Ryan Kessler Spring Updates

2/24:

  • Discuss use cases
  • Created document of all cases

3/3:

  • Researched messaging options
  • Looked at what other apps use for their messaging
  • ChatSDK is what we decided to go with

3/10:

  • Researched how to add pictures to profiles

3/17:

  • Researched location services and how to implement it
  • Looked into GPS use in apps

April and onward:

  • Poster
  • Presentation
  • Report

Friday, 5/6

Happy Friday!!

Fastwrite:

First, rate the readings/units from the class on a scale from 1 (bad) to 5 (good).

  1. Friedman, Russell, and Pomeroy and Handke
  2. Harker, After the Fall, “The Betrayal of Student Activism,” and “Student Protests, Then and Now”
  3. “Silence Breakers,” “Being Black at Mizzou,” “Why Millenials of Color Can’t Get Ahead,” and “Teaching Slavery to Reluctant Listeners”
  4. Debate on NPR between Kara and Alec, “Willful Ignorance on Campus,” “A Plague of Hypersensitivity?,” and “Watch What You Say”
  5. The Hunting Ground
  6. Campus Sex, Campus Security

Then, write a paragraph on the readings you rated highest and their significance to you, and attempt to in some way answer the following questions.

  1. How have these readings encouraged you think differently, if at all, either as a student or as a human being?
  2. Were you able to apply the perspectives these readings provided to your daily life?
  3. Did they work effectively to allow you to develop your own ideas about current cultural debates?
  4. Did they present a fair balance of views regarding different subjects?
  5. What were your take-aways from these readings, and how can they help you in your future outside of this class?
  6. Finally, did these readings  (and They Say, I Say) help you to learn writing skills you did not previously have in your toolbox?  In other words, has your writing for this class given you more confidence for how you will approach writing assignments in the future?

Format and Structure of Presentations

Presenters:

  • Be prepared to give your presentation at least three times to three different groups of your classmates for about 6-7 minutes at a time.
  • Be sure to ask questions of your audience at the end of your presentation. These questions could either ask for feedback, or ask for how your audience might think differently about your topic given your argument/viewpoint.

Audience:

  • Stay focused and engaged with the presenter and his/her ideas.
  • Be ready to ask questions of and give feedback to the presenter.

Monday:

Colin and Tommy, and ….?

Wednesday:

Hannah, Lauren, John, Ryan, Nate, Sam, and Andrea (and possibly Jenn)

Friday:

Colin B., Hannah B. and Hope, Amanda, Corey, Anthony, Liz, and Jack

Groupwork:

With your essay groups, discuss how you plan to structure your presentation. Give people a general indication of what you have in mind, and ask for feedback and additional ideas. Also, discuss any anxieties you may or may not have about presenting your work, and ask for advice on how to develop more confidence with regard to what you will present.

Wednesday, 5/4

Good afternoon!

Quick note about grade for presentations I forgot to mention Monday:

Presentations are worth 20 points of the final essay. I will indicate your grade and write feedback on your presentation on your final essay draft.

Two More Options for Presentational Format that I forgot yesterday:

  1. Presentation-in-a-can (the canned presentation)
    1. This style is closer to the conference paper/lecture.
    2. Put all the materials you would like to present into a can (soup-size or larger coffee-size). You could include notecards with talking points you want to go over, as well as pictures that you can circulate around the people at your station.
  2. Create a Game
    1. Design a game that can be played by 4-5 people that in some way demonstrates main points from your essay.
    2. Possible options would be card games (create your own card deck), a variation on wheel of fortune, hopscotch, mock-drinking game (don’t actually supply alcohol).
    3. You should make sure people are taking useful lessons/key ideas from the game.

General Tips and Guidelines for Dressing/Conducting Yourself

  1. Wear clothing that looks “nice” (business casual/smart casual) but that you are comfortable in. I am not against defying traditionally gendered clothing, but (for example) if you are a male in this class who doesn’t typically wear dresses or skirts to class, dress the way society has demanded you dress (i.e., how you normally dress). In general, aim for something like a collared shirt (male) or blouse (female), dark jeans or khakis/skirt/dress (any color).
  2. Practice good posture (stand up straight). This will help you keep your breathing steady and
  3. Look your audience in the eyes when you have them.
  4. If you are consulting notecards or a piece of paper to speak from, don’t ruffle it and turn pages unnecessarily. Use your notecards or paper as a way of structuring what you want to say.
  5. DON’T mumble—speak clearly and audibly!
  6. DON’T speak or present for over five or six minutes. No one has ever complained about a presentation that was too short.

Monday, 5/2

Happy Monday!

