Hello All,

Given that the closing of the AC was part of our chancellor / blog / #SaveCuse discussion, I thought that I should also pass along this announcement.

At very least, I think that demonstrating and advocating for a larger voice / role in the decisions that affect us as members of the Syracuse community is a positive thing.  We also need to bring the AC back; the administration was both shortsighted and ill-informed about the important role that the AC play(s)(ed) on Campus.

Note: I am posting this information only to make the class aware that it will take place tomorrow. There is no class responsibility to attend or even endorse the event.

Use this link to see the full details: AC flyer1 .

I’m curious to hear what folks think of the #SaveCuse video from the perspective of our course and its discussion of genre (and context, medium, purpose, persona, and audience). Today’s Daily Orange is running an editorial, #SaveCuse video embarrasses university,” that faults the video for both advocating on the behalf of a small campus contingent and “captur[ing] every negative connotation associated with being a No. 1 party school…”(5).

Like much of our discussion about the chancellor’s blog posts and emails, it seems that proponents of saving Castle Court have also misjudged the writing situation in which they present their video. Watch the video below, and then provide your reaction and your analysis of where the video’s creators misstepped in their defense of Castle Court. What, using our awareness of the writing situation, would you recommend to bring the two parties (chancellor & video makers) together?

You may also wish to check out the Twitter stream for #SaveCuse.

Similarly, how would you identify the genre, or genres, the video evokes? As a multimodal piece of argument, what might the video makers have done differently to make their argument more persuasive and convincing?

Here are the expanded assignment details for our next class. You can use this link to download them: WRT105_TwitterFiction_Exercise.

I mentioned using the “copy url at present time” to help annotate the TED talk. As you’ll see below, that is no longer necessary. Instead, use the time-indexes provided with the transcript for the video.

GL

WRT 105 | Reading and Annotating Andrew Fitzgerald’s TED Talk “Adventures in Twitter Fiction”

• You might make note of this fact, or perhaps question it, or perhaps make note of a radio-story experience you had while driving with older relatives in the car ( NPR? older folks do love to listen to talk radio).
• You might think of other mediums and how they have affected the way they broadcast stories and narratives—Fitzgerald mentions the idea of episodes (serialized narratives), and we now have things like webisodes, vlogs, and cell-phone fiction (narratives composed on cellphones using SMS).
• Also – don’t be afraid to play the skeptic: read against the grain of Fitzgerald’s claims and try to problematize them. Are his claims about radio always true? Do Fitzgerald’s claims also apply to screen narratives? Would we consider twitter fiction to be a screen narrative?

The point is to engage actively with Fitzgerald’s talk and note down those engagements: use the notes you make as a tool to process his claims and arguments.

Luckily, the TED folks in all of their 21^st century medium wisdom have thought to provide a dynamic transcript of Fitzgerald’s talk.

Go to https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_fitzgerald_adventures_in_twitter_fiction#t-46708

Along the bottom of the video, towards the right side, look for the transcript icon. Clicking it will launch a new page with the video playing in the top left portion of the page with the transcript in the main body of the page. The transcript has time-indexes for Fitzgerald’s talk, and highlights / underlines the text as Fitzgerald speaks it.

All of which will help you make your annotations for the TED talk.

Also spend time reading /annotating Claire Armistead’s blog post and the twitter-fiction site. For these two sources, make brief notes about sections, a particular story’s twitter stream, or a blog-worthy tidbit. Again, try to engage and be critical / questioning of what you read. So, here are the specifics for the assignment:

Read and annotate Andrew Fitzgerald’s TED Talk “Adventures in Twitter Fiction”https://www.ted.com/talks/andrew_fitzgerald_adventures_in_twitter_fiction

and Claire Armistead’s blog post

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/jan/10/twitter-birth-new-literary-genre

and explore the website:

http://twitterfictionfestival.com

Write a blog post discussing how twitter fiction is different from more traditional forms of fiction (following the guidelines in chapter 2 of EaT). How does fiction delivered via twitter complicate our understanding of purpose, audience, persona and genre? You might like to compose your own twitter fiction as part of this exercise, which will help you to consider the purpose, audience, persona and genre of your own writing.

Please post to your expressions page and bring a hard copy to class.

one must take care to ensure that the balances are correct.

Sometimes … life’s like this…

Okay, so I’ve chosen to edit the “Hello World” page and use it as the first page of my blog site.

I’ve also tried / experimented with a few other things:

• I’ve edited the tagline for the site to something more appropriate
• I’ve added content to my media library and experimented with adding / deleting images to use on the site. I’ve found that this particular theme, padhang, tends to tile images that I want to set as  background images. I think it may be possible to have the bkgrnd image display as a single image, but that may also be a function of the image size as well. I’m not sure.
• I also tried experimenting with menus and parent/children pages… still not sure what happened except to say that it wasn’t what I had planned.