(complete these preliminary steps during the first day of class):
1) If you haven't yet, create a Twitter account and begin following me. In addition, please visit Settings and click on Mobile to connect your cell phone to Twitter, and download the Twitter app to your phone.
3) Whenever you are tweeting anything for the course in general, use the hashtag: #wrts15d. However, for this tweeting maxims assignment, just use #wrtm.
4) On your Weebly site, create an "assignments" tab under which you will subordinate tabs for "tweeting maxims." Subordinated to the "tweeting maxims" page will be: "found maxims" and "original maxims." However, if you are limited to 5 pages on a weebly free site, then all three can be combined into one.
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Twitter and live tweeting
Blogging is when people publish their ideas for a (mostly) unknown audience in posts of any length. Twittering (or micro-blogging) is when people publish their ideas in a much shorter format to a known audience. The Twitter tweet (the name of each post) is 140 characters long. Just as with blogging, one cannot fully grasp the medium without engaging with it. So, we are going to engage it over the course of the semester, first, as a way to engage our readings outside of class and, second, as a way to connect to people who are in fields or have a general interest in areas relating to our research project. These connections will lead us to learning more about our topic from more diverse means than we could have ever thought. It will also provide us with the opportunity to interview someone associated with our research topic (a requirement of the assignment).
So, to get this project under way, we are going to complete the following:
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Live-Tweeting Texts and Assignments
(This portion of the assignment is stolen and modified from Mark Sample at George Mason University, who stole it from Zach Whalen at the University of Mary Washington.)
Reading and working on assignments are often perceived as a solitary experience but in our networked society it need not be. In order to help us all engage with the texts and our activities outside of class, and create a collective experience of our workings, I would like you to “live tweet” as you read / watch the assigned texts and work on assignments, posting to Twitter whatever comes to your mind as you read the texts and work on the assignments. By “whatever comes to your mind” I mean things that are about the text and/or what you are working on. Try to limit tweets like, “This article is boring. #yawn,” as such tweets will make you look foolish and show little thought about the text itself. You should @reply to other class members frequently so that we can begin discussions about the texts and what you’re working on outside of the classroom and then continue those discussions when we meet in the classroom.
Topics to tweet from
There is no required number of tweets to “live-tweet”; but the more you tweet the more engaged the class can and will become in a dialogue outside the class. Do, however, be sure to make it clear which reading or assignment you’re tweeting about. This can be done in the content of the tweet or by using a hashtag for an author’s name (such as #shirky), as noted in the schedule. This is important because we want to be sure we know which text you’re tweeting about.
Begin live-tweeting starting with the first assigned texts and continue until you hand the final draft of the last assignment of the semester. |