Course Description and Objectives

This writing-intensive course will explore musical composition as a metaphor for dynamic and group collaboration in diverse media. Students will learn and share compositional strategies by writing, designing, and performing multimedia compositions together, in wiki and in person. As we write to, for, and with each other, we will frequently have occasion to carefully consider the social, creative, and technological issues that regulate community formation, policy, and collective action in the arts and sciences, today.

For starters, we will compose a wiki, a common space where we will share ideas, practice writing daily, form into clusters, and determine social and compositional outcomes for our semester's work. By means of a series of informal and formal grading assignments, we will emphasize the importance of rhetorical choices in technical writing, and rehearse traditional narratival, definitional, evaluative, causal, and problem-solving strategies of communication that will help us analyze and build dynamic and accessible web spaces comprised of text, images, and sound.

Workshopping and remixing our wiki as it grows will facilitate cluster formation, and each group/band/team of writers will look to the compositional processes, forms, and idioms of diverse fields of production (drama, musical performance, science and industry, diy culture) for models and templates. This course welcomes all compositional strategies, and will work closely with rhetoric, a metadiscipline that works like glue, connecting listeners, performers, and composers, always doing its part in the infrastructure of the disciplines, both humanities and science-based. Rhetoric is usually understood as a way of transforming the feelings, ideas and opinions of others, but you can use rhetoric as an investigative tool as well. For example, by studying the language, sounds, and images used in your field of study or ethical paradigm, you will learn a great deal about what that field of study takes for granted, which will help you learn to learn.

In ENC 4311, you will write for persuasion - you will attempt to move someone to do something, such as change their mind. And you will write for inquiry - by putting ideas into different contexts and forms, you will explore problems and find unexpected solutions. The first axiom of this course is this: think practically about what you are trying to do with words, images, tone, and moods. Composition is the practice of finding the right mixture for any given goal. Depending on the foci that emerge in each group project, students can experiment with different roles--professional and technical writers, artists, scholars, and activists--and in these modes, students will give presentations, design open-ended wiki presences, and alter formatting templates according to audience needs for final projects in a .pdf format.

ENC 4311 is open to majors and nonmajors alike, and this mixture promotes peer-learning and project building. Sharing diverse interests as we intersect on our course wiki will allow us to rehearse, in formal assignments, idiom translation skills that are the hallmark of an interdisciplinary university community. Such communicative peformances thread through the warp and woof of artistic and technological development in the 21st century.

By all accounts, we live in an ecosystem under stress and burgeoning with information, and experimenting with multimedia composition (arranging sounds, images, and text) will help you learn techniques of attention management in diverse technical writing scenarios. Information has been defined by cyberneticist Gregory Bateson as "the difference that makes a difference", so this course will ask you to refine old techniques and learn new strategies to help you differentiate all of the information you browse and produce. In information rich-contexts notorious for unpredictible network effects, creating patterns that mix sound, image, and text will help us find our writing rhythm in ecologies of continual and often sudden change.

minimum expectations

1. Find and experiment with patterns of information - which may incorporate text, images, and sound - that most persuasively or creatively engage a particular context and idiom.

2. Cultivate a manner of working with dynamic and abundant information that allows you to dedicate attention to the repeatable and sharable methods you select and employ in diverse composing processes.

3. Arrange and display material to simplify technical information, by leveraging standard formats and by experimenting with standard formats, as well.

4. Evaluate and revise our course wiki to make sure that our writing proceeds towards measurable outcomes.

5. Collaborate effectively with your peers as a community of writers who provide feedback on each others’ work, and, in small "bands" working towards common outcomes, create shared and interactive ideation space.

6. Test and experiment with diverse writing adjuncts, as a way to both learn about and compose in diverse media formats.

Prosody Workshops, Peer-Review, and Response-able Participation

We will dedicate several sessions of ENC 4311 to workshopping our writing as it happens. Each of us must tune into our wiki's recent changes page and revise our wikis daily. Furthermore, in-class participation will depend on staying in tune with our wiki's activity, and it all begins by reading and responding to each others' writing. Although daily "blogs," responses to peer "blogging," and early versions of working drafts need not be “polished,” our early-and-often uploads should address the issues of the day, as well as address and solicit feedback from your peers. Under no circumstances will I accept a “final” version of a major assignment (the connecting "unit assignments" that thread throughout our course and accrete into final projects) unless I have seen a regular rhetorical process. Also note that if you show up to class on the day an important draft is due without your draft work (or with draft work that is incomplete), this will count as an absence.

Attendance, Participation, and Grades

Attendance in this course is required. While it is understood that emergencies / University-sanctioned activities may arise which result in your missing one or more classes, frequent absences will negatively affect your final grade. As a rule, one or two absences will have little impact on your final grade, assuming you participate enthusiastically when you are in class and realize you are responsible for all material covered during the missed class(es). In the event that your prepared attendance, or lack thereof, becomes a problem, I will ask you to meet with me to discuss our options. These options may include a failing grade or a lower grade than you might have earned had you attended classes regularly. In short: show up prepared to talk and write about the wiki's recent changes.

Participation--timely wiki posts, prepared attendance, and peer-grading performance--will account for 33 and 1/3% of your final grade, unit assignments another 33 and 1/3%, and final projects will fill out the scale.

ENC 4311 explores and depends on an evaluation process known as peer-grading. Response-able and consistent interaction in wiki will help us create rubrics for each unit assignment, and each student will perform and benefit from multiple evaluations for each unit assignment. The instructor will in turn grade these performances, and will also, where necessary and at his discretion, override any "off-the-mark" peer-assigned grades.

Readings

At first, the calendar syllabus will prime the pump with links and suggested resources, but as our wiki evolves, it will become the primary text. As our wiki grows, refactoring and redesigning the resources we gather for ease of use will garner full writing credit. In addition, we will consult two guidebooks, both available at the Bayboro Bookstore:

*McLoud, Scott (1993). Understanding comics. New York: Kitchen Sink Press.

*Weston, Anthony (2000). A Rulebook for Arguments. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.

Tools and Resources

CommonsStudio : free online guidebooks and writing resources, here.

Each student must also purchase a hand-held cassette recorder, a cheap computer microphone, and a blank cassette.

Information Management

Please back up everything you write for this course. You should either write your wiki posts in a word processor and save before posting. Or, if you like the feel of writing directly in wiki, cut and paste your work to an open word processing window, saving a back-up version in this way as you proceed. Information technologies carry a trace of instability, so it is always good to have redundancy in your writing process: make copies and put them in different places!

Freedom of Speech and Cognitive Liberty

As you will see, classrooms and wikis are both spaces devoted to free inquiry. This is a rhetorical space, one where composers are response-able to each other: they think and write in response to each other, and not to a preconceived notion of each other. Assume the best in those you study with and be generous with your respect, and you will teach them to respond in kind.

The First Amendment of The United States Constitution

Religious observance absence policy

Students who find a ENC 4311 meeting time in conflict with a major religious observance must provide notice of the date(s) to the instructor, in writing, by the second class meeting.

Disability access policy

In my capacity as instructor in ENC 4311, I will do everything I can to make fully available the educational resources we use and create in section 691. Any student with a disability should be encouraged to meet with the instructor privately during the first week of class to discuss accommodations. Each student must bring a current Memorandum of Accommodations from the Office of Student Disability.