All posts by Mark Long

Writing Prompts

What’s the Story?

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Research Reflection Prompt #1
Due Sunday September 11th

Context
One part of being able to document the life experiences of students, alumni, staff and faculty at your college or university is getting to know and communicate the broad story and context of your institution. Each of your institutions has told it story, whether in print, in on line promotional materials, in books, and even documentaries. These narratives not only capture significant events in the history of an institution and community; they also tell a story from a particular perspective and for a purpose.

The Task
To get you started on learning more about your institution—and to give everyone participating in the NAPLA project useful information about where we all are writing from—your first task in this course is to 1) compose a descriptive account of your college or university and 2) post that account on your blog.

Here is what you need to do:

  • Gather information and synthesize the factual story of your institution from its founding to 2016. What is the story? When was your college/university founded and why? What was its mission? When it changed mission/directions as a college/university, what were those changes in response to? And,
  • When you look at the changes your university has made since 1945 (in its mission, its curriculum, its student body, its financing, its campus/classroom design, its technologies, etc.), discuss what stands out to you – what is significant about those changes or how those changes were accomplished, etc.?

Your writing should go beyond a Wiki-like entry. Your college / university has a story worth telling. Using various publications about it, what is the tale of your institution?

As you are working on this first piece of writing, too, give some of your attention to the institutional story as a story and consider the rhetorical considerations of the author(s) as well.

Once you have drafted, revised, and edited your brief history of your institution please

  • check that you have documented your sources carefully using whatever citation system you are familiar with (MLA, Chicago, APA)
  • give the brief history a title
  • publish the brief history on your blog

Before you press “Publish,” note well that Word Press allows you to link to other digital sites or pdf files, whether in your text or Works Cited page. (We will learn more about this if you have not used WP before.) You may also create categories and tags for your posts, and we will talk about the advantages of doing so in our class meetings.

When you post your entry, it will be syndicated to the course blog. Before we meet for our first video conferencing session on Tuesday the 13th, we will have the opportunity to read all of the blog posts. This will be interesting for everyone!

We will also be copying and pasting the bios you write on your individual blogs and putting them up on the NAPLA course blog. All of this information will help us introduce ourselves and begin the process of learning more about our public liberal arts institutions.

Finally, next week might be a good time to meet the archivist, or the person in charge of special collections at your university’s library. You might also want to gather the names of people in charge of Public Relations, Alumni Relations/Advancement, or Admissions Office, or begin identifying people on your campus who might hold the stories and trends and contexts that they see in your college or university.

Have fun! And be in touch if you have any questions.

Digital Projects

Setting Up Shop

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Due Sunday, September 4nd

Once you have logged in to you Word Press site, and changed your password, your job is to become comfortable navigating Word Press by working on configuring and personalizing your blog.

When you log in you will have access to your WP dashboard. In the top navigation bar you can click on “My Blog” to go to your site and view the changes you make.

Here is what we would like you to do:

  • Change the title and tagline (subtitle): Go to Settings > General. Add your own title and tagline. Think about what you are doing or consult the Century America blogs for examples. Remember, you can change the title or tagline later;
  • Add a page or pages: On the dashboard go to Pages > Add New. Pages are one way to organize information on a blog. Create and compose a brief biographical statement (100 words) on an “About” page. Add an image of yourself, if available, by clicking the media icon. We will also use the bio and the image on the main course page as well. Remember, you can add additional pages or change the title of the page or pages later;
  • Add a couple of links to your blog: Go to links > add new. Add the COPLAC site: www.coplac.org. Add our Course Site. And consider adding additional links as the course unfolds;
  • Add a Widget: Go to Appearance > Widgets. Add “Recent Posts” and save the addition. The widgets you add will appear in the sidebar of the “Twenty Sixteen” theme. Recent Posts will in effect create a table of contents for readers of your blog. Note well the need to create brief and descriptive titles for your blog posts.

The following steps are optional

  • Go to appearance > customize and add a header image
  • Consider changing the WP Theme: This is optional. But some of you may want to play around with the visual elements and content configuration on your blog. Go to appearance > themes. While there is no need to change your blog theme from the default “Twenty-Sixteen” some of you may want to modify sidebars, where you can add or subtract “widgets” such as “recent posts” or “text” or “categories”). Add background image, if you would like; create a static front page, such as a description or a welcome note; or add a search or tag cloud “widget” to your sidebar.

