Sample Assignment for a First Year Composition Class Using New Technologies

First Year Composition-English ‘5060-2012’

Instructor-Tricia Fausset

This semester we will be learning about composition from the ‘top-down’.  That is, we will start with readily available technologies and resources such as Twitter and email to describe an event and then work backwards, technologically speaking, to expand on the writing.

It started with a Tweet.

Assignment 1 (in class)-Review the picture shown in Figure 1 and describe with your clickers and using 140 characters or less (a restraint of Twitter) what you interpret from the picture.  All of the student’s responses will be shown on the screen in the front of the class and we will examine the similarities and differences present among each student’s description.  You will then provide your own critique of each composition.

Figure 1

****Notes about the assignment and semester project(s)****

The goal of this first assignment is to get the students using their own words to evaluate a visual image.  Additionally, this first assignment gets students used to using the clickers and their corresponding technology.  Because of the anonymity associated with the clicker technology, students will begin to learn how to provide honest and meaningful evaluation of others work.  They will be engaging in peer review.  As the semester proceeds, the image will change somewhat, but retain some of it's original characteristics.  As the image changes, so too will the student's description/composition evolve with those changes.  The next assignment will involve students, working in groups, to perform a similar operation, but with an expanded image (see Figure 2).  

Figure 2

This involves collaborative work as well as a continuing development of multiple digital literacies.  As the semester proceeds, the picture will expand and the students will be asked to expand their composition to a facebook post, an email, a word document, a typewritten composition as well as others.

The syllabus includes assignments that will hopefully help the students connect how they ‘compose’ and use technology now, to the evolution of composition and technology (to some extent).  These ideas are closely aligned with Yancey and in particular her argument for the importance of teaching composition in a variety of literacies as well as the circulation of those compositions (Twitter feeds, Facebook posts, etc.).  I also pay some homage to Yancey by borrowing from her dramatic ‘We have a moment’ and replacing it with ‘It started with a Tweet’, which will be a running theme for each assignment in this syllabus.  Furthermore, Shaughnessy in her DIVING IN section specifically addresses the notion of the teacher making a decision to become a “student of new disciplines and of his student’s” (p. 297), which is really another hallmark of this assignment.  I would suspect that many of the students are much more familiar with Twitter than I would be.

Connections and collaborative learning are important goals for me to include in any semester program.  Bruffee, of course, talks a lot about collaborative learning and stresses that the collaboration be a “social engagement in intellectual pursuits-a genuine part of students’ educational development” (414).  This is what I would hope for from any syllabus or set of assignments.