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E388M Minds, Texts, and Technology Fall 2000
Division of Rhetoric and Composition Unique #31625 |
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This Web site contains important information about the policies of this course. You should read and understand the information posted here. If you are not clear about any aspect of the course, its requirements, activities, or method of evaluation, please let me know. You may save the text of any page by choosing the "Save As" command in the File menu of Netscape. Students who remain in the class after the 12th class day are assumed to accept these policies. |
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Course Description: Minds, Texts, and Technology What do readers, writers, and texts have in common with the human immune system, the economics of the stock market, the rise and fall of a pre-Columbian city-state, or a ship's navigation crew? Recent interdisciplinary research in complex systems and cognitive science suggests some intriguing possibilities. This seminar will explore some of the theories emerging from this research and their potential for informing composition studies. The course introduces concepts in situated and distributed cognition, activity theory, distributed cognition, and complexity theory to establish a theoretical framework for analyzing writing situations, as a way of testing the applicability of these theories for rhetoric and composition. One goal of this seminar is to help students define and develop working bibliographies, which are somewhat different from annotated or "works cited" type bibliographies. For this purpose, students will write regular 1-2 page responses to the assigned readings. They will prepare a short presentation to the class on a text chosen from the recommended reading list. Students will also be responsible for regular posting to the class email list and message forum in response to the readings and course work. A second goal of the course is to share and generate techniques and strategies for using online environments effectively to support reading-intensive courses. We will be discussing class texts both face to face and online in a variety of different ways, from Daedalus Interchange to MOOs and MUDs. The CWRL classroom: This course is held in a CWRL networked computer classroom, which offers a variety of resources for constructing projects, researching topics, and communicating with each other and with other scholars. This course does not teach basic computer skills; students are expected to have experience with word processing, research on the WorldWide Web, and copying and saving files to a disk. We will have the opportunity to experiment with different applications which have some usefulness for teaching reading-intensive courses. Please note: Basic computer skills are not taught in this course. Students should be familiar with keyboarding, copying and saving files to disks, word processing, and sending and receiving email. Students are required to have a computer account with both email and web posting privileges. I enjoy meeting with students to discuss concerns and questions about the class. Please feel free to stop by my office during office hours, or email me with questions or suggestions for the class. Note: When sending email about this class, please put the class number (388) as the first item in the subject line of your message. Grading Policy: Grades in this course are determined on the basis of an Online Learning Record, which accompanies a portfolio of work presented at the midterm and at the end of the course. These portfolios present a selection of student work, both formal and informal, completed during the semester, ongoing observations about student learning, and analysis of student work and interpretations with respect to the student's development across five dimensions of learning: confidence and independence, knowledge and understanding, skills and strategies, use of prior and emerging experience, and reflectiveness. This development centers around the major strands of work in the course: rhetoric and composition, research, technology, and collaboration. Coursework: Students will work individually and collaboratively to design, plan, conduct, and report case studies. This work will be divided into six stages: a statement of the inquiry question, problem, or issue; a research design for a case study; annotated bibliography of existing relevant research; data collection; data analysis; and the research report. The projects will be framed to address major questions about the relationship between technology, culture, and cognition. Students will develop projects with the goal of producing a publishable paper, Web document, software project, multimedia project, conference presentation, or comparable piece of work intended to provoke a rethinking of current research paradigms. Planned research may form the basis for a larger study, such as a dissertation or thesis. The format, scope, and topic of projects is decided through individual consultation with the instructor. Please note: All assigned work, including informal writing, proposals, rough drafts, finished projects, peer critiques, the midterm OLR and final OLR must be completed and submitted on time to receive a passing grade in this course. Except under extraordinary circumstances, there will be no incompletes in this class. |
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M. A. Syverson |
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[ home] [today] [objectives] [Texts] [Schedule] [Students] [assignments] [resources] Webmaster Peg Syverson syverson@uts.cc.utexas.edu |