The Mashup (250 points or 25% of total grade)
The You Tube assignment was meant for you to explore and practice basic argumentative strategies in alphabetic writing, and in a largely informal forum. With the video mashup assignment, you are remediating argumentation within the highly visual and auditory medium of video.
As you gather, summarize, and reflect on sources that you assemble together in your annotated bibliography--and use the arguments you find during the You Tube exercise--your job will be to locate an anomaly worthy of investigating and responding to through producing a video mashup.
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This assignment is adapted from Dr. Bill Wolff's mashup assignment from his fall 2012 Writing, Research, and Technology course.
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Assignment Description
This assignment is going to ask you to think expansively about an historical and/or contemporary subject that you feel strongly about and compose a mashup of video, audio, and still image texts in an attempt to make a rhetorically savvy and visually complex social/cultural critical commentary or argument. (Windows users, please see this about video editor options.) The mashups you create must draw from at least two kinds of sources:
The openness of this assignment requires a great deal of student self-direction and critical conceptualization. The objectives of this assignment are:
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On Possible Topics Issues
The topic issue you choose for this assignment should challenge you in new ways; it should force you to take risks; it should take you out of your comfort zone. All topics/issues must be approved by me. Over-used topics/issues that have become tired and are prone to cliche, such as abortion and legalizing marijuana, will not be approved. Nor will interesting issues tackled in uninteresting ways be approved.
Perhaps, for example, you can’t stand the blather coming out of the mouths of cable TV news correspondents and you think it is causing the decline of civility in our society. Or, maybe you want to decry how political campaigns have debased the values and practices necessary for a healthy democracy. Or, maybe you’re fed up with all the waste that contemporary cultures create. Or maybe you're concerned about the use of drones or the increase in surveillance by our government. Or you're displeased about the state of race relations, the state of the education system, and so on—and the inability for people to actually talk about what is happening. Or, you are wondering about the fate of humanity as it tumbles ever forward in some sort of direction. These are all "contexts" that trigger purposes to compensate for the problems that seem to persist and call for solutions.
The most important thing, however, is that you locate a topic, idea, or issue that you feel strongly about, are curious about, and will force you to take risks—risks not merely in terms of how you are composing but also the kinds of subjects you will be considering and arguments you will be making.
"Return to Saucer" by Timothy Conan Young is an excellent example of an "audio" mashup:
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Crucial to formulating a research question is for you to find something anomalous and strange: something that does not admit easy explanations, and that in fact calls for various and even opposing arguments to play out.
As you begin your research, you will need to identify and articulate what your prejudices are in the matter, which are given by a controlling value. For instance, for some, their prejudice (controlling value) concerning technology is that its development always frees up human beings to pursue extraordinary accomplishments that will only improve the quality of life for all. Such a prejudice would not willingly entertain Joy's controlling value, and so someone like Joy would have to find ways to appeal to this point of view.
Joy's AnomalyFor instance, the anomaly Bill Joy saw--which drove him to write "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us"--was perhaps that the zeal creators of new technologies possess blinds them to the unintentional, but potentially harmful consequences that could emerge with the development of GNR technologies.
One way we might articulate his question would be: what is the best way to deal with technologies in development that could produce devastating consequences if pursued without forethought?
Dealing with divergent controlling valuesIt is imperative for you to articulate your various prejudices in the matter and to bring these viewpoints into conversation with other researched perspectives. This is what we have been practicing with the YouTube assignment. And you will need to practice this in the video mashup.
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Specifics for the Final Video
Your final video must end with the following:
Specifics when Uploading the Final Video to YouTube
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For Windows usersAll versions of Windows since XP have come with a version of a basic video editing software, Movie Maker. Here is a breakdown of the versions:
mac usersiMovie HD, ’08, and ’09 have their own special quirks and glitches, but overall they are much more robust and stable than Windows Movie Maker.
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