Course Description

Welcome to WAM! This semester we’ll explore ways to expand writing beyond the page, considering how writing shifts across different digital and print mediums. The ability to communicate effectively across multiple types of media is a crucial part of literacy in our society. In this course, you will explore the intersections of various media: print, video, images, sound, and gesture. You will consider the ways in which writing—as an object and as a practice—is shaped by multimodal interactions. This course combines theory with practice so that you can develop effective strategies for designing multimedia presentations, projects, and texts that integrate photography, video, audio, and gesture.

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Note: Writing Across Media is neither a lecture course nor is it a how-to course on particular software or technologies. It is, however, heavy on writing, theoretical readings, and discussion. WAM also fulfills UIUC’s General Education Advanced Composition requirement.

 

Student Learning Outcomes

After completing this course, students will be able to:

 

1. Compose and present multimodal arguments across media and support said arguments with evidence, analysis, and sophisticated attention to audience, technology, design, and/or material.
 

2. Understand how writing is mobilized across multiple spaces and contexts and how the affordances of writing depend on the media involved.

 

3. Thoughtfully engage with, analyze, and contest theories of media, communication, composition, rhetoric, literacy, and design.

                       

4. Clearly explain, defend, and reflect upon your rhetorical decisions, processes, and products with regard to media and technology.

 

5. Revise your multimodal work in response to course texts, class readings, and peer and instructor feedback.

 

Required Texts and Materials

You are only required to purchase one “reading,” which we will discuss during the interactivity unit: the videogame The Beginner’s Guide, which is available through Steam (this was listed at $9.99 at the time of writing).

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All other readings will be available through the course website, either as a PDF file or a link to an online resource. We will discuss readings on Tuesdays, so make sure you have access to the readings during our virtual class sessions.

 

Assignments

 

Final Portfolio

By the end of the semester, you’ll have created and compiled work that shows how you write across media, which you’ll post to your own website. We’ll go over website creators and design options for this in class. Your final portfolio should include, unless we agree on alterations or remixes, the following elements:

• Major Project 1: Interactivity and Audience, with a SOGC

• Major Project 2: Remediation, with a SOGC

• Major Project 3: Transmedia Advocacy, with a SOGC

• 5-6 of your weekly experiments that represent a range of your work

• 5-6 of your in-class writings that show how your ideas have evolved over the course of the semester

• A final reflection and assessment of your work in the course
   

In-Class Writing

Each synchronous class day that we meet over Zoom, I will share an in-class writing prompt that relates to that day’s readings as well as the concepts we’ll explore during the class meeting. I’ll ask you to keep your responses in one place where I can access them and comment on them, either through a blog on your website or by sharing a Google Doc directly with me. That way I’ll be able to provide feedback, point out ideas that you might draw on your major projects, or clear up questions that you have about readings and concepts in the course. I may also ask if you’re willing to share some of what you wrote with the class in future meetings. If you miss our virtual class meeting, I’ll post these prompts online along with that day’s materials. I recommend that you complete the writing by the weekly Sunday due date to stay on top of the course material and so that you’ll have texts to draw on in your final portfolio.

 

Weekly Multimodal Experiments  

Each week of the semester I will post a prompt relating to the theoretical and hands-on readings from that week on the course website. The genres, modes, technologies, and materials that you draw on to answer these prompts are up to you, as long as you have a clear rationale behind your choice. In some of these prompts I will be more explicit about how you should respond (asking you to write a tweet, for instance) but others will be more open-ended. I challenge you to play with format and style, and make these responses your own, drawing both on modes of responding that you’re familiar with, and modes you’ve never used before. Feel free to talk to me if you want to remix or take a different approach to the prompt—my main goal is that you establish connections between theory and creative practice, but there are lots of ways to go about that. I also encourage you to expand on your experiments for your major projects, as the prompts will connect directly to the themes for each unit. Because of this possibility and the importance of maintaining weekly accountability, the due date for these experiments will be Sunday at 10pm. I will also select 1-2 experiments each week that we will workshop and view together as a class.

 

Major Projects

For each major project you will complete a Statement of Goals and Choices, a piece of reflective writing where you analyze and defend your writing choices and explain what you want the project to accomplish. The SOGC will be due along with the draft for each major project, and will also be included in your final portfolio.