The more you become comfortable navigating WP at the outset of the course the better off you will be as we use more advanced features of Word Press on your project sites.

In addition, we encourage you browse the Word Press Tutorials. The sixth page of the WP tutorial is about making posts. It will likely be the most useful to you at the beginning of this course. If you would like to add images to your site or to your post, read on to learn how simple this is. The eleventh tutorial, titled “Insider Tips,” is helpful as well. The “kitchen sink” icon in the post/page editor, to take one example, reveals formatting options, enabling you to create headings and indent text, or to use the “paste from word” button that will carry over formatting from a word document.

And don’t worry. If this is all new, as the course gets going, we will talk about the difference between pages (as opposed to posts) and widgets (such as a tag cloud or a list of links that you can use to customize your page and make it easier for a reader to navigate). We will tinker and try and try again as we play with the powerful digital tools. You will come away with a working knowledge of a widely-used and powerful digital platform that will be useful in your college coursework and in your life beyond school.

We will spend some time during our first class meetings responding to any questions, troubleshooting, finding solutions. We will also, of course, be offering support and tutorials on more advanced WP features and the use of WP plugins as the course develops.

For now, the goal is to have fun. Learn by doing what you need to get done.

Digital Projects

Blogs and Blogging

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As you set up your own Word Press shop we would like you to have a look at one earlier instance of a comparable digital project: Century America. This project site provides a link to the Century America course site where you will find student blogs.

A few selected student blogs from the Century America site offer examples of blogs that have been customized by the user:

Musings on Ink and Type
Heart of the Blue Ridge

While you are browsing these sites, you  might want to read a few of the blog posts by the students. Think about the voice of these reflections on intellectual work, the rhetorical challenge of writing engaging and professional prose–and remember here that your writing will be syndicated on our primary NAPLA course blog. Consider the post “Creating Meaning in a Sea of Information” by a student at UNC-Asheville in Western North Carolina in her sophomore-junior-ish year, Ashley McGhee, or a post by Britta, in Morris, Minnesota, “Weather Setbacks and Research Advances” and “Research Musings and Updates.” Note well that in the second two examples the author has created categories and tags to organize the posts on the blog. (Britta has also included an awesome tag cloud widget at the bottom that helps to organize the content on the blog.) We will talk more about the advantages of using these WP features when posting on your blog.

If you would like to look ahead, take a glimpse at the awesome Century America Student Project Sites

University of Maine Farmington
New College of Florida
Midwestern State University

Why a Blog? E-mail, web pages, wikis, blogs, Facebook, social networks, twitter—much of the writing we now do takes place in a digital format. And while all of us are still working out the conceptual implications of these new technologies, the advent of digital writing has created pedagogical opportunities to think about (and with) the digital tools that we use to represent and understand ourselves, and the world.

Blogging offers significant opportunities for student writers:

  • Designing and managing a blog offers experience using one of the digital technologies used by readers and writers. Digital writing requires all of the knowledge and skill writers use in other formats in addition to the new ways digital writing blends modes of representation (visual and verbal) and creates opportunities for fresh conceptual and material connections;
  • A blog allows teachers to shift the motivation for writing from the assignment to the writer. In fact we might argue that one of the obstacles to becoming a more effective writer in school is the writing assignment itself: for more often than not, writing assignments motivate writing for a purpose other than one’s own. Your blog posts will therefore be more focused on questions and problems and less on assignments, on thoughtful (and creative) exploration of ideas as opposed to more mechanistic forms of response to proscribed questions, pre-assigned topics, or readings
  • The relatively short form of the blog entry encourages concise and purposive writing. Managing to say exactly what you need to say in fewer words will challenge you as a writer
  • The likelihood that the blog will actually be read will help you become more rhetorically aware—of the conceptual, linguistic, social, emotional and ethical concerns a writer must address to be effective with any audience
  • Writing in a digital format (a web log, or blog) enacts (and represents) the complex process of thinking and writing that takes place in a college-level course; and we will use your writing experiences, and the archive of writing that we create, to reflect on your learning process, and the role of writing in that process