Modes of Presenting:

  1. Poster-style presentation
    1. Translate your final essay into images and texts you put on a poster board
    2. Be able to talk through your poster and why you ordered sections of it the way you did, why you chose to include what you did.
  2. Videos/Films (1-2 minutes long)
    1. Make a video that roughly mirrors your paper.
    2. You can include sound, video, images, and text.
    3. The Multimedia Center in the library has video cameras, GoPros, and sound studios you can use free of charge. (http://library.udel.edu/multimedia/)
    4. Be able to talk through your video/give a wrap-up of it at the end, explaining the choices you made about what to include and why.
  3. PowerPoints
    1. Create a PowerPoint that outlines main arguments and examples of your paper.
    2. DO NOT BOG DOWN THE POWERPOINT WITH TOO MUCH TEXT. Too much text on the screen will bore your audience. You should be able to talk through your presentation in five minutes without reading straight from the ppt.
  4. Essay turned Conference Paper OR Lecture
    1. Turn your essay into a smaller, more read-able text (about four pages long), or design a lecture/presentation you can give verbally to the class.
    2. Writing to read out loud is very different than writing to read silently (you should have very clear transitions, and shorter sentences than usual).
  5. Cartoons/Advertisements
    1. Turn your essay into a political-style cartoon or an advertisement.
    2. Again, be able to talk through your cartoon or advertisement.
    3. Consulthttps://eone10.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/conducting-visual-arguments.pdf for this in order to get ideas for design, layout, word choices, and so on.

(Optional) Pairing up:

  • I am open to two people working collaboratively on a presentation, however it needs to be clear how work has been split equally between the two of you.
  • I am also open to the two of you acting out skits that in some way demonstrate important take-aways from your essay, however it will need to be clear how you’re demonstrating them (there will need to be some explanation at the end).

Groupwork:

Talk with your group about what you are planning on/thinking about presenting, and what medium you are going to translate your paper into. Ask for feedback on ways you can successfully present your info in an engaging and fun way, and what your group members think about the choices you plan to make/things you intend to include.

Wednesday, 4/27

Good afternoon! 

Workshop/Activity:

Go through your essay and highlight or underline all the content you quote from outside sources. Then, try to identify how you both introduce and explain the quote (think “quote sandwich”).

  • Do you properly introduce important sources with signal tags, and/or brief summaries of what the source is talking about?
    • If not, how can you better place the quote within your paper?
  • Do you explain what the quote means and why it’s important to what you want to say?
    • If you follow a quote with “this,” “that,” or “what he/she is saying is,” rewrite the passage in a separate document in a way that more clearly interprets what your source says.
    • If you don’t follow the quote with any interpretation of it, rewrite the passage in a separate document in a way that better integrates the quote
  • Do you properly cite and format the quote? Do you include the author’s name in parentheses if it does not appear in your signal tag?
    • Integrating a quote without mentioning the author’s name. EXAMPLE: While trying to identify why college-age voters are drawn to both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, we might consider that “establishment Democrats and Republicans are progressively thought to be bought out by lobbies and big business” (Friedersdorf 8). By defining themselves as both anti-establishment, Sanders and Trump have both attempted to appear genuine in their positions by highlighting that they have not been influenced by outside money.
    • Integrating a quote with an author’s name. EXAMPLE: While children may not pursue romantic relationships before the age of 10, psychologist Paulina Demetriou at the University of Texas-Austin points out the importance of training children to be respectful lovers at a very young age: “Children should be well-versed in the rights and wrongs of a loving romantic relationship from a very young age (3-6) to prevent them from entering abusive relationships farther down the road” (55). Though parents may feel uncomfortable speaking to their children about their future relationships when they are young children, as Demetriou points out, conversations about right and wrong behavior in a relationships will help them build healthier, less destructive bonds with loved ones throughout their adult lives.
    • Using a block quote (while you should avoid them, you should block any quote that is longer than five lines of text). EXAMPLE: Many people have recently pointed out that GMO labeling, rather than help consumers make wiser decisions with regard to their diets, would actually distract them from nutrition labels and ingredient lists. As the editors of Scientific American point out:

Instead of providing people with useful information, mandatory GMO labels would only intensify the misconception that so-called Frankenfoods endanger people’s health. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the World Health Organization and the exceptionally vigilant European Union agree that GMOs are just as safe as other foods.

Thus, as there is no evidence to suggest GMOs are inherently more dangerous than non-GMOs, we should look for other ways to encourage consumers to make healthier choices when deciding what foods to buy.

Monday, 4/25

Happy Monday (hopefully)!

Workshops!!

Instructions: Spend about 20 minutes on each of your group members’ essays (this will carry over into Friday’s class).

1. Have the person whose essay is being discussed read his or her essay aloud.  Before you read, give a brief summary of your essay, and tell the people in your group what specific things you would like feedback on so they will know what to listen for/look for.

