Syllabus

[Downloadable Syllabus (.pdf)]

RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION: MEDIA AND THEIR EFFECTS
ENGLISH 150-H
Spring 2009

ROOM AND TIME: Creighton Hall 126, MWF: 11:30 AM – 12:20 PM
OFFICE HOURS: M: 9:30-11:30 AM; W: 1:30 – 3:30 PM, and & by appointment
OFFICE: Creighton Hall 135 G
OFFICE PHONE: 280-3458

Any shift in the traffic of information can create not only new thoughts, but new ways of thnking.
—Paul Miller, AKA DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Rhythm Science.

It is impossible to understand social and cultural changes without a knowledge of the workings of media.
—Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage.

First, we must learn to understand learning and work in new ways: Creativity is no longer the production of original texts, but the ability to gather, filter, rearrange, and construct new texts—symbolic-analytic work, articulations.
—Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Datacloud.

COURSE OVERVIEW AND OBJECTIVES
English 150 is about how we make meaning. It is about taking ideas, analyzing and interpreting those ideas, and using them to communicate new ideas, new meanings. This process involves exploration, reading, observation, and research; comprehension, analysis, interpretation, and critique; and, ultimately, presentation of your own ideas, shaped for different contexts, audiences, and media. More specifically, English 150 is designed to introduce you to college-level writing and rhetorical analysis, with an emphasis on strategies of composition, including invention, organization and development, and sentence and paragraph structuring.

As a themed course, we will explore the issue of media and its effects, focusing Marshall McLuhan’s argument that the “medium is the message,” by which he meant that the forms our communications take (i.e, printed books, radio broadcasts, text messages, web sites) have a larger affect on society—how we think, work, interact, communicate, organize, construct, and participate—than the ideas expressed in those communications. Using McLuhan’s ideas as a framework for exploring media and their effects, we will use both traditional and digital technologies to engage in a number of activities including representing ideas through playlists; composing with words and images; rhetorically analyzing texts; and exploring how new compositional tools can both support traditional academic literacy and expand our notions of academic work.

Specific goals include the following:

TEXTS AND MATERIALS

Required Texts

Materials

GRADING
Please see the attached Grading Contract (.pdf) for specific information on the grading criteria for this course. The Creighton College of Arts and Sciences only has the following grades: A, B+, B, C+, C, D, and F. A grade of A/F may be submitted for excessive absences.

COURSE POLICIES

Academic Honesty
Students are expected to abide by the Academic Honesty Policy as presented in the 2008-2009 Student Handbook, available for download from http://www2.creighton.edu/studentservices/centerforstudentintegrity/.

In short, plagiarism in all its forms (word-for-word copying, the mosaic, and uncited paraphrases), cheating, unauthorized collaboration, submitting work produced in whole or part by others, and other violations of the academic honesty policy will be prosecuted as per the guidelines in the 2008-2009 Student Handbook and the Creighton College of Arts and Sciences Academic Honesty Procedures, with instructor imposed sanctions ranging from a zero for the assignment to a failing grade for the course.

In practical terms, this means that you should produce the work you submit and acknowledge your engagement with the ideas of others. If you consult an encyclopedia for information, cite it. If you find an idea in something you read, even if you do not copy the text word-for-word, cite that source. If you use someone else’s words, put quotes around them and cite them, including the words of your fellow classmates. If you use an image from the Web or a printed source, attribute that source. You should acknowledge sources from the start, even if they are in the public domain or are under Creative Commons licenses. Plagiarism is plagiarism whether it is in a draft or in the final product. If you are unsure whether or not you should cite something, ask your instructor. If you do not have time to discuss the issue with your instructor, cite first and ask later, or, at the very least, include a brief cover letter with your assignment in which you indicate the issue in question.

For the purposes of this course collaboration is not collusion (unauthorized collaboration) and collusion is not collaboration. When you collaborate, you discuss; when you collude, you pass off as yours work that is not your own. While having someone rewrite or “fix-up” your paper for you is collusion, having someone peer-review or proof-read your work is not. To avoid collusion, ask yourself this question: is this person pointing out for me problems to rewrite and/or correct myself, or is this person rewriting and/or correcting these problems for me? The former falls under collaboration, the latter under collusion. For the purposes of this class, I ask that you indicate in a cover letter any help you receive with your work from people outside the class, explaining what they did (marked typos, suggested an additional example, suggested that you rearrange your supporting points, etc.) and what you did in response. The point, again, is to make sure that they’re not doing the work for you, and that you do due dilligence in doing your own work and citing sources of information and ideas.

