Within a traditional writing class the documents created share the same medium (alphabetic print on paper) even if they are in different genres (e.g. personal narrative, editorial, research paper, poem, science fiction, biography). However, in this course you can write in many of the genres on a blog, making the blog a medium (and so a quite flexible one). Part of this course will focus on the differences between writing paper-based and digital texts.

For instance, what are the similarities and difference between writing for the web and on paper? What happens when you create images in Photoshop, move those images into Flash to create a photo essay with text and audio?

What, then, are the material specificities of each medium, and how do they shape meaning? That said, evaluating and categorizing digital texts is fundamentally different than with traditional paper-based texts "because the technology fundamentally changes how writing is produced, delivered, and received."

In this course you will do a lot of writing, just not all on paper.

Central/Major Projects

1) Blog(s): (You will maintain a personal blog for the entire course and participate/co-author the course blog. In addition, you will use a news aggregator to subscribe to blog feeds. *See the Blog project page for more information.

2) Research paper: You will write a research paper on a topic of your choosing, although it must relate to our course in some way. This can be a stand-alone project, be built up from your blog, and/or tie into the Wikipedia Article you write/collaborate on. One of our goals for this assignment is to juxtapose the traditional research paper to writing an encyclopedia article such as in Wikipedia. *See the Research paper page for more information.

• Collaborative Writing w/ Google Docs: Set up a Google Docs account for yourself for sharing documents with others. This will be particularly useful for the research paper assignment.

3) Wiki Article(s): You will write a new article on a topic of your choosing for a wiki community or contribute to one or more pre-existing articles. This will include research and citing sources just as with the research paper. One of our goals for this assignment is to juxtapose the traditional research paper to writing an encyclopedia article such as in Wikipedia. *See the Wiki Article page for more information.

4) Open Media Project: As one of (or the) final projects, you can produce a multimedia text on a topic of your choosing. Since we have previously worked with digital text and hypertext (with only limited use of still images, video, and audio), you now have the freedom to choose media for your project. *See the Open Media Project page for more information.

5) Process log: For each assignment you must do a lot of writing or "MetaTalk" about your activities. This isn’t simply a list of *what* you did but also how and why. *See the Process Log page for more information.

6) Final Portfolio: At the end of the semester you will submit a portfolio of your final and best work. This will most likely be digital in form. There will be a reflective component that will prepare you for your presentation at the end of the semester. *See the Final Portfolio page for more information.

7) Oral Presentation: All sections of 201 must include an oral component. In this section it is fulfilled with a semester-end presentation. In this presentation you will present the class an example of your work from the semester and talk about it in terms of difficulties, successes, and what you learned from the project. It will be approximately 10 min. and will include another 5 minutes for Q&A. *See the Oral Presentation page for more information.