I loved eavesdropping on your first team meetings in class yesterday—I heard so many good ideas for potential collaborative projects. Over the next few days, keep thinking about your options and stay in touch with your teammates as new ideas come to mind. This weekend is the time to check with potential clients to see if they would be interested in having your team help them. As you do so, be careful not to commit to a project until your entire team agrees on its topic. By next Tuesday, your team should have a draft of its memorandum of understanding, [ Read More ]
Archive for February, 2011
The photos you brought to class on Thursday looked very promising, and at this point you should be editing (or in some cases, reshooting) those photos, then integrating them with the written text for your Instructable. During Week 6, we’ll wrap up the Instructables unit, then turn our attention to Unit #3, a collaboratively written recommendation report. To help me put you into balanced teams, please print out and complete the Teaming Inventory document (linked on the Readings page), then bring the results page with you to class on Tuesday. On Tuesday, we’ll conduct a peer-review workshop for the Instructables [ Read More ]
Several of you missed class on Thursday (is everyone OK?!), but for those of you who were there, I had fun watching you complete our visual instructions activity. I read through them last night, and given your time constraints (and my intentionally vague instructions), I was very impressed with what you produced. We’ll conduct a short debriefing exercise about this activity on Tuesday, and I would love to hear more about your successes (and your frustrations) with this activity. If you have not submitted a proposal for your Instructables project, please complete that task right now. I have responded to [ Read More ]
With the correspondence unit behind us, we are ready to move from business communication to technical communication. The instructions unit puts a new twist on a very old genre, and it will help us develop our visual rhetoric skills at the same time. I’m always amazed at what my students do with this assignment, and I can’t wait to hear your ideas. On Tuesday, we will compare various approaches to delivering instructions. To prepare for our in-class discussion, please read Chapter 10 in the textbook before you come to class. In addition, you should familiarize yourself with the Instructables website [ Read More ]