a WebQuest for Writing 105, Unit 1
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Introduction
As you know, this class takes as its project the consideration of literacy. In an attempt to better understand our cultural and time-anchored definitions of this complicated word, we begin with this quest: to consider how various levels of seeing the individual influence our ideas of literacy. You will be asked to consider your personal belief structure about literacy as a concept and then to examine that belief structure against frames of the family, of the perceived social group, against that of the larger culture and other cultures, and against what you believe can be known or true.
Task
This webquest asks you to play given roles to consider various "frames" through which the person is studied. Although the roles you play will be reductive of what people in these professions actually do, they will perhaps allow a particular focusing. I am merely using them as an heuristic, or a way of putting information into categories, so that the information may be examined in several different ways.I do not expect you to confine your thinking to one role at a time: this is not possible. You are a whole, complex person, and your thinking will reflect that. I do ask, however, that your response writings to each of the roles are sensitive to the role you are playing at the time; i.e., an "anthropologist" would never say that culture has nothing to do with literacy. Your job, when playing the anthropologist then, will be to figure out how culture figures into literacy, not if.
Process
After you have played the following five roles and written responses to each of them, your culminating paper / project for unit 1 will be a submission to the class magazine that expresses your personal literacy experiences as a whole or studies the connections between language and the people who use it with an eye focused on yourself as a particular user of language. The portfolio itself consists of- all drafts,
- the five responses,
- journal writing,
- and posts to the message board (see also Definitions, posts).
Roles
The roles that you will be asked to play (in loose order of my typically Moffett-structured class) are:- the Metaphysicalist -- predestined personality? are there factors that affect our literacy potential that lie outside of our present understandings?
- the Psychologist -- blame your parents. how did / do your personal experiences and family shape your particular literacy?
- the Sociologist -- white middle-class female seeks... how does an individual's social group affect her literacy?
- the Anthropologist -- a product of your times and culture. what can an artifact (or lack of one) say about how and what a culture reads and writes?
- the Philosopher -- i'm only human! how can the individual "know" something outside of language? what does it mean to only be able to "know" something within the limits of how we define it? what could this mean for definitions of literacy?
You are not restricted to exploring the roles in any particular order.
Resources
- Artists and Media Resources -- musicians, performance artists, movie starz, graphic artists. Links to downloadable media players and translators. How come some music is popular and some isn't? Why do different people listen to different kinds of music? What persuasions is Tori Amos working in her lyrics? How about Led Zeppelin?
- Classical Latin and Greek Resources -- okay, i admit it, i'm a geek. i LOVE this stuff! How do our language's ties to Latin affect how we think about literacy?
- Computer Stuff -- Lotsa links, mostly html and Mac stuff. How does working with computers affect our concepts of literacy? How do you predict that it'll affect them in the future? How do people "argue" on the net? How do they teach? Who are they talking to?
- Culture and Language Links -- Links to foreign language dictionaries online, listgroups particular to television shows, essays exploring Ebonics, and my current research about the African kanga are all linked here. Write a page to me explaining why that can be, and you'll get extra credit! (this is not a joke...)
- Friends -- free web email links, search engines for people, email address references, and the Home Pages of those I know and love. How are these people presented online? What do companies get by allowing you access to their files and by indexing names and addresses? Are you "findable" in hyperspace?
- General Reference -- these are links to search engines, dictionaries, style reference pages, and miscellaneous other stuff that previous classes have said should go here. email me with suggestions or complaints.
- Journals and Their Online Equivalents -- links to both online-only journals as well as "real" print-based journals. Who are their audiences? Who is likely to bookmark their kind of site? Who isn't? What links do they support from their sites?
- Libraries and Collections Online -- libraries and their online equivalents. Good starting places for research. How easy is it to find information at one of these sites? How much information do they present? Do they have "agendas" in their presentation of information?
- Mega-Sites -- these mega-sites are great starting places: they're searchable, and you can find about everything at them. If you're just looking to see what's out there, one of these sites is a good sample. How do people present themselves online? Every one of these sites is probably maintained by a single person; what voice do you hear talking at the site? To whom? What about? How do people use awards, links, pictures, etc. to "move" you?
- Personality and The Self Links -- These are links that suggest ways of seeing yourself as a situated individual. This includes links to horoscopes and personality tests as well as essays, homepages, etc. that somehow are evocative to me of conversations about the self and its situated vs. individual nature.