 

You should submit your drafts and slices to Moodle, but as you’ll be posting the final projects to your website for the portfolio, you’re also welcome to add your project drafts to your website early. The way you present your project will change depending on the approach you take, so feel free to talk to me about the best way to share your work. Feel free to link out to other platforms (YouTube, Twitter, etc.) where needed, or to include files/documents to install.

 

We will talk about the ways to acknowledge source use in different media, but also keep in mind that you should give credit to the research that you’re drawing on, either for inspiration or information, for every piece that you create for this course.

 

• Interactivity and Audience Project
  The first major project that you will complete this semester will focus on playing with interaction and choice. Your project can take multiple forms, from a text-based videogame where players choose the ending, to a physical choose-your-own-adventure book that you arrange and bind, to a video series where the viewer chooses the order of clips. We will explore a variety of genres and forms that you can put into practice here, exploring choice in a way that is meaningful to you. Consider how designing choice into your project causes your audience to interact with your project in a different way, and how you can accomplish more by inviting that audience to compose and create with you, rather than just writing “for” them.
   

• Remediation and Rearrangement Project
  In the second major project, you will build on our conversation surrounding revision, remakes, and remediation. Here you will revisit a piece of writing that you created prior to this class, and transform it while attending to the five modes that we have discussed. Consider how you can make your remediation purposeful, perhaps by reaching a new audience, or updating the argument based on current developments or new research. The trick here is in making sure that your remediation is truly transformative. In other words, the new product should accomplish something that the original did not, and you should articulate what that is in your Statement of Goals and Choices. You can build on your work in the interactive unit by creating a project that consists of a string of interconnected pieces of media, rather than a single narrative, or you may choose to delve more deeply into one form of media that you want to explore.
   

• Transmedia Advocacy Project
  For your final project of the semester, you will construct an argument or awareness campaign for a cause of your choice across multiple modes and platforms. This can be a local or national issue, but it should impact a community that you are a part of in some way. The first part of this project will ask you to examine how this issue is discussed, portrayed, and materialized in an online community. Building from your findings, particularly on what is already being done about this issue, consider how you can make informed choices about the potential advocates that still need to be recruited, the information that needs to be made public, and the steps that need to be taken to address this issue. You will choose media and modes that will best accomplish this set of goals, and link them together through a central website, installation, social media, or other digital platform.

 

Course Guidelines

 

Assessment

The central goal of this course is to give you the space to apply existing media skills and develop new ones, but most importantly, I want you to think about why we make media choices: how we decide on the genres we use to communicate, how we balance engagement with different modes, how we engage diverse audiences, and how we achieve our goals under the constraints of different creative projects.

 

Based on my own view of the course, as well as research on student assessment, those goals are best served through a conversation between your and my qualitative assessment of your work, rather than through quantitative grades on each of your assignments. You will have a final portfolio for the course, and I’ve listed the central expectations for that portfolio above. At the beginning of the semester, you’ll have a chance to meet with me and talk through those expectations. I’ll upload a summary of that conversation to Moodle, as a reminder of the goals we collaboratively set. This might include modifying, remixing, or repurposing the instructions for individual assignments.

 

You’ll complete two guided self-evaluations, one at the midterm and one at the end of the course. The midterm evaluation will be used to check in on the goals we set, to propose any modifications to your goals based on your work so far, and to share your sense of your learning progress. For the final evaluation, you’ll assess your work throughout the semester, where you think you’ve strengthened your skills as well as where you might take what you’ve learned in the future. You’ll also propose a final grade, justifying that grade based on your progress toward the goals you set and the work in your final portfolio. In most cases that grade will be your final grade for the course, but I reserve the right to change that grade if needed.

 

As experimentation is one of the key values of this course, this approach to assessment will give you space to try risky approaches to assignments and prompts. Our goal is to focus on the process of multimodal creation rather than polished products, and often we learn more through creative failures than we do from aiming for pre-set criteria.

 

If you become worried about your grade at any point throughout the semester, feel free to come talk to me about your progress thus far. I will also reach out if I feel that you’ve fallen out of sync with our timeline or the goals of the course.

