Meta-mapping assignment

Hey y’all. Here’s what you need to do for next week. Respond to this post in the Comments, leaving your term and definition that your group worked on in class (i.e., discourse, genre, mode, framing, etc.). You’ll be using these as reminders of the reading, but you can supplement your classmates’ definitions with your own from the Kress book.

Use the terms to do a meta-reflection on your map assignment from last week. This meta-reflection only needs to be a page or two single-spaced. (Yes, that means it can be a page. Or it can be two pages. I don’t care, as long as you’ve covered a few of the terms in some depth in regards to your map.) The point of this assignment is to use some of Kress’s key concepts in his theory of multimodal semiotic theory to reflect on how you designed your map. You might talk about what discourses you drew from to compose your piece on a computer vs. a pizza box. Or what genres you pulled from to make the text cohere. Or how you translated the map from page 26-27 of the book and framed particular semiotic objects to emphasize the point you wanted to make.

So this is practice for using Kress’s terms with your own design. Bring your write-up to class next week. We’ll talk more about the maps and your meta-reflections in relation to the analysis assignment. We won’t have time to talk about all of them, so decide before class whether you want to just turn it in or want to talk about it. We’ll get to 1-2 in some depth and hear chimings-in from others as it relates to the 1-2 in-depth ones.

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Welcome to English 495.02

This is the course website for English 495.02: Multimodal Theory and Pedagogy, taught by me (Dr. Cheryl Ball) during the Spring 2011 term at Illinois State University. But all that information is really redundant. Cuz you can find it elsewhere in teh design of this “blog” (did you see how I used Internet speak there? Not blog; teh. Get used to it. ;) So, really, all I needed to say was “Welcome!” and maybe a “you can find all the info you need about this class here!” That’s a good example of how multimodal texts work and how, as English department folks used to dealing with wordwordswords, why we often don’t think to take advantage of multimedia to do the work better, or at least, different. That’s what this class is about.

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