In the Fall of 2007 I had the opportunity to teach, for the first time, Multimedia Writing at Purdue University. Given the opportunity to truly develop a syllabus from scratch, I chose not to emulate the syllabi of previous instructors and, based on my pedagogical readings and experience, I developed and designed my own assignments. The assignments in my course diverged significantly from the norm. To my knowledge no section of multimedia writing has been taught using a documentary film as the primary course assignment.
In addition to the documentary film (and its accompanying texts), students were also given the opportunity to complete individual assignments, including reflections on the nature of multimedia writing. These assignments (including samples of student writing) are included here. Since the individual assignments were later integrated into a portfolio, I have also included samples of those as well as details for the portfolio submission. My original design for the course contained assignments that I was not able to implement this semester, but since I intend to include them next semester, I am including them here and will update them appropriately as students engage in and complete these assignments.
As I mentioned above, this was my first time teaching multimedia writing and as such, was very much a learning experience for me. I had the privilege (and good fortune) of working with a group of motivated and dedicated students, all of whom seemed to enjoy the class to varying degrees. The bar that I set for them was not only met but raised again and again as they worked through the assignments. They continually met and then exceeded my expectations. Successful teaching is always a complicated interaction between teacher knowledge, pedagogical strategies, student motivation, and the interpersonal dynamics of the individual classroom. The dynamic within this group of students, including their interaction with me, was conducive to successful completion of assignments. I cannot imagine a more ideal situation in which to test a new syllabus approach and am immensely pleased by the course outcome.
Included within this section is a detailed guide to teaching the course using the syllabus approach that I developed during the Fall 2007 semester and have revised based on student feedback and my own assessments. Feel free to use and adapt any of the assignments included here. I ask only that you make appropriate attribution, including a link to this website. Feel free to post any questions and/or suggestions that you might have. To share suggestions, revised versions of assignments, sample student work or to pose questions, please visit the site forum.
Note: many of the materials included here were facilitated by the use of the open source, content management system, Drupal. Downloading Drupal is free, while running it requires that you have a webserver that provides a MySQL database and supports php. Your institution may provide you with the necessary technical requirements. If not, an inexpensive alternative (and the host that I use) is OpenSourceHost. If this is not a tool that you wish or are able to implement in your classroom, many of the assignments can be supported by free blogging services, such as Blogger.com
