READING: If you have not already read Atwan16.pdf from last week, please do so. This will be the final reading selection for the semester &, as always, can be found on Blackboard.
WRITING: This week, you will be asked to write 3 comments on any post by any 3 students. Each comment should be 100 words in length & in some way correspond to the original post. DO NOT just write: "Nice work. I like what you wrote." Try to add to, or further the conversation your peer already began. After you have posted 100 word comments to 3 different students, email me the URLs to the comment, NOT to other student's blog or original post. You can do this by copying & pasting the URL found in the browser bar of the comment page into an email. Please, send the email to jware@nebrwesleyan.edu by Thursday, 01 May 2008 @ midnight. These will be your last 3 weekly blog assignments. Late assignment will not be accepted.
EXTRA CREDIT: For those of you who completed extra credit assignments this semester, you will need to do the following: copy & paste the URLs of your extra credit posts into an email, then send that email to the aforementioned address. Again, do not just send a URL to your blog; send URLs for each individual extra credit assignment. So, if you completed 3 separate assignments, there should be 3 unique URLs within the email.
WP3: Well, here it is: the last of your 3 major writing projects. For this assignment, you will be asked to make a soundtrack for your life. Each song you choose will contain the following elements: 1 embedded video, the name of the band & song, 250 words relating the video to your life, & a minimum of 4 relevant hyperlinks for each song (1 of which must be the band's site & another of which must be a place to acquire the song legally).
The soundtrack itself will consist of 8 songs (no more no less) & each video must be engaged directly. By this, I mean that you need to take aspects of the video, whether they be visual or auditory (music or lyrics), & address how they speak to or for your life. To this extent, you will be utilizing the video as an entryway into your life by writing through the object. But, once you enter into that doorway, you are NOT to provide a straight narrative of some event that took place, but instead say something about who you are through an object, thing, idea, etc. As mentioned in class, you will most likely need a BRIEF narrative strand to connect or transition different objects or thoughts, but this should in no way be the focal point. I would HIGHLY recommend looking toward the essays we have read for class as examples of how to do this (e.g. Sanders' paragraphs on his hammer). Furthermore, the order of your videos MUST be chronological in nature, according to the part of your life it relates to. Finally, your essay will best be served if you have a common theme running throughout.
The final draft of this project is DUE, Thursday 15 May 2008 @ midnight.
I will schedule individual conferences with students for next week. During these conferences you MUST have a minimum of 3 "shorts" COMPLETED & in relatively polished form. We will go over these pieces & discuss how they function with regard to the assignment guidelines & the trajectory of your individual project. We will create a schedule of conference appointments this week in class.
As a matter of example, here is a sample I wrote myself. Please use the formatting for your project that I have here. IF YOU ALREADY READ THIS POST FROM LAST SEMESTER, PLEASE READ IT AGAIN. IT HAS BEEN NOTICEABLY REVISED:
WRITING: This week, you will be asked to write 3 comments on any post by any 3 students. Each comment should be 100 words in length & in some way correspond to the original post. DO NOT just write: "Nice work. I like what you wrote." Try to add to, or further the conversation your peer already began. After you have posted 100 word comments to 3 different students, email me the URLs to the comment, NOT to other student's blog or original post. You can do this by copying & pasting the URL found in the browser bar of the comment page into an email. Please, send the email to jware@nebrwesleyan.edu by Thursday, 01 May 2008 @ midnight. These will be your last 3 weekly blog assignments. Late assignment will not be accepted.
EXTRA CREDIT: For those of you who completed extra credit assignments this semester, you will need to do the following: copy & paste the URLs of your extra credit posts into an email, then send that email to the aforementioned address. Again, do not just send a URL to your blog; send URLs for each individual extra credit assignment. So, if you completed 3 separate assignments, there should be 3 unique URLs within the email.
WP3: Well, here it is: the last of your 3 major writing projects. For this assignment, you will be asked to make a soundtrack for your life. Each song you choose will contain the following elements: 1 embedded video, the name of the band & song, 250 words relating the video to your life, & a minimum of 4 relevant hyperlinks for each song (1 of which must be the band's site & another of which must be a place to acquire the song legally).
The soundtrack itself will consist of 8 songs (no more no less) & each video must be engaged directly. By this, I mean that you need to take aspects of the video, whether they be visual or auditory (music or lyrics), & address how they speak to or for your life. To this extent, you will be utilizing the video as an entryway into your life by writing through the object. But, once you enter into that doorway, you are NOT to provide a straight narrative of some event that took place, but instead say something about who you are through an object, thing, idea, etc. As mentioned in class, you will most likely need a BRIEF narrative strand to connect or transition different objects or thoughts, but this should in no way be the focal point. I would HIGHLY recommend looking toward the essays we have read for class as examples of how to do this (e.g. Sanders' paragraphs on his hammer). Furthermore, the order of your videos MUST be chronological in nature, according to the part of your life it relates to. Finally, your essay will best be served if you have a common theme running throughout.
The final draft of this project is DUE, Thursday 15 May 2008 @ midnight.
I will schedule individual conferences with students for next week. During these conferences you MUST have a minimum of 3 "shorts" COMPLETED & in relatively polished form. We will go over these pieces & discuss how they function with regard to the assignment guidelines & the trajectory of your individual project. We will create a schedule of conference appointments this week in class.
As a matter of example, here is a sample I wrote myself. Please use the formatting for your project that I have here. IF YOU ALREADY READ THIS POST FROM LAST SEMESTER, PLEASE READ IT AGAIN. IT HAS BEEN NOTICEABLY REVISED:
Octopus Project, “Music is Happiness”: Between cuts of the band playing on what appears to a Saturday Night Fever dance floor, this Octopus Project video splices in clips of a gerbil scurrying through several different retro-video game worlds: Legend of Zelda, Berserker, & Asteroids just to name a few. The gerbil-scenes present the viewer with an Atari-aesthetic that anyone who grew up in the 80s can no doubt recognize. As a child, many of my weekend mornings were spent in front of the television set playing highly-pixilated arcade games on my family’s Atari 5200 gaming unit, &, a few years later, on an original Nintendo Entertainment System. At the time, these ancient games were technological wonders; in retrospect, our amazement appears laughable. The squared-off images were more abstract figuration than mimetic, & the movement of individual entities mimicked the herky-jerky nature of a poorly conceived stop-action film. A far cry from the life-like images & fluid movement today’s systems offer, Atari & early Nintendo games nonetheless enabled my brothers, friends, & I to enter into fantastical worlds in which we could play the roles of a happy-go-lucky star fighter with a penchant for shooting at robots with laser beams, a jungle adventurer attempting to save a distressed maiden (all the while leaping boulders & dodging arrows), or a chivalrous knight in search of golden coins & fire-breathing dragons; & this is to say nothing of classic arcade games such as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, or Frogger. By the look of the video, it would seem that the Octopus Project may have shared similar childhood experiences (Not to mention that the music itself sounds as if it could be used in one of these games).
No comments:
Post a Comment