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A. Toscano's HomepageEnglish
4181/5181Major
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Major Assignments After you've read Alan Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum, I know you'll have an opinion or two about his world view of the IT world, a world all of us inhabit and some of us think we run. As you read this book, I want you to think about how the information could be useful for your career or career path. You might not be able to claim Cooper directly is useful, but he may be indirectly useful by getting you to think about what your future may hold. After you've finished the book (and I'm giving you lots of time to read this book), I want you to write an essay, a career-oriented essay inspired by Cooper. All essays are meant to be at least five pages in a normal typed, double-spaced format. All should have a title other than, "The Inmates are Running the Asylum Essay." Also, all essays should be well written, unified, coherent documents nearly free of mechanical, logical, or structural errors (representative of appropriate upper-level college writing). Possible topics you may want to discuss as they relate to careers:
You will be making an argument in your essay, which means you must have proof backing up what it is you want your audience to believe. You must defend your point of view with logical arguments and sound evidence (the evidence will come partially from the book). You shouldn't summarize!!! I've read the book several times, so, if you need to refer to something Cooper mentions, an efficient in-text citation will do just fine. Try to relate something in the book to an experience, belief, critical perspective, etc. on careers or jobs that you have. The main goal of this essay is diagnostic. I want to assess the class's writing abilities in a more traditional English format--an essay--before moving on to designing user documents. Therefore, this should not be late. All Portfolio Documents All your documents must have a proposal memo/write-up turned in when you bring your rough drafts to class for workshops. Please see the syllabus for rough draft due dates. Without the proposal memo/write-up, the assignment is incomplete, and your portfolio grade will be lowered. Make sure this gets to me when the document is due. Please do not turn in a document and then get the proposal memo/write-up to me days later...that defeats the purpose of this assignment. Your final portfolio will have an overall reflection that will include your revision strategies and rationale as well as comments on how you see usability testing being important to your current or future career. Individual User Document #1: Search Engine (Rough Draft Due 2/14, Final Due 2/21) Students will create a small-scale user document aimed at instructing a lay audience on how to perform a task with a technology. Search engines will be our primary concern, but see me about alternatives if you want to choose a different “instrument.” Students must propose what they plan to investigate by writing a brief description of the instrument, explaining how they will approach their set of instructions for an end user, and offering a way to test their draft. The final document should be revised for the student’s final portfolio. Your User Doc should include the following when you turn it in:
The first three items can be seen as one document, a preliminary work. The fourth item is your actual steps or procedures for getting a user through the search engine query you're using. If you find that you're done after 3 steps, consider describing the features of the search engine's results. As I said before, 10 steps is a bit much, but you can describe the results if you seem to be finished after a few steps. Individual User Document #2 (Rough Draft Due 3/14, User Test 3/21, Final Due 3/28) Students will create a medium-scale user document aimed at instructing a lay audience on how to perform a task with a technology or technologies. The best assignments will come from finding a technology close to your educational background or career. Please consult with me early if you have trouble settling on an “instrument.” Students must propose what they plan to investigate by writing a brief description of the instrument, explaining how they will approach their set of instructions for an end user, and offering a way to test their draft. The final document should be revised for the student’s final portfolio. Any gamers out there? We'll have more in-depth planning documents this time around. The first change, though, will be that I want you all to come up with three personas for the instrument you'll document. I also want you to include the following:
Remember, you need to build on your skills throughout the semester (and from the previous semester, year, or what have you), so I want to see some sophistication. Let me show you what a student did a couple years ago... Individual or Group Document #3 (Rough Draft Due 4/04, User Test 4/11, Final Due 4/18) Students will create a large-scale user document aimed at instructing a lay audience on how to perform a task with a technology or technologies. The best assignments will come from finding a technology close to your educational background or career. Please consult with me early if you have trouble settling on an “instrument.” Also, if you decide to do this with a partner, choose your partner or group members wisely, paying close attention to your potential members’ levels of commitment to class as well as your and his or her dispositions to compromise and teamwork. Students must propose what they plan to investigate by writing a brief description of the instrument, explaining how they will approach their set of instructions for an end user, and offering a way to test their draft. This assignment’s testing must include a sound user-centered approach for testing the document’s effectiveness. I’m more than willing to accept a user test done on a population outside 4181/5181. Your last document, User Doc #3, is going to be slightly larger than your previous User Doc #2. The new feature for your proposal/planning documents is the abstraction. Depending on the instrument you come up with, you may or may not end up having the user critique your abstraction diagram. Since we have nice, powerful Adobe software, I want you all to do your best to incorporate the software into your next document. Think of Instructional/Educational Guides as well. Don't limit yourself to just instructions or manuals. Also, you may do this with a partner--NO MORE THAN TWO!!! Your user test will be April 13th, so you must have something for users to test. An instructional-type document will be at the heart of this assignment, so I want you all to come up with three personas for the instrument you'll document. I also want you to include the following:
