Tips for the Media Creators

Below are some suggestions for you about your projects.

1. As with the book review, revisions are a good idea. This is not one and done. You can send me a partial for my reaction. That's fine. Unlike the book review, where I suggested you read other book reviews as a model, there is no model here. So we make it up as we go along. A couple of you after class said you were thinking about 4 minutes for the presentation. (I had in mind about 2 - 2.5 minutes). I don't know how to resolve this in an objective way, so the question I'll pose is does the presentation draw the viewer in?

2. On that question economists teach - there's no accounting for taste. So I expect you to differ in your way of answering that question. And I think for generational if not other reasons (those likely matter too) my taste will be quite different from yours. You should still try to please yourself in making your creation, I just want to state the obvious, that I may react to it differently than you anticipate.

3. Also, regarding mental models, I think it might be helpful for you to consider TV commercials (if you watch any TV) or short YouTube videos (if you watch any of those) and which ones you like and why you find them affective. My favorites from the last several years have been the Guinness commercials with the cardboard cutout figures using the expression "brilliant" as a way to frame the ideas. I thought those were funny, economical in production, and to the point. Our genre is different, but you might borrow from commercials you like what values you are trying to deliver on in your piece.

Now some points on the technology itself.

1. We said you'd hyperlink each image to its source. We want to give attribution if at all possible.

2. Putting a border around images is optional to meet your own aesthetic, but I personally like them as a way to distinguish the image from the background.

3. Assuming you are using slideshare - the music file has to be somewhere else on the Web (like in your Netfiles account). Then you need to let slideshare know about its location.

4. There is a question of whether you build the narrative first and match a song to it or if it you have the song and build a narrative that fits it. I believe in some iteration on that. You might struggle a bit if you build a complete narrative and then try to find a song to match it.

And some points on Copyright/Fair Use

1. You have a fair use argument to make about using copyrighted content without seeking permission from the copyright owner. What you are making is for an educational reason. Your creation also likely won't have any impact whatsoever on the market for the content that you use.

2. For the images, you have a better case if you have many different sources than all from one source.

3. Don't use images that have a watermark on them. Don't take a screen shot of an image where the poster has gone to some effort to make the image hard to copy (disabling the right click function.)

4. For the music, finding free, instrumental only versions of familiar songs may be a bit of a challenge. Time is money (even for students who don't have very much money). A single song purchase is not that expensive.

5. If you use the song for your presentation, but otherwise don't try to redistribute to others, you are probably ok.

6. I've told some or all of you about music in the public domain, which is fine, but it might be less recognizable. So you might not communicate as well by choosing it. If you can find well recognized public domain music that communicates the message you want, you've got a goldmine. It might very well exist but could take some time to find.

Good luck.

PowerPoint Template

This is here to assist you with the multimedia project, should you choose to do that for the second project. Will cover use of this template in the second hour today.

The bare bones about the book review

For the 396 students here is a list of what you will be doing for the next four weeks on the first writing project.

1. You will produce an essay of at least 5 pages (if written in MS Word, for example).

2. The essay will be produced via a process of drafts and revisions. Your final submission after the four weeks will be a second draft, a third draft, or even a fourth draft. It will not be a first draft.

3. I will give you feedback between revision on which you will base your next version.

4. Before you start in on the drafts, you will produce a one pager (called a precis) which explains your plan for the the essay.

5. Your essay will be in some significant part about one of the books we are reading this semester. You should not aim to summarize the entire book, but you might want to do something of that sort for a particular chapter and then zero in on that.

6. Your essay also should tie into two other themes. One is the theme for the course, desigining for effectice change. Your review should say how the book under consideration ties in. You might establish that tie by creating a connection between the book and other things we have or will read. The other theme is personal experiences you have had that illustrated ideas from the book directly or indirectly via the structure of the argument in the book.

7. Style-wise, I've encouraged you to read other book reviews so you can get a sense of what a good review looks like. The reason I've opted for this form of essay is so you have models you can emulate.

For 396 students - Rubric for Book Reviews

The rubric for the reflections makes sense to me so I'm going to keep the first two categories for that, General Writing and Tying into the Course, with the same weights. But the third category on growth doesn't make sense because the book review is a thing unto itself and I will only count in the assessment the final version you submit, not earlier versions nor the precis. So I need something else to swap for that third category.

Multiple Parallel Threads (25%)

You will have one or two core themes about the book you review and you definitely want to revisit them periodically in the writing. But then you will have other threads too. They are related to the core themes and perhaps also to each other. One may be a personal narrative. Another may be something else we've done in class that ties in with the main topic of your review. You may also use two threads to talk about the same issue but from different perspectives. Threading is essential to make it a good read and returning to a thread from time to time as it fits in with the larger story makes for compelling reading.

The chapter in Better, What Doctors Owe, which covers the malpractice issue, does the multiple threading extremely well. Finding a doctor who ends up suing other doctors, to get at the intellectual tension in sorting through a doctor's own beliefs on the matter, is pure genius on the part of Gawande, or he was very lucky to have stumbled into this particular example.

For 396 Students - The Second Writing Assignment Is a Multimedia Project

When you are ready, click the image on the left to a blog post I wrote last summer that has the video and an explanation for what I'm trying to have you accomplish with the video. The second assignment is to make one of these. Choose a suitable theme and then produce your own creation, from soup to nuts. You must also produce all the supporting documents, as indicated in that post.

