powerpoint templates unexpected illiteracies and clunkiness: imagining ‘writing for the web’ for...
DESCRIPTION
Powerpoint Templates Page 3 Introduction This is a story about instructor expectations and challenges to such expectations. It also raises questions about what it means to write well in the digital age and what’s required to teach writing in this context.TRANSCRIPT
Powerpoint Templates
Unexpected Illiteracies and Clunkiness: Imagining ‘Writing for the Web’ for English Majors
Anne Milne, English DepartmentUniversity of Toronto Scarborough
Powerpoint Templates Page 2
Acknowledgments• The students of ENGC37 (Literature &
Culture 1750-1830), Winter 2015• Kirsta Stapelfeldt, UTSC Library, Digital
Scholarship Unit• Chad Crichton, UTSC Library, Liaison
Librarian for English and Coordinator - Reference, Research and Instruction
• Nancy Johnston, UTSC Writing Centre and Centre for Teaching and Learning
• Tom Robles, UTSC Writing Centre.
Powerpoint Templates Page 3
Introduction
This is a story about instructor expectations and challenges to such expectations. It also raises questions about what it means to write well in the digital age and what’s required to teach writing in this context.
Powerpoint Templates Page 4
As a prof., I rely on experience to anchor my pedagogical practice…but I live & die by my hare-brained
schemes.
Powerpoint Templates Page 5
The Assignment: A website illuminating William Hogarth’s “A Harlot’s
Progress”, 1732 (worth 35% of the final grade)There were 30 students in this 3rd year class.
We created 5 teams of 6 students each. Four teams had an assigned topic (People and Places, for example) and the fifth team was the editorial team, assigned to write the introduction, Hogarth biography, edit student writing, and set standards for the website. Each content team had to research and write 12 annotations (2 per engraving) plus a 300 word collaborative essay (draft & redraft).
Powerpoint Templates Page 6
Initial Student Response:“Sweet!, We only have to write a few captions of 25-50 words each and a 300 word collaborative essay!”
Later they said: “Writing captions is the hardest assignment we’ve ever had.”
Powerpoint Templates Page 10
Existing sources were kinda, sorta helpful…
• Most sources are business-oriented (writing to sell).
• The ’Less is More’ ideology embraced by these sources denigrates complexity.
• Ungrammatical approaches are promoted. Writers are encouraged to use sentence fragments, for example.
Powerpoint Templates Page 11
Eye-tracking research suggests that web users don’t read (much)Are we as university instructors wasting our
time ‘writing for the web’ and teaching students how to do it?
Can we/how can we intervene? Are we creating ‘writing for the web’ 3.0?
What does it mean to generate and deliver content on the internet? How are complex ideas received?
Powerpoint Templates Page 12
Conclusions; Or, Things I didn’t think of (or only sort of thought of)
1. Who is the actual audience for the website? 2. What is the ‘critical content’ and where
should we place it? 3. We emphasized clarity, concision, & limited
jargon, but what about teaching headline writing, subheads & chunking?
4. What kinds of writing do search engines like?
5. What role(s) should links play?
Powerpoint Templates Page 13
THIS PRESENTATION WAS PART OF THE DIGITAL PEDAGOGY INSTITUTE HELD AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO SCARBOROUGH AND RYERSON UNIVERSITY, AUGUST 19-21, 2015.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.