While issues of academic honesty are far from simple, there are three simple things you can do to avoid most problems with academic honesty: Do you own work, cite your sources, and ask when you are unsure.

Attendance, Participation, and Late Policy
You are expected to attend and fully participate in at least 86% of our scheduled classes (that’s 35 of our 41 scheduled sessions). You may miss, for whatever reason, six scheduled class sessions. As attendance equates to participation for this class, it is not enough for you to just come to class. You need to come to class prepared. Coming to class unprepared is the same as missing class. Attendance will be taken via a sign-up sheet that will be passed around at the start of every class. It is your responsibility to make sure you sign in.

You are expected to come to class on time. Arriving late two or thee times in a semester is understandable, but coming to class late habitually is not. If you arrive after the sign-up sheet has been passed around, you will need to see me at the end of class to sign in.

It you miss or are late to class, it is your responsibility to find out what you missed, if there are any changes to the schedule or announcements made in class, etc. Such information will be posted on the course web site.

Class Cancellation Policy
In the unlikely event that I need to cancel class at the last minute, I will notify the English Department which will post an official message outside the classroom door, and if all possible, I will also announce the cancellation via email and on the course web site. If you are in doubt as to whether or not I have canceled class (there’s a note outside the classroom but I haven’t emailed an announcement or posted one to the course web site), I strongly recommend checking with the English Department office.

File Management and Data Backup Policy
As you will submit a portfolio at both the midterm and at the end of the course, you will want to keep copies of all your work, whether electronic or in physical form. Chapter 2 of Portfolio Keeping includes a good discussion on creating a working folder to store physical copies and maintaining multiple drafts of electronic documents.

As part of managing your files well, you will want to keep backups of your electronic data separate from your computer’s hard drive and any portable storage devise you carry to class or a computer lab. Hard drives crash, computers get ripped off, laptop power cords fail, USB drives get lost (or even eaten by dogs). Despite my repeated pleas for making backup copies of all work, I have had students lose their only copies of a project for each of the reasons listed above (and by other means as well). You want to keep backup copies of your work so this does not happen to you.

You might also consider not keeping your backup next to or with your computer. Consider, for instance, what recently happened to director Francis Ford Coppola. While he backed up his files, he kept the backup device with his computer and both were stolen at the same time, meaning he lost all his projects <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7019644.stm>. Keeping a printed out copy of important files can also help prevent a complete loss of your files.

I’d be happy to discuss file management and data backup strategies in class.

Program Assessment
In order to help the Composition Program assess how it is doing in meeting its goals, you will be asked to submit some of your work at the end of the term for the Program Assessment. While these pieces will be projects you create for this course, they will be submitted separately from any material you are asked to submit for the course such as the Final Portfolio. The Composition Program asks that:

  1. You submit two pieces of writing of your choosing that demonstrate your ability to work successfully within distinct rhetorical contexts. This might include pieces of different genres (i.e. personal and analytical or narrative and argumentative) or it might include pieces written for different audiences or reasons. Any project is fine.
  2. For one of the above pieces, please include both the initial and the final draft. If you wrote an accompanying writer’s note explaining or reflecting on the choices made in your writing, please include that as well.

Students with Special Needs
As each person in this class learns differently, please let me know in the first days of term if you will require any special accommodations in order to participate fully in the course.

If you need more specialized accommodations than I’m able to initially provide, please notify the Coordinator of the university’s Office of Disability Accommodations (ODA), provide documentation of the disability, and complete a written needs assessment. Once acceptable documentation of a disability is on file, reasonable accommodations will be provided. To learn more, visit the ODA at http://www.creighton.edu/EOP/Disability.html, call them at 280-2749, or visit the office on the 4th floor of the Harper Center. Confidentiality will be observed in all inquiries.

Writing Center
While one of my jobs is to help each of you with your writing, I am unable to provide as much one-on-one assistance as I would like or as you may need. Therefore, all students, regardless of their writing ability, are strongly encouraged to make use of the Writing Center, which provides free one-on-one writing consultations for all members of the Creighton community. For more information and/or to make an appointment, please see http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/english/writcen.htm. The Writing Center is located in Creighton Hall 136.

This syllabus is subject to change. All changes will be announced in class, on the course web site, and via email.