Here I want to give a different justification for this assignment. Among the more important skills to learn for your future career is how to write an effective memo. A related skill, also quite important, is how to write a good executive summary of a longer document. In other words, knowing how to communicate important ideas with a very limited amount of text is requisite for career advancement.

I could have given you an assignment to write an effective memo, but it would be hard to come up with a setting where that sort of assignment would really grab you. Absent the compulsion to really nail it, you would find the exercise far less instructive. I'm hoping you can immerse yourself in this media creation project and thereby get something of substance out from the time you put into doing this work.

And then you'll have something to show your parents and friends from having taken the course. ;-)

For 396 Students - The First Writing Project Is A Book Review

Book reviews are for a slow Sunday morning, where you have a hard copy of the Sunday NY Times and have to decide which section to read first. You stare at the Magazine section to see if the featured articles are on topics that interest you or if you are familiar with the authors and like other pieces by them . In either case, that's where you head first. Otherwise, you head for the Book Reviews. The pieces are shorter there. But the variety of topics is bound to interest, the way opinion gets expressed intrigues, and the writing is far better than in most of the rest of the paper. The contributors are specialists in their area and often professional writers themselves.

One slow Sunday follows another and then you find that you want to feed the craving. So you start to read general interest periodicals and the reviews in those or perhaps you start reading periodicals that are mostly if not exclusively devoted to book reviews, such as the New York Review of Books. Then, because you feel you need a break from slugging through the reading in your discipline, the slow Sundays creep into your lunch hour during the week, perhaps breakfast time too. You find that you can both unwind and learn about things outside your speciality. Its a way to get thoughtful commentary on a diversity of topics.

This, then, provides a glimpse of the goal, what you want the reader to feel from the piece you have created. What follows is a different approach to this requirement.

You are to write a review of one of the books for the course. Almost certainly, you'll be able to find reviews of the book you choose elsewhere. You are not in competition with the authors of these pieces. You will produce a different sort of review. In what you write you will create connections between the book under review, other shorter readings in the course, and the general course theme. What implication is there in this book for effective change? You will further tie the book to your own experiences. By personalizing your narrative, you will create a unique story, one that differs from prior published reviews.

Ultimately, what you produce should be at least 3000 words. You'll get to that in stages. First you need to get me a precis of what you plan, 500 or 600 words that describes the general ideas. Please don't give me a bulleted outline. I like sentences. They are better for communicating your thoughts. Plan for a day or two of turnover so I can read and give you feedback. You can start on you draft straight away, without waiting for the feedback. Ultimately, however, you'll need to incorporate it into the first draft. I do expect you to proofread your draft ahead of time for general readability.

We can iterate multiple times within the four weeks that the project is due. If you think you've nailed it after the first pass, and my comments suggest likewise, you can stop then. Don't linger on that possibility however and use it as a reason to try for the perfect first draft. It is better to get something workable out there and then reconsider it afterwards. Also, the writing requirement demands revision. That is the expectation.

Here is a tip, especially for those of you who have not done much writing on your own before. Read as many book reviews as you can the first few weeks of the semester. If you find the same reviewer for multiple pieces and you like the style, try to imitate that. When I first got started writing my blog, I tried to emulate Stephen Jay Gould writing in the New York Review of Books. (I loved his essay called The Streak of Streaks.) Imitating the master is a good way to get started. Your own personal style will come out from trying variations on that.

I would like the precis and the final draft submitted to be on your blog. If you want to send me earlier drafts differently, that is ok. It's also ok to put those on the blog too. If you ever go back to your own writing later, it will be interesting for you to note how the piece changed from draft to draft. You are welcome to write one of your weekly reflections on that.

For 396 students - General Thoughts about Writing Requirement

From the Campus Guidelines for General Education:

1.2.4 Courses approved to meet the Advanced Composition requirement must involve writing assignments that (a) demand analysis and synthesis of the subject matter of the course, or in the case of writing courses in the rhetoric and communication disciplines, application of the principles under study; (b) require substantial original composition (typically totaling at least 20 to 30 pages over the course of a semester); and (c) involve multiple drafts throughout the course of the semester. By special permission of the General Education Board a two-course sequence may be certified as fulfilling the Advanced Composition requirement, if the writing component of the sequence meets the standards specified for certification of a single course; credit for Advanced Composition will not be given for completing only one course in the sequence.

We will stick to both the letter and the spirit of the requirement. The reflective writing will achieve some of this, but there will be no revisions on the reflections. So we will do some other work as well that will entail multiple drafts. There will be 3 additional "writing" projects. The first two will be in a preassigned formats. The third will be you choosing to do another in one of the first two formats.

Schedule-wise, divide the semesters into the following chunks:

First three weeks - do extra reading to prepare for the first assignment

Next four weeks - work on first writing project.

Subsequent four weeks - work on second writing project.

Final four weeks - work on last project.

Grading-wise, each of the projects will be worth an additional 10% of the grade. The shrewd student will note that for students in 396 we have now allocated 130% of the grade. We will simply divide the total points earned by 1.3 and thus re-norm accordingly.