NOTE: Due to Rowan University’s unprecedented shift to remote learning this semester, our course syllabus must be amended to align with our new circumstances. I have made these adjustments with crossouts and red fonts below.
Course name: Writing, Research, and Technology
Number: WA 01301
Meeting times: TR 11:00 a.m. (Section 1) and 3:30 p.m. (Section 2)
Location: Victoria 201 online
My email: luther at rowan dot edu
Office hours: Tuesdays 2-3 p.m. or During meeting times or by appointment
Course description
“When politicians toe the party line in every instance, sometimes speaking absurdities in order to be ideologically consistent, audiences, toeing the same party line, accept these absurdities as facts of rhetorical life. In a post-truth world, audiences do not seek information on which to base their opinions; they seek opinions that support their own beliefs. In a world where facts, realities, and truths are irrelevant, language becomes pure strategy without grounding or reference.” (12)
Bruce McComiskey, Post-Truth Rhetoric and Composition (2017)
In November of 2016, Oxford Dictionaries chose “post-truth” as their word of the year, “an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’” The concept that people form public opinions based on their feelings over facts or logic isn’t actually all that new. See, for example, Stephen Colbert’s funny monologue on truthiness, which was delivered on the Colbert Report almost 12 years ago, during the Bush administration’s tenure.
That said, two global-political events in 2016 produced a significant uptake in the usage of the term “post-truth”: Britain’s decision to withdraw from the European Union (i.e. Brexit) and the presidential election of outsider conservative candidate Donald Trump in the United States. These events have not only drawn our attention to the importance of emotional appeals that influence our decision making, but to the systems and technologies of information — the individualized media diets — that have gotten us to a moment epitomized by fake news.
As such, we will approach post-truth primarily in two ways: one that is optimistic and focuses on individual responses and another that explores the deeper systemic challenges that makes the future of information more uncertain. With regard to the first approach, you will use Unit 1 to look at how we, as individuals, can learn and adopt media-based literacies like fact-checking to become more responsible citizens. With regard to the second, you will use Units 2 and 3 to examine the many frameworks that make impactful strategies of intervention more demanding and complex than teaching fact-checking. Unit 2 to respond to this cultural moment by blending personal experience with research through blog writing.
Writing Arts Core Values
Like other courses in the Writing Arts sequence, this one is informed by the major’s core values (note: for more details on how these can help you with Portfolio Seminar, see the document “Questions to Help Further Your Understanding of the Department of Writing Arts Core Values”).
While WRT touches upon every value to some extent, the following will be explicitly emphasized:
- Value 3. Writing Arts students will demonstrate the ability to critically read complex and sophisticated texts in a variety of subjects.
- Value 4: Writing Arts students will be able to investigate, discover, evaluate, and incorporate information in the creation of text.
- Value 6: Writing Arts students will understand the impact evolving technologies have on the creation of written texts.
- Value 7: Writing arts students will show an understanding of the power of the written word and that such power requires ethical responsibilities in its application.
Important: If you are a Writing Major, you will need to use specific textual evidence from your writing in this course once you get to Portfolio Seminar. Once there you will demonstrate how you met the following learning outcomes by pulling from your reflections, blog posts, or other pieces you published in this course. See Major Assignments below for further description. Of course, throughout each of these assignments and units we will discuss how evolving technologies have impacted the creation of written texts (Value 6) in terms of mediation, identity, publics, and ethics.
Major Assignments
NOTE: My teaching is flexible and responds to your evolving needs as the course progresses. This is one of the reasons I use a blog to organize course content. As such, you might notice that I will communicate more specific information about our learning goals and assignments as we get closer to certain deadlines. Although no new information will be given, my responsibility is to help you develop ways to respond to course challenges as you encounter them and communicate them with me.
Please use the unit pages and schedule, but most of all the daily plan blog to help you in this regard. Each of the following units is worth 100 points for a total of 300 possible points in the course. See the individual assignments as they appear on the menu above for more details. In the meantime, here is a breif overview:
Unit 1 | FACT-CHECKING THE STREAM [Weeks 1-7]
Recent research tells us that many people, especially students and older adults, have a difficult time evaluating information on the web. This is largely because digitally-networked spaces require a different approach to reading than those offered through traditional, print-based literacies. After a brief introduction to one of the more visible consequences of our post-truth moment — the rise of fake news — you will spend the first 5 weeks of the course reading Mike Caulfield’s textbook, Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers and practicing web-based research such as going upstream and reading laterally. You’ll not only read and research with these strategies in mind, you’ll compose four fact-checks shuttling between popular web platforms for writers including Google Docs, WordPress, and iMovie. The first three fact-checks will be between 500-700 words and the final one will be longer and composed through a video. Although drafts should be written in Google Docs, revisions will be posted on WordPress and will include embedded media and links. Because you will learn specific research strategies that require you to incorporate information into your posts, this unit emphasizes Value 4 & 7.
Unit 2 | READING REALITY [Weeks 6-10]
The second unit aims to provide a deeper context for the circulation of fake news, starting with a critique of fact-checking using the concept of frame-checking. It will then offering four specific frames — economic, cultural, technological, and political — for understanding the how the concept of post-truth has affected writers, while also introducing three methods of annotation, starting with familiar print-based marginalia, but introducing two others that are geared toward digital/web texts. Reading and annotating complex and sophisticated texts written by professional writers and scholars will provide a framework for writing that tries to clarify how claims to facts, truth, and reality are always-already mediated; hence this unit emphasizes Value 3 & 6.
Unit 3 | Video Essay [weeks 9-14]
In the final few weeks, you will produce a short video essay that makes an argument about one of the phenomena we discussed in the first two units. This phenomena should extend or amplify the conversations we had about the frames in Unit 2; your video might update the problem, examine a specific case study, offer strategies of intervention, or share tools that help users resist, expose, or otherwise ethically mitigate the pernicious forces of post-truth. Ultimately this engagement with writing, media, and ethics emphasizes Values 4, 6, & 7.
Unit 2 | Social Distancing [WEEKs 10-15]
This unit focuses on blogging and digital publishing via WordPress through this extraordinary time of social distancing. See the Unit 2 page for details.
Policies
For policies on behavior, attendance, late work, grades, accessibility, and more, please click the Policies link under Syllabus (above) or go here.