Professional eportfolios

What is an eportfolio? What might you be able to communicate to possible employers, internship coordinators, and/or graduate school admissions committees through an eportfolio? What might those audiences hope to learn about you in an eportfolio?

Class Journal April, 7 2015

Laura Durkalec

Class Journal for April 7, 2015

Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky

Shirky says there is old media era and new media era.

-Old media era has to do with the “process, product and output idea.” Shirky gives the example of the television but this idea isn’t limited to just that. Talked about on page 53 of the reading.

-New media for Shirky is when media is considered the connective tissue.

- Shirky points out on page 60 how he was teaching at NYU and in just 15 to 20 years media has sufficiently changed. It no longer is a “process, product, and output” idea but now is a connective tissue.

- In old media movie reviews came from movie reviewers and news came from news reporters.  There were three ways to make message public if you were just another citizen and if you did any of this you were either rich, pathetic or a whack job. The example Shirky gives: a priest molested a guy. He could only make it public by putting it on a sign and then he was considered a whack job but it was one of the biggest scandals ever.

-New media is the means in which you can publish. Now we have the connected tissue. We only need a blogger and a publish button to make your work public.

-Mad men on AMC did not go for a mass audience. AMC needed to fill airtime with Mad Men. This is kind of an example of a relic of the old media because it doesn’t matter what they play, AMC will still get the check.  

Cognitive Surplus with Critical Mass

-If you buy a TV this amounts to one more consumer and one more producer. What this means for cognitive surplus is that this number adds to the amount of volume that will one day reach the critical mass.

-Critical mass is a concept where you need a certain number of people for anything to work. The Internet itself has a critical mass.

-Example: There was a boy band in South Korea. The website very much functioned like a forum where you could get on and talk about them. For it to work you need to have those people on the forum to chat.

-With cognitive surplus you have to get enough people together with enough motivation.

-Example: Getting Josh Groban a 21^st birthday gift. There were two organizations: one collects the funds and then the other distributes it.

-The Internet gives you a set of means to publish. Motivation is always intrinsic and altruistic. People want to connect with one another and people want to bond. It comes from a place of love.

Gutenberg Economics

-Old media model can be described as a “Gutenberg Economics” scribal culture.

-The initial capital is always resources and labor. Resources: ink, paper, machines. Labor: editors, layouts, press room mechanics.

-Gutenberg economics is one of the things that gave rise to new authorships. There was always a risk and a hope for return. Now you can make something public without asking for permission.

Some Class Discussion

-“Do you buy the claim we were once anti social but now we are more social?” 1 way path vs. 2-way path talking about old and new media.

-“Does the web enrich relationships?” Easy to move around and still keep in contact.

-“Do you know people only online and not in real life?” Through business stuff, role playing, Xbox live, home school kids will contact students in real class and act like they’re part of the class, making friends on Tumblr, poetry critiques, ok cupid, Chelsea’s “can I go to the bathroom?” story

Last points of the lecture

-When doing something in real life it can affect something online and when you do something online it can affect your real life. Shirky sees “in real life” and online as related.

-Two types of writing: public writing (stuff that was published) and private writing (journaling, address book, calendar, letters). Shirky points to the idea there is no longer a distinction between the two. Or we can write in ways that are both public and private. Private messaging isn’t really private because you can screenshot.

-Digital sharecropping like with Huffington Post. There is where you pull something from the Internet and put it on their site and they get revenue from ad views. Digital sharecropping model says you shouldn’t get paid for what you wrote because you still get views and a reputation. Shirky points to this as an online issue.

-Geocities was not really the point of having a good design it was a point to connect with people that like the same things as you do.

-Technology allows us to do stuff we want to do. Motives are innate and inside us. Motive matters more than opportunity.

Rheingold’s video

-Rheingold’s video notes that the computer is a writing and reading technology. A “many to many” model. Many people write, many people read, and many people write back. Can also be called cooperative action. No longer are my rewards monetary but intrinsic.

Class Journal: 4/2/2015

Class Journal 4/2/2015

Chelsea Holmes

 Jim Ridolfo

Things everyone liked about Ridolfo’s piece

-storytelling

-description of experience

-interview style

-he couldn’t have figured it out the same from a birds eye view

-very process oriented (strategy)

-he showed diagrams and stages

-he said how hindsight effected everything maggie was saying, giving the text a lifespan

-everything is purposeful, purposeful delivery

-media and circulation strategy

-shows a writing and editing strategy

-if people like it after Maggie talking with them, they’ll redistribute it

-Ridolfo notices that Maggie’s story is not generalizable  (there is some serendipity involved)

Ridolfo’s piece is still important even with it’s flaws because:

-learn something about delivery

-it is the opposite of what we normally read that has an exact definition, this gives us practice to put with the theories

-delivery starts with orality

RIDOLFO LIST FOR DELIVERY

1.community

2.place

3.time

4.media

5.organizations

6.instiutions

7.technology

8.people

Ridolfo thinks people matter!

Ex. Website called “knowyourmeme.com” with “wewlad”

Shows often time text is more about the story behind it, just like us finding Maggie’s story interesting because then we can understand her writing more.

It is important to have an actual conversation with people, like how Maggie talked to the conservative men in person. This is a Platonic way of going about things, he taught about having the actual author there to tell you what writing means.

Remixing and reprinting of Maggie’s piece, makes the audience seem active

Distribution: Maggie knows who gets to see it and how they get to see it

Circulation: Where it goes after distribution and who sees it without her knowledge

Rhetorical situation with Bitzer Review

- triangle with 1 writer, 1 text, 1 audience, and 1 context

Theories we have covered this semester

-Rhetorical situation

-Genre

-Remediation

-Media

-Multimodality

-Remix

-Assemblage

-Delivery

“How do they all relate?”

