Folks, for Thursday you'll see we'll begin class with a workshop looking at Meaning-Form relationships. Then, we'll peer review your Policy Arguments, and I'll have a worksheet to guide you.
We're reading out of Style and reading an online excerpt on "rhetorics of web pages" in Barton, Kalmback, and Lowe's open-access book called The Writing Spaces Web Style Guide. Even if you are not constructing a web-based policy argument, this will still be relevant to our discussions about hypermediated forms of policy arguments. To be fully ready for Thursday's peer review, please bring Style and Working with Words, as well as your laptop with a downloaded or readily available copy of your completed draft of the Policy Argument. Or if your Policy Argument form is going to be paper-based and/or circulating in print hard copy, then please bring 1 good copy of it to share. Your argument should be complete and in as finalized a form as you can get it, though I did mention today that I understand some delivery forms shift and change as a result of peer review, and that may be the case with yours.
If you're still stuck, still wondering, still wanting to tie together loose pieces of knowledge-making as we near the end of this sphere, let me just remind you of the good work and thinking you have already done that is documented in our Bb class notes. Now is a good time to look over the swath of notes we have generated together since Sep. 25, because it's likely that one of those documents -- whether it is the list of key terms we defined to help us get in the mindset of policy arguments, or the gridding that we did during Case Study #2, or the way we discussed "hypermediation" or "citizen criticism" -- that may make something make concrete sense for you.
Finally, and I apologize for letting this preparation post go on so long, I'll document here that in today's class, by a vote of 13 - 8 - 3, you selected "remediation" as the topic of our Wikipedia article. (The other terms that garnered votes were "citizen journalism" and "collaborative journalism.") Please take 48 hours to let that notion settle and I'll check in on Thursday for "buyer's remorse." I offer you this settling period because it's clear to me that you -- as a class -- are immensely talented and have a real and critical understanding of what could be accomplished through a Wikipedia article, so I want to ensure that the topic is something we can all do together (given our shared expertise) but also is interesting and viable enough that you would want to do it together.
See you on Thursday,
-Prof. Graban
