Paper 3: Wiki and Reflective Essay
300 points, 3 pages for Reflective Essay (about 750 words)
Drafts will be ongoing
Reflective Essay and all wiki revisions/edits due Thursday, 12/8
File under Projects: Paper 3; Stage: Final; Access: Private
Assignment—The Course Wiki (200 Points)
For this assignment, we will work as a class to develop a course wiki that answers our operative course questions: What is digital writing? How do individuals and online communities use genres like blogs, social networks, and wikis rhetorically? How do they put tropes, rhetorical figures, appeals, and other writing “moves” to use, and to what effect? To answer these questions, you will complete individual and collaborative work.
Individual article (100 points)
On our wiki, you will compose an article whose purpose is to answer one or more of the above questions by focusing on a particular digital genre or online community. This page should be based on at least one of the assignments you wrote earlier this semester—either a paper or a microtheme. However, I will expect substantial revision: articles that are simply copied and pasted from an earlier assignment will receive a poor grade. To revise, you should:
· Take into account my comments and suggestions on your graded draft(s);
· Answer one or more of the operative course questions as explicitly as possible;
· Organize your article using the common page structure we will design as a class;
· Include at least one link to another article on our wiki, being sure to make the connection between them—the reason for linking—clear and explicit.
Collaborative article (50 Points)
Working in a small group, you will compose an article on a relevant topic of your choosing, such as themes, key terms, tropes, etc. Your collaborative group article should be organized according to the common page structure we will design as a class. It should also include links and direct quotes from at least two other articles on our wiki, along with explanations/analysis of the quotes. This article will be worth 50 points, awarded evenly to group members.
Article Edits (50 Points)
Working independently (but still collaboratively), you will make edits to 5 articles (other than your own individual or collaborative articles), for 10 points each. Edits might include proofreading, reorganizing, linking to other pages, adding additional content, clarifying analysis, etc. The only caveat is that you cannot do the same “type” of editing more than twice (i.e. you cannot simply proofread five articles). The goal is to make the five articles better—which should ultimately help everyone receive a better grade (karma!). When you make an edit, be sure to use the “short description of changes” function.
Assignment—The Reflective Essay (100 Points)
The goal of this reflective essay is to compare your experiences writing academic essays to your experiences writing our course wiki. In your essay, you should answer the question, how is composing an academic paper similar to and different from composing a wiki? To answer this question, you may reference both the “finished products” (i.e. your original paper versus your revised wiki article) and your actual writing process (i.e. what you do when you sit down in front of the computer to write). Whatever you decide to focus on in your reflection, I ask that you include concrete examples from your own writing and your wiki edits, explaining the choices you made as you wrote. Appended to your reflective paper, you should also include a log of any edits you made to others’ wiki articles, with dates and brief descriptions.
Criteria for Evaluation
Wiki
o Individual and collaborative articles clearly answer one or more of our operative course questions
o Articles include concrete evidence in the form of direct quotations
o Articles analyze the significance of evidence in answering the course questions
o Articles include the requisite number of links
o Include references where appropriate, following the guidelines for our common page structure
o Make edits to five different articles, using a variety of editing “types”
Reflective Essay
o Offers an overall “thesis” or main claim about the similarities and differences between writing academic papers and writing the wiki.
o Includes concrete examples of these differences.
o Appends a log of edits on others’ wiki articles
· Use correct grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. throughout.