Writing with Music Unit

This unit consists of readings and assignments about "new literacy."  Instead of writing about music, you will experiment with using music as one element of a video composition, and you will use the combination of personal experience and essays about new literacy to reflect on the possibilities and pitfalls of becoming increasingly literate in the 21^st century.  

I am asking you to do 3 assignments within this unit.

1.     Keep a reading-response and working journal for this entire unit.  For the reading journal, please write a short response to each reading for this unit and post your response on your personal weblog or the class weblog.  Your response should be like the head notes from the Casebook assignment: who is the author, what do you know about the publication, what genre are you reading, what ideas strike you as interesting or note worthy?  For the working journal, please reflect regularly (2 or 3 times a week) on your project: what is interesting about working with PowerPoint-as-video?  What is frustrating?  Do you think you are learning valuable new literacy skills?  (50 points)

2.     Use PowerPoint to make a slide show (no more than 3 minutes) that includes a music soundtrack.  In other words, take a song or songs, and make your own personal music video from images you already have, images you take while working on this project, or images you find on the Internet.  You will get one week's worth of training, and have one full week to work on the video.  The finished product is not as important as the process; think of this video as an experiment in new literacy skills.  (150 points)

3.     Reflect on "new literacy" based on what you have been reading and what you did in your video project.  Your reflection can take the form of a commentary essay, a well-developed top 10 lists about new literacy, a brochure about "new literacy" or another genre of your choice.  An academic genre should be four to five pages long; a functional document (brochure, instructions) might not be that long, but it should have good content and should take about as long to develop, draft, and revise.  (200 points)

Assignments two and three can be revised during the final two weeks of the semester; assignment one is a process assignment and needs to be completed as you are working on this unit.  Please keep reading for more elaboration on each assignment. 

Reading and Working Journal

During the first week and half of this unit, I am asking you to do some readings related to literacy and new literacy, and I am asking you to reflect on those reading.  Think of your reading responses as very similar to the head notes you wrote for the casebook, and address these points if they are relevant.

• Identify significant information about the author (if relevant): his or her other writings, his or her biases.
• Identify significant information about the publication:  Who reads this publication?  Is it informal, middle level, or academic?  Is it popular or a specialist publication?
• Identify the genre of each essay: interview, report, commentary, profile.  Please find at least three commentary essays related to your topic. 
• Identify the key ideas from this article that you might use in your essay.

Your reading responses should be to the following articles or handouts. 

Class handouts (Manovich and Graff): treat as one response

Alice Yucht and Seymour Papert (linked essays): treat as one response.

New Literacy Summit Executive summary (pages 4-11, linked).

David Byrne and Edwared Tufte (linked essays): treat as one response.

Lynn Arthur Steen (linked essay). 

You may also respond to any additional readings on new literacy that you find on the web or in print sources. 

Working responses should reflect on these questions:

1. what are you learning while working on the PowerPoint project?
2. what is interesting or cool?
3. what is frustrating or tedious?
4. are you learning new skills, or extending print-literacy skills?

I have suggested three during the week of training and three during the week we work on the slide show.

The better your reading and working journal entries, the more material you will have for your final reflection assignment in this unit.

Criteria:

PowerPoint Musical Slide Show

I am asking you to use PowerPoint to put together a slide show with music because PowerPoint is easy to use (relative to video editing), you are likely to use PowerPoint in other classes, and because a finished PowerPoint presentation will likely fit on a 250 MB floppy disk; a video would need to be burnt on to a DVD or CD. 

The actual content of this music slide show is wide-open. You might take Lyle Lovett's song "North Dakota" and make a video based on family photos and found photos, or you might take an instrumental and animate your favorite poem—one you wrote or one someone else has written.  If you have ever recorded your own music, you could definitely use it here.  You can save the whole project as a movie, or keep it as a slide show for users to click through.  My hope is that you have fun with the assignment and develop some of the following skills.

General new literacy skills (some of which might seem old):

• Finding (or making) relevant images and text—improving your search skills.
• Combining images, text, and music into a coherent whole: multimodal composition.
• Visual thinking and expression—figuring out how words and images go together, how you make transitions with images, etc.     

PowerPoint skills:

• Working with templates (not wizard)
• Importing images (clip art and pictures from files)
• Using the drawing tools
• Using animations
• Importing music files
• Saving as movie.

Criteria: The finished product is not as important as the process of trying this video out, so the criteria emphasize time commitment, experimentation, and a just a bit about execution.

1. Evidence of time commitment (15 hours).  A well-developed project is the most obvious way to show this time commitment, but you can also show it in the form of draft files, files for collected images, time spent at the Technology Learning Center (ask for a note from the TLC employee), etc.  Your working journals can serve you twice—get points for them in the journal part of this unit, and have those journals be evidence here. 
2. Evidence that you have experimented with a wide range of skills and features (see lists above): use a variety of kinds of images, experiment with text, try out different transitions. 
3. Evidence that you understand some of the concepts of visual communication we cover in class or that are covered in Call to Write. 

Value: 150 points.

Due: Monday, Nov. 10^th. 

Reflecting on New Literacy

I want you to chose the genre in which you reflect on or synthesize what you have learned this unit.  Successful writers make good choices about genre, and figure out quickly what the requirements and conventions of their chosen genre are. 

You might think about your own call to write, here:  if you want to keep working on your academic writing skills, choose an academic genre like commentary or academic review.  If you want to work on your design and visual communication skills, chose a more functional genre like a brochure or a set of instructions.  If you had a particularly good or particularly bad experience with the video assignment, you might want to tell your story as a narrative.

On page 110 of Call to Write, the author groups the genres in the textbook into three categories: genres that writers use to express themselves, genres that writers use to inform or explain, and genres that writers use to persuade.  Those distinctions might help you decide which genre to use.

We are taking only a week and half to do the actual writing of this assignment, so it is important that you read the assigned readings carefully, that you keep good reading and working journals, and that you begin to think about this assignment even as you are finishing the video assignment.  In other words, most of the invention and early drafting should be done when we turn our attention to this final project. 

An academic genre should be four to five pages long; a functional document (brochure, instructions) might not be that long, but it should have good content and should take about as long to develop, draft, and revise.  An expressive genre should be four to five pages long.  (200 points)

Criteria:

1. An audience and purpose clearly defined within the final document.
2. Appropriate relationship established and maintained throughout the document.
3. Consistent voice appropriate for the situation; or a voice that is appropriately varied.
4. Genre conventions followed adequately—as determined by the audience and situation. 

Value: 200 points

Due: Wed. November 26^th