David’s posts

Final reflective assignment

Posted by David

Due: Monday, May 5 at 11:59pm

Now that you’ve showed the class your group projects and seen all of your classmates’ projects, I want you to do a final bit of reflection before the semester’s work comes to an end. I want you to write a post to your blog that includes the following (not necessarily in order–best if you do this in the form of full paragraphs and not just as a list):

  • A link to your group’s comic project.
  • A visual piece of that comic project that serves as the featured image for your post.
  • A paragraph of text in which you consider what role(s) you played within the group as you completed that project. This paragraph should not so much be a justification of what you did, but more an analysis of what skills you brought to the project and how you approached the task.
  • A consideration of one of the other group’s comic project (which should include a link to the project and at least a few sentences with what you find interesting about it or what you learned from the way that group approached the task).
  • And, finally, some discussion about how this final project relates to the other work you’ve done this semester. What did you learn from making the comic? How did it fit within the span of the other assignments?

Between now and Wednesday of next week, I will go back through all of your sites and re-read all of your projects as I compile final grades. You should also make sure that all of your major assignments are complete, easily found via your main page, that all the parts are there, and that they look the way you want them to. Let me know if you have any questions.

Some examples of visualizing an argument

Posted by David

Check out Giulia Forsythe’s description of her visual notes. You can make a comic that includes a certain amount of these sort of doodles, too. That’s not exactly the same thing as the comics we’ve read this semester, but it’s also a form of visualizing complex arguments.

Sir Ken Robinson, “Changing Education Paradigms” by RSAnimate.

Slavoj Zizek,”First as Tragedy, Then as Farce” by RSAnimate.

 

This week

Posted by David

As I said in class last week, we are finished with formal reading assignments for this class and will spend our time in the rest of our meetings with studio time working on the final projects. Your Vietnamerica essays are due on Thursday, so you should have a solid draft by the time we have class tomorrow afternoon. If questions arise while you work on the essay, we can discuss those tomrrow.

Your reading assignment for tomorrow is just to make certain that you have very carefully read and thought about the essay that you will be working on for the group projects. You should each make your own reverse outline for the article that your group will be turning into a comic. If you identify the places where the article makes major shifts, then you can map out what kind of shifts occur–what does it shift from and to what? Come to class with an understanding of what you see as the major pieces of the article–be able to identify and describe the article’s major claims, subordinate claims, and what evidence is used to support claims.