Everyone in class felt like everything had to do with rhetorical situation

-delivery and genre are the necessary “how”

-rhetorical situation –informs/frames

-remediation, assemblage and remediation are different sources

-media=repurposing

Current class definition of remix vs. assemblage: in remix one can’t see all the parts, and in assemblage they can

Journal 3/31/15 Idaly Mata

Where does the class intend to post project 2?
Social media: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, Weebly, Blogger
Each place has its own set of values. Author must consider their medium and intention when choosing the site(s) the intend to post to. 

Take into consideration the theories of Porter and Nielsen.

Given examples of Reddit being more "masculine and conservative" while Tumblr is more "queer".

Considering each site:
                           Facebook: shareable, more than alphabetic: image & video, recirculated articles,                                                        relatable (common experience).
                               Blogger/Weebly: alien, unfamiliar, exploratory, relatable (Nielson- his emphasis on                                                               the importance of titles)
                               Twitter: hashtag, humor, witty, retweet, quotes, @name, links, locations
                               Instagram: 1/3’s, selfie culture, good caption, descriptive, clever, concise, 2 lines or                                                    less, hashtags.
                               Tumblr: relatable, visual (gifs)
                               Youtube: good tags, good title, subscribers, descriptions.

+Key wording, describing, upholding conventions+
-must keep in mind the importance of design choices, chosen platform, and the parameters of the  project.

Workshop #2
Adapted from Cheryl Balls "Adapting Editorial Peer Review of Webtexts for Classroom Use"
Stage 1) Understanding community values
Stage 2) Read/review the webtext
Stage 3) Write a review letter
                 includes: 1. playback what project is about 2. review what works / what doesn't work                                             3. suggestions for revision
Stage 4) Making sense of your feedback

Practitioner Stories

In trying to research the delivery of texts, Ridolfo constructs a practitioner story: a narrative about how a specific writer composed and delivered their text to multiple audiences for multiple purposes.

Of what value are practitioner stories like these? What do such stories teach us about writing and editing?

Class Journal - 03/26-15 - Taylor Paul

Overview of the classic rhetoric of delivery:

• Delivery is the oral presentation of the message, such as formal speeches. 
• Some factors that surround formal speeches are location, physical appearance, who the audience is, and their perceptions.
• Historically: the white man was the only person with the right to the podium.

Overview of the Porter's ideas on delivery:

• Delivery became less important in rhetorical theory because 'places, body, and text' were not seen as important anymore.
• Porter feels that digital delivery:
• Makes sense of digital writing.
• Helps plan communication because the five topoi help you to create and write your content by giving you key factors to consider
• Porter also feels that is it acceptable to place more focus on certain topoi and feel that others are less important because that is their nature (it is also acceptable to add and remove topoi as we see fit).
• Internet communication isn't monolithic. Different rules apply to different spaces because the Internet is not a single entity. 
• Just as the printing press changed the nature of knowledge by adding consistency, technology is not a neutral tool and changes us as people.
• Digital composing is a techne (theory and practice/why and how of creating texts).

Group work uncovering the five topoi:

• Access/Accessibility:
• Considers the ability of people to obtain information regardless of location or physical ability, as well as considers ways in which users access information (mobile site, app, pc, etc.)
• Not everybody has the same technology (access) and not everybody has the same body (accessibility).
• There is a digital divide, meaning not all access is equal. Many people do not use the internet, and many that do access it primarily through mobile devices. 
• Because not everybody has the same body, some people are limited with their use of the Internet. This is why it is important to use tools that increase accessibility such as alt tags with photos. 
• Body/Identity:
• Considers online representations of the body, gestures, voice, dress, and image of identity and performance of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. 
• The body plays a key role in face-to-face oral delivery, and so creating a bodily representation is a part of rhetorical performance in digital spaces as well. 
• Examples of body identity is the use of emoticons which can accurately (or inaccurately) represent our bodies in digital space. Another example is the photoshopping of models (such as on the Victoria's Secret webpage) or the filtering of personal images (such as those on Instagram or Facebook).
• Controversial in the sense that we expect the representation of bodies in digital space to represent real life, and are often offended when it doesn't. 
• Distribution/Circulation:
• Considers the technological publishing options for texts, including reproduction, distribution, and circulation. 
• Distribution choices affect the composing process (tweets are composed differently than blog posts, and videos are composed differently than podcasts).
• Circulation is the potential for a text to be redistributed without the author's direct intervention.
• Essentially, authors control distribution by choosing where to share their work, but they can only slightly influence circulation by restricting it from being shared or requesting it be shared. 
• Circulation also involves the use of search engine optimization because texts that are effectively tagged will circulate more than those with no tags. 
• Economics:
• Considers regulations and copyright policy, as well as motivation for creation and value. 
• We don't create and share texts for no reason, so we must have some motivation for writing (be it monetary or social). 
• Economics of delivery also considers that everything must have value (for the author, and for the audience).
• Interactivity:

• Considers how users engage interfaces and each other in digital environments. 
• All texts are interactive, even if the only interaction is access (reading a blog post where comments are disabled, for example). 
• Porter provides the above chart where the lowest measure of interactivity is access and the highest is co-production (such as collaborative Google docs.

Digital Delivery

Porter's theory of delivery is comprised of five topoi. Given the nature of topoi, the five dimensions he outlines are designed to help plan the delivery of a message through digital media. In your estimation, are these five topoi helpful? Why or why not?