 

Deadlines and Late Work

Deadlines in this course are considered motivation and accountability tools. I’ve set deadlines both to give you a sense of how long I expect a project, or a stage of a project, to take, based on the firm and final deadline of December 18, and to help you pace out your responsibilities.

 

While there is no late penalty, I do expect you to treat deadlines as professional commitments in order to value both your time and mine. That means that if you feel you will need more time, either because of changes in your process or because of extenuating circumstances, make sure to communicate that to me directly so that we can agree on a new timeline.

 

Attendance

We will meet together over Zoom on Tuesdays this semester to workshop your creations, discuss that day’s reading, and work through ways to transform media theory into creative practice. Your attendance during these sessions is crucial to your success in the course, as this is where we’ll break down central concepts as well as where you’ll hear feedback and ideas from other students. My hope is also that these class times will be fun and engaging, and give you a chance to craft a class community, as online courses tend to feel more separate and isolating. Because of these reasons, I expect you to attend all synchronous sessions, but I also understand that there are a number of reasons that could keep you from attending, from technology issues to illness or personal emergencies. To stay up-to-date and best manage your time in the course, if you miss a synchronous session, I recommend that you first look at the course materials that I will post on the course website, complete the in-class writing for that day to build up your text options for your portfolio and to process the concepts you missed, and then check in with me if you have any questions or want to chat about what you missed. We also have chat channels in Zoom where you can go to ask questions of students who attended or chat with other people who missed class in lieu of our live class discussions.

 

Electronic Policy

Because our course is focused on media use and practices, we will talk throughout the semester about the intersections between technology and learning. COVID-19 has led to a greater emphasis on remote learning, which leads to new relationships with and challenges because of devices and technology. With this in mind, my electronic policy basically boils down to “use it wisely and consciously.” It is up to you to decide what wise and conscious use means to you. 

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Regardless of what you decide, I expect you to think about your decision. Consider ways to practice turning phones off at opportune moments and logging off of certain websites when they become a distraction. I will check in with you throughout the semester on how technology is aiding or stalling your learning process, both in making sure that you have access to the technology that we'll use in the course and talking through ways to shape focus and attention in an online world where work and personal life become even more blended. I recommend that you check out distraction-prevention tools as well to set up good habits for switching between work and play. Here are some examples: 

• Freedom

• Self-Control (Mac) 

• Cold Turkey 

• StayFocused 

• Rescue Time 

• Focus Booster 

 

Classroom Discourse

As a significant portion of the course will be spent in discussion, and we will discuss challenging issues on which we are likely to disagree, it’s important to remember that the topics we cover have a real impact on your and other students’ lives. Keep your classmate’s humanity at the forefront as we share and discuss, considering how you can privilege responses that keep people invested in, rather than push them out of the class community. The course readings and examples raised may evoke emotional responses, which are a valid way of contributing to discussion. Help maintain an environment in which you and your classmates will feel comfortable contributing.

 

That being said, conversation topics and debates that target the identities of members of our class community cut people off from the conversation and cause harm. If you engage in disrespect, mean-spiritedness and personal attacks, especially those based on race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, nationality, or religious beliefs, I will ask you to leave the conversation (whether in a synchronous class session or group chat) until you’re able to return and engage respectfully.

 

Source Use and Documentation
Giving credit to the sources—including words, phrases, information, and ideas—that appear in or otherwise inform your work is an important practice to develop. As we’ll discuss, that practice shifts depending on the context: in academic writing there are established citation styles, whereas hyperlinks might be used instead in online journalism, and scrolling credits are used to acknowledge collaborators in video formats. One expectation I have for your work this semester is that you spend time documenting and acknowledging the research and inspiration you drew on, and we’ll discuss the reasons (legal, personal, ethical, professional) for doing so. For your Statements of Goals and Choices I’ll ask you to include in-text citations and a reference list for the sources you draw on, as this is framed as an academic genre. The citation style is up to you, but I recommend you use MLA, APA, or one of the citation styles most commonly used in your discipline. For your major projects and weekly writing, your source acknowledgements might range from a dedicated webpage with a hyperlinked source list to text added to a video or podcast description to annotations added throughout the project to indicate when you’re drawing on sources. You have freedom in deciding how to acknowledge sources, but a central expectation of the course is that you do acknowledge sources.

