Weekly assignments are opportunities to explore ideas and practice techniques that will inform your final project. These assignments will be published online and accessible from your homepage for the course (see "Individual student homepage" below). A few examples of excellent takes on these assignments are also showcased in the Weekly Assignments Hall of Fame.
As always, I reserve the right to revise assignments up until the class meeting in which I assign them.
The first assignment of the quarter will be to set up a homepage where you will publish your assignments over the quarter. We will set up the first page of the site during the first class meeting. Because the purpose of the site is to make your work accessible to the class, this site will not test the limits of your creativity, but rather follow a simple structure so that everyone can easily find what they are looking for.
Write a brief (say 250-300 word) text describing the development of your technological literacy as a way to introduce yourself to the class. Bring it to class in electronic form (not a print out!), as we will use this text to practice some initial HTML.
After reading Bolter's "Hypertext and the Remediation of Print," revise the mark up of your technology narrative as necessary to produce a thoughtfully designed, effective multimodal hypertext. Please preface the hypertext with an introductory paragraph discussing your goals for text and the reasoning behind your design decisions. This assignment will be evaluated on:
Redesign English 282's Guide to Writing Hypertext using an external CSS stylesheet while keeping its basic content the same.* Your finished product will include an introductory page with
Your design will be evaluated on the basis of these 5 Basic Rules of Web Page Design and Layout and the thoughtfulness of your design as reflected in your introduction.
*You may use whatever images you like or none at all. You may also make structural changes to the HTML (e.g., add new <div>s, mark up the nav links as a list, and so on), so long as you don't use HTML to control issues of presentation that are better left to CSS.
**When you finish with your CSS file just upload it and a copy of each of the "Guide" HTML files (which are set up to import guide.css) to your server account (all together in the same folder so they will find each other). From your introductory page make one link to this (your) copy of index.htm (to show your version) and another to the CSS-less index.htm at http://courses.washington.edu/webrhet/assignments/guide/ (to show the original).
Doing your best to maintain the style of your CSS redesign, do a second redesign to make sure that your design follows accessibility guidelines.* Add to your introductory page:
*This will likely involve modifying both CSS and HTML files.
For this preliminary project overview, you will be describing the rhetorical situation to which the site you design for your final project will respond. The goal is not yet to propose solutions, but rather to make sure that we all (you, your organization, and me) share an understanding of the issues in need of consideration.
Please respond to the following questions in prose paragraphs. Be thorough and thoughtful, while also direct and clear. This assignment will be evaluated on both the content and the effectiveness of your writing.
Are you developing a site for your service learning organization or for the Carlson Center's Word on the Street project? If you are developing a site for your service learning organization, do you have design control over the organization's website or will you be redesigning the organization's website (or a portion thereof) to address a different purpose and/or audience than is targeted in the original?
Here is my attempt at this assignment using a made-up organization.
Find at least three websites designed with purposes similar to that of the website you are designing and perform a genre analysis guided by questions and issues raised in Askehave and Nielsen's article on digital genres as well as the questions listed below. In an introductory paragraph, introduce the sites you've analyzed and explain in what ways their purposes are similar to those of the site you are designing for your final project. In the body of the paper write up the results of your analysis. And finally, in conclusion, summarize the most useful rhetorical lessons and strategies this analysis provides you as you approach your final project website.
Your analysis should include links to the pages that you discuss, engage with Askehave and Nielsen's discussion of web genres, and address the questions below. As you decide how to structure and present your work, keep in mind that this analysis will serve as a resource for your classmates (whose sites likely address similar purposes) and consider the interests of that audience (for example, scanability, clear references to examples, and so on).
Your work will be evaluated on the thoroughness and thoughtfulness of your analysis as well as the presentation of your results.
Questions to guide analysis:
As you read and research throughout the quarter, post links on your homepage to at least two websites you find exemplary in some way. Beneath the link, please write a brief blurb explaining what the website is and why you find it exemplary. It should be something useful for your peers in this class to look at (e.g., "this webpage uses links" is not sufficiently characteristic, but "this webpage effectively addresses an audience of college students through its use of slang and colorful, high-impact design" is). If your reason for choosing the webpage is found somewhere specific in the coding, please direct your readers what to look for in "viewing the source" or in a web editor. These postings are due by April 27th but will be appreciated as you find them.
Write a detailed plan for your final project and the timeline on which you will produce it. The goal here is to provide yourself and your team (if you have one) with a clear articulation of your goals for the site, as well as as many specifics as possible in order to make clear how you intend to meet these goals. This proposal will also serve as the basis of a conference with me as well as an initial review with your organization.
Although you should address the questions below (and all others you determine to be useful), in writing your paper, develop it in paragraphs rather than a series of discrete answers. You are certainly encouraged to use headings and other good principles of document design, but your final product should not be a series of bulleted or numbered lists. Feel free to use diagrams and other visual aids where useful. Links to mockups that illustrate your descriptions will be most welcome.
This proposal will be evaluated on the 4.0 scale according to the grade that I anticipate giving a perfect execution of the site you propose, as well as the degree to which you persuasively communicate a feasible plan for producing the proposed site. NOTE: This grade by no means constitutes any agreement about the grade you will receive for your final website.
Notice that many of these questions involve issues you have considered in previous assignments. Specifically, many of your answers to the above questions will likely be informed by your preliminary project overview, your web genre analysis, and your resulting ideas about how to most effectively address your purposes in the given rhetorical situation (including how best to make use of convention and/or what kinds of genre bending, blending, and blurring you'll put to use).
The project timeline will include: