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Week 10: Online Advocacy, a Guest Lecture, and Planning the Rest of Our Semester

I hope Wednesday’s peer critique exercise helped you identify a few places in your tap essays that could benefit from revision. Between now and next Monday, when this project is due, I hope you will share your essays will a select group of friends and classmates who are willing to give you additional feedback to help you fine-tune your essays. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with a writing format where little details matter as much as they do in Tapestry, so even after you’ve finalized your text and your images, keep working on the small, subtle aspects of your essays. I know that attention to detail will pay off when you release your essays into the wild next week.

Before you come to class on Monday, please email me the URL for your tap essay and upload all of your resources for this project to your shared Google Drive folder, as described on the assignment sheet. Once Unit #2 is behind us, I’ll introduce our two remaining projects (which are interconnected) and we’ll start making plans for those assignments. Here’s what you need to do to prepare for class:

  • On Monday, we will finish Net Smart, so please read pages 191–253 before you come to class. After we conclude our discussion, I will introduce Unit #3, the Multimodal Rhetorical Analysis, and Unit #4, the Online Advocacy Project.
  • On Wednesday, we will have a guest lecture from a visiting scholar, so please make sure you are on time, and please do whatever you can to make her feel welcome at Virginia Tech. I have pushed back our reading assignment until next Monday, so you only need to do two things before class: (1) Select four online advocacy projects that you are interested in analyzing for your Unit #3 project, and (2) decide whether you would prefer to complete Unit #4 in small groups or as an entire class. We will try to make a decision on this second point after the guest lecture.

I will be at a conference for the next few days, but I will try to check email at least once a day, so let me know if you need anything before Monday. Otherwise, good luck polishing your tap essays!