This class is designed to be flexible, meeting your needs based on your intended engagement with online spaces. The course culminates in a final project that asks you to apply the theories we discuss, as well as your own perspectives and insights, into a product that demonstrates your critical digital literacies in resistance to online surveillance and privacy threats.
Because this class holds ENG 5020 (graduate) or ENG 2020 and 3005 (undergraduate) as prerequisites, you should already possess facility with rhetorical analysis, multiple literacies, and genre conventions. Further, because this is a 4000/5000-level course designed for English and Education/Writing majors, you should produce insightful, structured, polished writing that you revise and proofread prior to turning in.
Blog Posts (x13)
For each of your weekly reading assignments, you will create a blog post response. These posts serve as conversation starters, sharing your thinking with the class. They also require you to process and engage with the material. Our in-class discussions will focus on connecting text with other material and exploring the implications of the theories we survey. You will need to digest each week’s material before coming to class so our conversations can be productive and rewarding.
Because your work will be publicly visible, you’ll need to think carefully about audience. Though you’ll write these posts primarily for an audience of your colleagues, anyone on the Internet can access your work. We’ll talk about who is and is not likely to see your ideas, and that awareness will help you tailor your writing. It’s possible that the authors of our readings might even drop by and comment on our discussions. (I have commented on blog posts made by students at other institutions who respond to my publications.)
Search Engine Optimization (Optional)
In order to be seen by readers outside our class, our blog needs to be attractive to search engines. (How often do you visit a site that’s not suggested to you by your search engine of choice?) Successful blogs—including those dreadful recipe blogs we’ve all seen—use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to improve the likelihood that they’ll appear near the top of search results when people look for the content on the blog.
Our class blog is no different—we want to be relevant to the discussion of writing studies—so I’ve added a behind-the-scenes tool to help keep SEO and post readability in mind. When you create a blog entry, you can see how good your post looks to search engines and get pointers on improvement. Getting good SEO or readability scores are completely optional in this class, but they’re a clear way to keep multiple audiences in mind as you write and learn.
Pre-Publish Checklists
Because our blog is publicly visible, it needs to be accessible to any visitors. For example, any images included in a post must include alt text so visually impaired visitors can still understand the content. To help address needs such as those, our blog includes pre-publishing checklists to make sure nobody forgets anything. Mostly, though, the checklists work to ensure consistency and functionality on our blog. At first, some of these requirements might cause a little frustration. However, you’ll quickly get into the habit of making your content accessible and connected.
All told, these are the requirements each blog post must meet:
- Title must be ≥ 10 characters long
- Content must be ≥ 300 words
- Post must be assigned to 1 category, filing it with the right homework assignment
- The post’s excerpt must be 120–155 characters (not words!) long
- Any links used must be valid (no broken/dead links)
- Any images used must include alt text for accessibility
- Post must include a Featured Image
Synthesis Papers (×4)
In addition to weekly blog posts, you write a synthesis paper at the end of each unit of study: privacy, surveillance, identity, and resistance. (See details and dates on the calendars page.) The purpose of each synthesis paper is to bring together the concepts from all the readings done during that module. You’ll use the authors’ ideas to generate your own new conclusion or theory and show how the authors support your thinking.
Objectives
By successfully completing the synthesis assignment, you will:
- Extend course readings into a broader theoretical framework
- Apply class discussions to your thinking
- Synthesize significant concepts/theories of digital literacy
- Practice articulating your ideas as you refine them
Procedure
Complete the following steps in order to create an effective synthesis paper:
- Review the recent readings and class discussions and come to a conclusion about the ideas we’ve discussed. This conclusion can be general or specific, theoretical or applied. But it must be clearly articulated. (In other words, include a strong thesis statement articulated early in your response.)
- Apply the content of this course to a specific issue. This is your chance to experiment with ideas and think critically about something of interest to you. If you fixate/obsess over something we’ve discussed, let that focus your work. If you see a way our discussion topics apply outside class or academia, let that motivate your response. (In other words, you’ll be given a broad direction; the narrow issue you address is yours to choose.)
- Make connections among the source material we’ve considered in class, as well as any other outside sources you deem relevant. This assignment is a synthesis, not an analysis, so create a cohesive whole based on your ideas.
- Explain your thinking in an essay (audience: classmates and instructor at minimum; optionally website/blog readers) that asserts your conclusion and supports it with evidence, examples, and related texts.
Topics
The four synthesis papers will address these broad topics, in this order:
- Privacy: Define the core values that guide your ethical actions, then apply those values to critical digital literacy.
- Surveillance: Use theories and readings discussed in class to position your understanding of online surveillance and privacy.
- Identity: In the context of the course readings and your lived experience, explain how your sense of identity is constructed by/within, and interacts with, your digital literacies.
- Resistance: Research privacy policies or a tool to protect one’s identity online and investigate and theorize a tactic of response to your personal ethical concerns.
Book Report
Each member of class will choose one week’s topic to take the lead on during the semester. You’ll sign up for your topic on the first day of class. Each topic has a full-length nonfiction book associated with it, and each week’s presenter is responsible for:
- Presenting to class the details of the book, leading discussion and engaging your colleagues (plan to be in charge for 90 minutes, but do not plan to lecture through all of it)
- Putting the author’s ideas in context of
- critical digital literacies overall,
- the unit containing the text, and
- other texts discussed in class
- Distributing a handout to the class that helps the audience process the book’s central concepts and arguments
Final Project
Standard Option: Textbook Chapter
We will create a textbook to be used by students in future sections of ENG 5045. Your chapter will present one week’s material (based on the book you selected to report on) in a manner appropriate for, and accessible to, students enrolled in this class. Specific details will be generated in class, but you can expect the chapter to be ~2,500 words and include review and discussion questions, as appropriate.
Scholarly Option: Journal Article
If you intend to remain in academia after obtaining your degree, this option will help you build your CV and publication history. Assert a scholarly argument in response to a specific threat to online privacy. Present your argument in the form of an article suitable for publication in a specific online journal of your choosing.