2. While the person in your group reads his/her essay aloud, read along on your own devices, noting important points you might not have caught in reader-responses.  Focus especially on introductions, transitions, and how the writer addresses counter-arguments.

3. Then, go through your reader-response to the person who has just read the essay, adding things you noticed while listening to/reading the essay today

Note:

Final draft submission deadline pushed back to this Friday at midnight.

Wednesday, 4/20

Good afternoon!

Fastwrite:

Sentence Outlines.

General Guidelines for Introductions:

  1. Begin with a fact.
  2. Give an overview/summary of different sides.
  3. State why the issue you’re discussing is important.
  4. State your thesis/argument (should act as a kind of road map for organizing the presentation of your ideas throughout the essay).

Workshops:

Look at the sample introduction by “Anonymous Awesome Student.”  Point out how he:

  1. Sets up his topic.
  2. How he introduces his argument.
  3. Where he presents counterarguments.
  4. Where he points out the significance/importance of what he has to say.
  5. Where he presents his thesis.

Then, looking at your own sentence outlines, re-visit your introduction and see if the paragraphs you marked as main points are in some way alluded to in your introduction.  Try to follow the general guidelines for writing introductions, and revise yours as necessary.

To-do:

  1. Send the second draft of Essay 2 to me and your group members by midnight tonight.
  2. Write reader-responses (try to focus especially on introductions, transitions between paragraphs, and incorporation of counter-arguments) to your group members’ papers and submit them by the beginning of class Friday.

Monday, 4/11

Good afternoon!

Fastwrite:

Take a few minutes to talk about what kind of sources you’ve been working with for your final essays and describe your research process.  Have you started finding sources for your topic yet (you should be!!)?  Have you found good research on your topic?  Are you having difficulty finding material that lines up with what you want to say? What search terms have you been using, and what databases have you been using?  Finally, have your sources helped you develop your own ideas, or do you find them in disagreement with your own?

In essay groups:

Try running a few searches through the library database or Google Scholar and see what you can come up with.  Try to make sure to think about how the articles you find/have found could be used, or if they don’t necessarily fit with one another.  Ask your group members if they have additional ideas of terms you could input in order to broaden your scope of research.

To-Do:

  • Submit the first draft of Essay 2 through email to me by midnight on Wednesday (if you have a conference Wednesday, get it to me by about 11am).
  • Don’t forget to show up to the conference time you signed up for!
  • Enjoy your week!

Wednesday, 4/6

Good afternoon!

 

Links I went over Monday:

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/

http://www.nytimes.com/section/education?module=SectionsNav&action=click&version=BrowseTree&region=TopBar&contentCollection=U.S.%2FEducation&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=Homepage

http://www.alternet.org/education

http://www.mediamatters.org/issues/education

http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/

 

Instructions for Informal Proposals:

If you do not plan on meeting with me Friday, write a paragraph or two (about one page) proposing what you’d like to focus on/argue in your final research essays and email it to me by the time class would normally start.  Be sure to note what kinds of materials you intend to look at for research.  While I thought I made this pretty clear, your topic has to be relevant to university-related issues.  While there are literally thousands, some potential topics are:

  • Debates around free speech (if you already wrote on this, you can easily approach it in a different way)
  • Gun control on campuses in a culture in which mass shootings are pretty regular (see: http://www.delawareonline.com/story/opinion/contributors/2015/10/07/reasoning-point-gun/73531620/)
  • Whether student athletes should be paid or not
  • Student protest, generally
  • STEM’s dominance / the Humanities’/Arts’ de-funding
  • Why do students choose certain majors over others? (has to do with the previously listed potential topic)  Why are minority students more inclined to choose STEM majors over others?  See: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/college-major-rich-families-liberal-arts/397439/
  • ADDING THIS LATE: Lots to be said about the destructive, often violent culture of masculinity on campuses.  There is also a lot to be said about the treatment of LBTQ+ students on campuses.  I think these two articles pair really nicely: (this older one that I used to teach) https://eone10.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/a-boys-life-wypijewski.pdf and (this new one I just read) http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/education/edlife/teaching-men-to-be-emotionally-honest.html.  I would highly recommend reading both, even if you don’t write on them.

Discussion:

More on citing in MLA.

 

Groupwork:

With your essay groups (yes, they are staying the same), talk for a few minutes about what you’re thinking about writing about for your final essay and ask for any ideas your group mates might have about your topic.  Try to identify:

  1. Who is your audience?  What group of people would you like to direct your essay toward (students, faculty, admin, larger publics?)?
  2. Why are you writing about your chosen topic (if you have one)?  What are the stakes of your argument, and what are you hoping to contribute to the conversation which you are entering?