Self[ie] Awareness: A Resource for Faculty and Students to Practice Character Presentation through the Selfie

Grant:

Lecturers' Professional Development Fund (LPDF)

Academic Year:

2015 - 2016 (June 1, 2015 through May 31, 2016)

Funding Requested:

$670.00

Project Dates:

Wed, 01/06/2016 - Fri, 09/02/2016

Applicant(s):

sessolo

Overview of the Project:

At the Sweetland Center for Writing I teach classes that focus on new media. Some of the classes I teach are: The Rhetoric of Blogging, The Rhetoric of Memes, Writing for Social Media, and Ethos and New Media. While I am very confident in the rhetorical content that I teach, I believe that developing my knowledge of web publishing and of coding languages such as html and css will help me become a better teacher in digital composition. For this reason, I'm applying for the Lectures' Professional Development Fund to be able to hire a graduate student from the School of Information who's familiar with coding. I am in touch with Professor Erik Hofer from UMSI, and I will ask his advice in the hiring process. The student's help is necessary for me to transition a webtext I developed with my undergraduate students in one of my classes from WIX (a commercial social platform) to a non-proprietary platform. Working with a graduate student who's expert in coding will provide me with the opportunity to learn the basics of coding, so that I can develop and enhance my expertise in new media.

Final Report Fields

Project Objectives:

To develop a resource for students and faculty to practice character presentation using selfies in the writing classroom; to improve multimodal teaching and writing at the University of Michigan; to disseminate findings to the broad University of Michigan community.

Project Achievements:

I was able to revise and expand a website that originated as a capstone project for a class that I taught in the past. I was also able to familiarize myself with Drupal, an open source CMS platform used to create websites. My digital literacy has definitely improved, and I will use this improvement in my teaching. The project impacted 20 students in my W 200 course “Writing the Selfie” in the Fall 2016. Students used the website as course material. In the Winter 2016, potentially 20 students in my W 302 course “Consulting on Multimodal Assignments” will use the website as course material. During the period of the grant, I worked with 3 graduate students from the school of information: Fan Luo, Jiayi Guo, and Ninglu Wang. So far 2 courses were impacted by the project, but I plan to use the website in future courses as well.

Continuation:

Yes, the project will continue beyond the grant period, as the website will be expanded with more submissions. The website houses selfies taken by students, and my plan is to add to that archive. Also, I plan to keep working on the code to fix some minor bugs, as I get better at using that language.

Dissemination:

From November 30 to December 11, 2015, I held an interactive exhibition about the project in Space 2435, North Quad. Together with that digital exhibition, I opened up a Twitter account, @Selfie_NQ2435, to interact with the project by accepting submissions of selfies from the broad U of M community. I am currently working on writing an academic article about the pedagogical merit of the project and website, and I plan to submit the article to the journal "College Composition and Communication." Initially, my plan was to deliver the website as a digital article to the academic web-journal "Kairos," but during the project I realized that it would be better to expand on the pedagogical merits. So, I decided to shift the academic dissemination to more conventional academic venues.

Advice to your Colleagues:

One of the challenges I encountered was to work in Drupal. The platform was suggested to me by the 3 graduate students I worked with, but I have found it incredibly complicated, and if I had to do the project again I would probably work in HTML.

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