Sunday, November 6, 2011

This is Ad Hoc

For starters, this is a requirement of my ENGL 101 course. But more importantly, it's fun. Taking your ideas out of the classroom and doign something with them, whether it's sending them into a peer reviewed journal, writing a letter to the editor of your local paper, or creating a blog of your own, exemplifies both the need and the reasoning behind general education courses like the ones I commonly teach. Taking your ideas out of the classroom is what we are meant to do. Some students refuse to see the connection between general education and the larger world. They might think that just because they can't see a direct link between the exact job they want to get paid to do and the reading assignment for this week, that they aren't learning anything useful for themselves. I couldn't disagree more. To those students I say ask not how specifically your class relates to you, but how you can apply the skills from a class over different areas of your life.

However, this assignment isn't really about me. And, whether or not you and I see eye to eye is neither here nor there when it comes to getting the academic (Project 3) job done. Your mission for the next part of this assignment is to transform your academic MLA version into something more web appropriate, complete with links and perhaps an image of some sort. In a way you will be translating your already written analysis into a web-friendlier version that truly adds to the larger conversation[s] (of consumerism, advertisements, gender, and anything else the commercial you've chosen touches upon) by being a part of this open blog.

There will be an incentive for the blog post with the most views (in the first week) and the blog post with the most comments (also in the first week), so create a tiny url and post it to your networking sites of choice. There will only be one "winner" for each category--meaning all 101 students between both classes are competing for the same titles.

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