Generally good sessions today covering some early-stage material in tech-comm and assignment introductory work in "Writing New Media."
Both TC classes went quite smoothly. Covered letters (part of a two-part "memos and letters" assignment), and introduced the first major assignment: two letters, one memo, introduced to varied stakeholders. Questions were germane, conversation was fluid, though I do feel like I talked too much....tends to be the way of it in early weeks.
Writing New Media was a bit different. Students did not do much of the reading, as I feared, and became frustrated. My warnings regarding the density of the content were clearly a turn-off, so I'm going to find work that's a bit more gradually difficult. Dropping them into Phaedrus was too much. This week they have scholarly articles as well, but they are at least contemporary.
Turned class around with participatory exercises in identifying old media forms. They got the hang of it quickly: Song, dance, recitation, painting, sculpture...and then we identified old media purposes: Community-building, identity, instruction. The assignment is still perhaps a bit weirdly ambiguous for them, but I think most of them are getting it. One student after class called the assignment "Caveman Memes," which was both hilarious and accurate - I'll call it that from now on, and reduce the Ancient Greek stuff by a bit.
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