- Philosophy Links -- Rhetoric was first taught by philosophers like Plato and Aristotle. Even today, philosophy has a lot to say about how who we are helps us create meaning.
- Postcards and Presents -- show an electronic buddy that you care enough to send the second best.
- Rhetoric Links -- here's where i mostly study when i'm not on campus
- Schools and Universities -- mostly links to other writing departments, but it's a mixed bag.
- Shopping -- a few weirdo stores online
- Sports Pages -- mostly basketball, hockey, and boxing.
- Travel Links -- see the world
- Web Cams -- no nudies here! (unless the Woz is feeling frisky at his desk one day)
- Webquests -- more learning projex like this one (kinda...)
Evaluation
The unit 1 grade will depend on the following:All required and additional journal writing (whether done in bluebooks or email) will also be considered as demonstration of your creative process and will not go unrewarded.
- demonstration, by means of your reflection writing and posts, that you considered how the concept of literacy could be defined and influenced by the five specified views;
- a submission to the class magazine that will be "published" online;
- on-time completion of the five reflections and the resulting class magazine submission;
- attendance and participation in group discussions.
Definitions
the final writing that you turn in for the culminating grade for Unit 1 will be a submission to our online class magazine: it will be in the public space and you will be able (and perhaps expected) to link to it from your own personal homepages (more about that in class). it needs to be a result of how your thinking about language, both personal and public, and your thinking about literacy in all its trappings has been influenced by your classroom -- both physical and virtual -- practices.the game Twenty Questions is an heuristic. the game allows you, through a process of eliminating potential guesses by asking questions that can be answered yes or no, to arrive at a more educated answer to the question, "what am i thinking of?" than if you just started to guess randomly. a heuristic is a sort of framework or skeletal structure that you can "lay over" an issue or inquiry so that you can understand it or see it a different way. it can be seen as a way to limit information, or it can, as Aristotle's _Topoi_ (or "topics") explained, help us generate ideas that we may not have thought about if we hadn't used the heuristic. For example, as simple a question as "what does the other side think about that statement?" can introduce thinking that wouldn't take place if we didn't consider the question. therefore, if you always applied that question to any issue no matter what the content, that question could be seen as an heuristic for you.
a journal entry is considered completely expressive in nature. there is no expected page count or content. it is a private message or demonstration of your work in that i do not share it with the class without your consent. i expect you to use bluebooks and / or email for your journals in this class.
a post is a public "thinking out loud." we as readers anticipate that you are attempting to make meaning with us and we will try to understand you to the degree that it is possible for us. you are not expected to think through an entire argument before posting, but neither are you expected to waste our time with inanities like, "for sure!! :-)" as readers, our replies to posts will more likely question what you mean by something rather than why you take that stand.
i have created a group account for us at egroups.com. any message that you attempt to post there will first be forwarded to me. upon my approval of the message, it will be distributed by email (to those who have elected to receive it that way) and also archived on the site. the egroups site also provides us with chat space (for those of you with java-savvy computers), a class calendar (post your birthday!), and a group links page. if you want to do a study of how people feel about things, we can take anonymous polls on this site. (suggest a question for extra credit!) there is a space for you to create your own personal calendar and you can even start your own group space here for free! :-)
a response or "reflection" is more careful writing: although for the purposes of this class it is still informal writing, it needs to be more considered as to its organization and what it's saying. a response will probably be the result of a few pages of freewriting; it is an organized presentation of your ideas rather than an initial working through of them. it is expected to be an organized (not necessarily edited) 2-3 pages in length (more than one page, less than four, or between 550 and 1500 words). you must post your responses (5 are required in this three-week unit) onto our group vault page.
if you have ethical issues about putting your work out there on the net and wish not to do so, you MUST talk to me about it previous to the deadline.
a webquest is a project-based
inquiry. teachers use webquests especially in the early grades to facilitate
information-finding on the internet. a webquest has very particular parts
and a somewhat generic presentation. can you visit a few
webquests to see what the rhetorical demands of them as a group seem
to be?
Conclusion
As we move toward unit 2, the ethnography, keep in mind the ways that you are both connected to and removed from the site that you decide to observe. How does your situatedness play into the details that you notice first? the details that you don't notice at all? How can you use the awareness of your situatedness to perhaps see what you might not have seen before? How does this kind of awareness promote democratic action? How does it inhibit it?
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mdlattim@syr.edu