages and sites and to make them public on the Internet. If you use these outside services, however, you will need to find your own support for troubleshooting your work.

Regardless of the technical means you use to produce your online projects, you will need to complete all the software tutorials in order to get full credit for your course grade.

Readings

The readings are an essential aspect of this course not just for the information they contain, but for the experience of reading them.

Unless stated otherwise in the assignment, you are required to do all readings using the physical books or paper printouts. (In the case of PDFs, you may print multiple pages on each sheet to save paper.)

You are also required to bring the book or printed hard copy to class on the day assigned (laptops or other devices are not permitted for in-class use, as explained below). Coming to class without that assigned reading on paper will result your being recorded as absent for the day.

You will be expected to complete all the assigned readings by the beginning of class. You should mark the book or printout to help you locate key words, ideas, names, passages, and examples in the future, such as when you're studying for the exams. See the online handout on the practice of Active Reading.

Please be prepared for brief quizzes and other activities intended to give you incentive to keep up with (and engaged with) the readings.

Exams

I will give you sample questions and conduct a review session to help you prepare for exams. The exams will cover the readings and concepts elaborated in the class readings and discussions.

Early in the semester, I will go over in detail the kinds of things you'll be expected to remember, understand, and be able to discuss on the exams.

Additional Expectations

In addition completing the exercises, designing and producing the projects, reading the assigned texts, writing the paper, and taking the exam, you will earn credit through:

• writings in our online discussion forums
• brainstorming sessions and preliminary writings or designs for your projects,
• peer critiques for workshops
• occasional self commentaries on your work
• other writings.
  
  

Attendance

Since this class will function as a community of writer-designers, your regular attendance is absolutely necessary. The UMD policy states:

Students are expected to attend all scheduled class meetings. It is the responsibility of students to plan their schedules to avoid excessive conflict with course requirements. However, there are legitimate and verifiable circumstances that lead to excused student absence from the classroom. These are subpoenas, jury duty, military duty, religious observances, illness, bereavement for immediate family, and NCAA varsity intercollegiate athletics. For complete information, please see: http://www.d.umn.edu/vcaa/ExcusedAbsence.html

1. Allowed Absences:

You are allowed a small number of absences which you can spent however you wish: 4 (in a three-day-a-week class) or 3 (in two-day-a-week class). Allowed absences do not excuse you from the work due or completed on the days you are absent, and some in-class activities and timely requirements cannot be replicated or made up. Save your "free" absences for a rainy (or snowy) day.

2. Unexcused Absences and Penalties:

Each absence in excess of the budget of allowed instances deducts 2 percent each from your overall grade.

3. Excused Absences and Penalties:

In the case of serious, legitimate, and verifiable conflicts that result in absences in excess of the allowed number, the UMD attendance policy states that absences can be excused if

1. you contact me prior to, or as soon as possible after, the circumstance resulting in your absence(s)

2. you provide written documentation from an authoritative source (e.g., a doctor, the Athletic Department) which speaks specifically to the reason you were unavoidably unable to attend class that particular day.

Like the other types of absence, documented, excused absences do not excuse you from the work due or completed when you did not attend, and some in-class activities and timely requirements cannot be replicated or made up.

Like the other types of absence, documented, excused absences, do not excuse you from the work due or completed when you did not attend, and some in-class activities and timely requirements cannot be replicated or made up.

4. Tardiness and Leaving Early

In addition to your budget of allowed absences, you also have 3 or 4 instances (depending on the 2- or 3-day weekly schedule) of arriving late or leaving early to use if necessary. Instances in excess of this allowance will decrease your overall grade by 2 percentage points each. If you need to leave class early, even if it's one of your allowed instances, please arrange it with me in advance

Participation

A larger goal of this course is to establish a community—with a wide variety of backgrounds, expertise, and interests—to enhance your learning and enjoyment in the class. The class is designed to provide a number of avenues for this community building.

Your sincere, informed, and regular contributions to maintaining this collaborative environment will count in your grade and of course will greatly benefit your final products in the course. You should plan on volunteering to speak at least once during each class discussion.

Your participation in this course will include contributions to our discussion of readings.

To help me evaluate your participation, after each class meeting I will ask you to log any quotations from the readings which you orally raised and commented on in class. You will log each of these contributions in a post to a Moodle forum, "Classroom Contributions." Please log only quotations that you contributed to discussion out loud.  Post one message for each quotation using the format of this example:

M 3/14: Bogost, Fetishizing Simplicity
We mistake elegance of design for beauty...care little for in our experience of them. 162.10

This format of each message includes:

• a header (including the date of class, the work's author, and a word or phrase that sums up the topic or point of the quotation),
• a string of key words from the quotation, especially from the beginning and end, to help us find the passage on the page,
• the page number (with tenths to indicate how far down the page). 

Students with Disabilities Policy

It is the policy and practice of the University of Minnesota Duluth to create inclusive learning environments for all students, including students with disabilities. If there are aspects of this course that result in barriers to your inclusion or your ability to meet course requirements – such as time limited exams, inaccessible web content, or the use of non-captioned videos – please notify the instructor as soon as possible. You are also encouraged to contact the Office of Disability Resources to discuss and arrange reasonable accommodations. Please call 218-726-6130 or visit the DR website at www.d.umn.edu/access for more information.

Incompletes

Incompletes for the semester will be given only in the following very limited circumstances:

• you must contact me in advance of the semester's end to make a request for an incomplete;
• no more than one or two weeks of class, or one or two assignments, can have been missed;
• you must be in good standing in the class (not already behind, in other words);
• you must have a documented family or medical emergency, as required by university policy;
• you must arrange a time table with me for completing the missed work that is acceptable for both of us.
  
  

Academic Integrity and Student Conduct

Please see UMD's pages concerning these two issues:

<http://www.d.umn.edu/assl/conduct/integrity/>

<http://www.d.umn.edu/assl/conduct/code/>