 

Resources

 

Instructor

I will be regularly available to meet with you during virtual office hours. In addition, I ask that you meet with me twice this semester for conferences, once at the beginning of the class to talk about and set your goals for the course and your final portfolio, and once toward the end to talk through your portfolio materials and get feedback. We won’t have our regular synchronous class time for the second round of conferences to allow enough time for me to meet with everyone.

 

You are welcome to email me or send me a message on Zoom to ask questions. I ask that you use professional communication conventions when emailing (in large part because it’s a good habit to keep up), by adding “WAM” and a short description of why you’re writing in the subject line, including an opening (“Hi Megan,”) followed by an explanation of your question or concern, and ending with a sign-off (“Best, Your Name”). We can also make space in class to talk through email conventions and strategies for sending difficult emails, as it’s an important communication skill that takes practice like any other. I answer emails during working hours (Monday through Friday from 9-5), so I will likely not respond to an email sent late at night or over the weekend. If you experience an emergency or time-pressing issue that you could not have planned for in advance, please mark your email as urgent and I’ll try to get to it as soon as possible.

 

Writers Workshop

The Writers Workshop provides free, one-to-one help to all UIUC writers. The Workshop’s consultants—some of whom are current or former Writing Across Media instructors—can help with any kind of text, in any class, at any stage of the writing process. The consultants have experience both creating and giving feedback on multimodal projects, so don’t feel as if you can only bring linguistic-based “academic” work or term papers to the Workshop.

 

The Writers Workshop will be fully online this semester. They have a detailed breakdown of how to make an appointment and what those online sessions will be like on their website in case you’ve never attended the Workshop before or have only had in-person sessions
 

• Information: http://www.cws.illinois.edu/workshop/

• Schedule an appointment: illinois.mywconline.com/

• Call: 217.333.8796  
   

I strongly recommend that you make the Writers Workshop a part of your writing process. Writers on every level (including myself!) benefit from this resource, as getting an outside perspective on your writing helps you improve and articulate your own ideas. A consultant’s feedback can help you see your work in a new way.

 

LinkedIn Learning 

Through your UIUC account, you have access to a variety of video tutorials through LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda.com). There are tutorials available on photography, graphic design, and the Adobe suite, as well as video and audio production. If a project takes you in a technical direction you don’t have experience in, or need refreshers on, make sure to take advantage of this resource. 

 

Mental Health

College can be a stressful time, and all of us benefit from support during times of struggle. You are not alone. There are many helpful resources available on campus. If you or anyone you know experiences any academic stress, difficult life events, or feelings like anxiety or depression, I strongly encourage you to seek support. The Counseling Center is here to help: call 217-333-3704 and visit their website at counselingcenter.illinois.edu/. For emergency services after-hours, you can call their Crisis Line at 17-359-4141 (TTY: 217-352-4217).

 

Students Requiring Accommodation

In designing this course, I’ve kept the different ways of learning and composing in mind, in the hopes that I can give you options so that you can interact with the course in a way that works best for you. Whether or not you decide to seek accommodations through DRES, feel free to talk to me about your learning style or needs as a student, so that we can make the classroom space flexible for everyone.

 

If you have a disability and choose to request accommodations for this class, please contact me and the Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services (DRES) as soon as possible to obtain disability-related academic adjustments and/or auxiliary aids. You can contact DRES at 1207 S. Oak St., Champaign, (217) 333-1970, or via email at disability@illinois.edu.  

 

Sexual Misconduct Policy and Reporting

While I am always happy to talk to you and offer support, you should also know that as an instructor, under Title IX, I am designated as a mandatory reporter. This means that I am required to report any reports of sexual misconduct to the University’s Title IX and Disability Office. After this report, an individual with the Title IX and Disability Office will reach out to you to provide information about rights and options, including accommodations, support services, the campus disciplinary process, and law enforcement options. 

 

If you experience sexual violence and aren’t yet sure if you want to file a report, or if you’re wondering how to help someone you know, visit the We Care site for resources and information: www.wecare.illinois.edu. On the site you can find a list of the designated University employees, such as counselors, confidential advisors, and medical professionals, who do not have this reporting responsibility and can maintain confidentiality.