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Contents 1 Extra Credit 2 In-Class Activities: October 23 (Day 14) 2.1 Research: Crucial Role of the Right Questions 3 Homework Due 25 October 4 In-Class Activities: October 25 (Day 15) 5 Homework Due 30 October

Extra Credit

This chance for up to ten points is available only until Tuesday, 30 October.

In-Class Activities: October 23 (Day 14)

• Quiz (individual)
• Turn in portfolios with Political/Civic Action letters and all associated information.
• Distribute graded quizzes, worksheets, rewrites, and (at end of class) cumulative grade updates.
• Review Wired magazine's trademark jingo ~ if I ask you on a pop quiz to identify and analyze a jingo, would you know how?

1. involves meaning on ______ levels.
2. the levels are a)_________________, b)___________________, and c)____________________.
3. jingoism (in general) involves_____________________________________________________________________.
4. the jingoism of Wired magazine involves ________________________.

• Marketing in Color, by Leon E. Wynter, clearly identifies the parties who instituted "special format programming" (true or false)?

To learn more about "special format programming," one would have to do a search. Google only turns up four articles:

Why He's a Thriller, by Jay Cocks, Time, March 19, 1984.

and three industry ads which may or may not be relevant.

Would it make sense to find out what else Leon Wynter has written?

How about the kinds of articles in which Wynter is quoted, such as, The Color of Mayhem, in a Wave of 'Urban' Games, The New Yorker, August 12, 2004.

How can you trust that the teacher has covered everything?

Research: Crucial Role of the Right Questions

Next major paper: Library Research in Communication

Categorization activity: the type of question you ask sets a limit on type of information you will receive. What kinds of questions get at which types of information? What areas are covered well by our current list of "right questions" and what gaps require additional, creative interrogation?

Homework Due 25 October

As you know, some of your work is being read (already) by the seniors in Honors 491G. Soon some first-year students will also read your writing (some of the assignments from wikiday one).

1. Read Positioning Students for Written Interaction.
2. Type/save a one-page (250-word) summary and analysis of the themes in the conversation between Steph and her first-year writing students.
3. Now, add one more paragraph articulating your own political stance in relation to the themes and arguments raised by the first-year students.
4. Go to your own Wordpress blog and sign-in.
5. Paste your summary-and-analysis-and-critique into a new entry in your own Wordpress blog, give it a unique title and categorize it as COM375: political letters

After posting in your own blog, return to the conversation, Positioning Students for Written Interaction, and "Post a Reply." In your Reply, invite the first-year students to read your summary-and-analysis-and-critique. Be as persuasive as possible, and include the link!

In-Class Activities: October 25 (Day 15)

• Overview: preparation for answering the following questions (homework, due Tuesday Oct 30).

What questions get at which elements of YOUR topic? FYI, here is the list you brainstormed on the second day of class.

What is the FOCUS of your research?

What is the "it" that you want to write about? What is your cultural text?

What is the effect you want your writing to have?)

1. What is your starting FRAME of REFERENCE?
2. What is your "ending" FRAME of REFERENCE?
3. How will you connect the starting and ending FRAMES?
4. How will you label the four semiotic elements of media, content, function, and context?

Conceptualization:

How does one identify, recognize, and investigate a cultural text? Our first example was with Willpower, Inc.

Example of a pop quiz: Hello? What is the context of "a pop quiz"? What content would you expect to find in this class? What function might your weirdo teacher possibly be after? What is the media in this example?

III. What do the coursewiki, fiction, hands-on instruction, film, music, and electrical &/or electromagnetic currents have in common? MEDIA On the back, please explain your answer.

IV. What do semiotic analysis, ficton, the coursewiki, language & culture & meaning, special format programming, HTML code & pre-designed templates, written text and visual images have in common? CONTENT On the back, please explain your answer.

V. What do repetition, critical thinking, internet literacy, intercultural communicative competence, historical/social contextualization of race/racism, and Public collaborative thinking and problem-solving have in common? FUNCTION On the back, please explain your answer.

VI. What do education (teaching), entertainment (assigned as homework), applied social science, critical media literacy, critique of cultural-economic relationships, and Writing as Communication have in common? CONTEXT On the back, please explain your answer.

Confusions between MEDIA & CONTENT, between CONTENT & CONTEXT, and between CONTEXT & FUNCTION. Be sure you concentrate on sorting these out!

Follow-up: transmission v ritual models of communication.

review the basic differences between the two models

the explanations of media (from the quiz) included two definitions that explicitly limit communication to the dimension of transmission. Which two are they? Do the other two implicitly set the same boundary?

what are the three levels of problem with the classic transmission model? {Note: You will want to consider these as questions with which to interrogate your own cultural text!}

how is a model that says "communication is a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed" different from a model that says communication is the transfer of information?

Homework Due 30 October

1. READ handout, "The Reading of Reading" by Mortimer Adler. (Quiz alert.)
2. PREPARE two mental maps of your research paper topic that shows what you know, do not know, need to find out, and must learn to ask about your topic. (See details below.)
3. Blog about the ritual model of communication (see below for details).

Mental Maps (2):

Draw the first one like we did with Willpower, Inc. - as a web of relationships.

For the second, use the rhetorical situation like we did in class concerning Bring Back Flogging, using the conceptual model of a rhetorical situation. Note in particular the relationships between content-logos, author-ethos, and audience-pathos.

Start thinking about and looking for resources.

What questions get at which elements of YOUR topic?

What is the FOCUS of your research?

What is the "it" that you want to write about? What is your cultural text?

What is the effect you want your writing to have?)

1. What is your starting FRAME of REFERENCE?
2. What is your "ending" FRAME of REFERENCE?
3. How will you connect the starting and ending FRAMES?
4. How will you label the four semiotic elements of media, content, function, and context?

Wordpress Blogpost (1):

Write this first in a word processing program, save it. Then go to your Wordpress Blog, login, create a new entry with a cool title, paste in your writing, categorize it as Babel for COM375 and publish it.

Write what?  :-) Explain why the title of this course is "Writing as Communication," and the title of Carey's revolutionary communication theory is "Communication as Culture." What communication model is being promoted by that particular phrasing and precise diction? Apply the rubrics of the transmission v ritual models of communication to the "babble" of the learning process and curricular goals of this junior writing course.