Remember, you need to build on your skills throughout the semester (and from the previous semester, year, or what have you), so I want to see some sophistication. Persona Research (ongoing, final due 4/25) Students will prepare a final report on the attitudes, values, practices, and demographics of three personas (personas are discussed in Cooper’s book). This assignment is the culmination of semester-long research into what are generalizations about types (not stereotypes) of users. Class discussions will expand on this assignment’s details, but I encourage students to gather information about types of users throughout the semester. Having a running log or daybook might help. Your final research will be assembled into a report that includes a Cover Sheet, Abstract (overview), Table of Contents, Illustrations/Images (persona picture), Description & Discussion, and References. This isn’t an assignment that a student can do well in one night; on the contrary, it will require a semester-long commitment to research and reflection. Your final research will include three personas in the following categories: 1) your perception of your group or culture (not you per se but your "type"), 2) the opposite of you (or a beginner if you're an expert), and 3) a user of a culture other than your own (but different from #2). Remember, culture with a small 'c' implies what we often refer to as subcultures. The goal of this assignment is to have you think critically and explore of the needs of users from a general perspective. Based on both your cultural observations and traditional research (a library--at least a search engine--should be used for references), I want you to create personas that include the following (the bulleted list is your description; your discussion is your research--personal observations and traditional academic research):
Each of your personas should include at least a 250-word discussion of the persona's technological literacy. From your observations and research, you are going to make the case that the above attributes of the persona establish him or her as a particular type of user with definable (albeit generalized) skills. This is the cultural exploration and case you'll make for your persona. There is no model for this--you decide, but please include the above information for each persona as separate from your 250-word discussion. I want to avoid giving you models of this assignment because that often leads to getting back what I gave you. That's circular reasoning, but I'll explain. Please note that this is a departure from Cooper's personas because I'm asking for more in-depth discussion of the persona as a member of a culture. Cooper would think we're doing too much, but our goal isn't to use these in our assignments; instead, our goal is to think about the cultural forces that shape users. Your website is a place for you to complete class assignments and display your final work. Of course, things can change, but your website is more of a repository in this course. Your non-portfolio drafts of the documents should be thought of as print-based documents, and your final portfolio drafts may be online versions. While the end result is up to you, I have guidelines for this assignment: Some of you are already experts at this, and some of you are brand new. I want you to create a BRAND NEW webpage for this course. Some of you have had me before, and you still have a webpage. Please have this class's web pages contained in a file folder named "4181" or "5181." Therefore, in your public_html file folder, you should have a file folder named "4181" or "5181."
I'll show you how to create and "updates" page, so you can record the changes you make every week. Check out the following list to see what gets added in addition to your portfolio assignments:
Later in the semester, you'll need to have links to your assignments if you aren't printing them out for your final portfolio, so it might help to consider the following as you work on this web page:
Let's see how far we got...questions? Bibliographic Essay (Due 4/18) ***This assignment is for ENGL 5181 students only*** ***This assignment is for ENGL 5181 students only*** ***This assignment is for ENGL 5181 students only*** This essay will be an exploration of a scholarly topic in the field of technical communication. You will summarize and discuss at least seven articles concerning your topic. Yes, in this assignment you should do more summary than analysis, but you must also analyze the relationships between and among the different articles. For instance, consider whether or not the articles agree or disagree or if they appear to build upon the previous articles. These articles should be all or mostly scholarly journal articles from peer-reviewed journals. However, I do realize that scholarly journal articles are not the only places where you can find good information related to our class topics. Please see me if you believe you've found good articles that aren't peer-reviewed. Although you will mostly summarize in this assignment, you must connect the articles together with some kind of narration--good transition, logical "next steps," chronology, etc. You may have an opinion...that's encouraged. Examples of topics we've covered or will cover this semester are below:
This essay should be at least 14 pages, double spaced. ***This assignment is for ENGL 5181 students only*** ***This assignment is for ENGL 5181 students only*** ***This assignment is for ENGL 5181 students only*** Those of you enrolled in 5181 will be doing a nice 4-5 minute presentation on HAL or inspired by HAL. I originally wanted you to take an aspect of user design from the book and discuss it. For instance, you could take one of the big case studies/examples and present the issue to the class in your own words. One of the disasters or mishaps would work well. Just get up in front of class and convey the information to the non-expert audience. I will score your presentation on a scale of 1 to 25 based of the following criteria:
Remember, presentations are not ALL ENCOMPASSING descriptions, they're astutely concise representations of a topic. Portfolio Requirements (Due 5/02) Your final portfolio is due on the last day of class and will be returned during the final exam. Please give me the original User Documents I commented on (#1, #2, and #3) in a folder of some kind. You may put your revisions online or print them out and turn them in with the originals--notice you don't have to do both, one or the other. However, make all online portfolio assignments in HTML or PDFs. Don't just put a word doc up and link to it. At least convert it to an html file. I'll take off points for word doc. In case you're skimming, all online portfolio documents must be html files or PDFs--do not just link to a Word document. Linking to a Word document for our purposes is lame. Along with your originals in the folder you give to me, I want you to include a Reflective Cover Letter. The reflective cover letter should include an introduction of yourself as a technical writer. Additionally, you should briefly discuss the assignments you revised—what you changed, why you did the changes, what effect did the changes have on the paper. Aim for discussing higher order concerns and major, overall revisions; please don’t tell me you added a colon here and there or corrected a misspelled word—consider the larger picture. This reflective letter is very important to your portfolio because it tells me how you've been thinking about the writing you've done this semester. Remember, I'm not grading products; I'm grading your entire writing processes. I would be surprised if this went over 6 pages double spaced. Not including a reflective letter will adversely affect your final grade. Finally, Moodle does not calculate your final grade appropriately because both 5181 and 4181 are combined, and the two classes have different requirements. If there's a percentage on Moodle, it doesn't reflect your final grade. A note about portfolio grades: As I graded the portfolios, I came across some very good work. Most of the documents turned in are well-done pieces that show more than adequate effort. However, I was taken aback by the lack of reflection in the reflective cover letters. As I stated in class several times, these letters are to guide my reading of your revisions, and you are to explain how your choices reflect your understanding of audience and purpose. I got a preview of the issue during your final presentations, but it was too late because you just turned in your portfolios. A better indication of you thinking about audience is actually your Persona Research, which highlighted your understanding of the assumed user. The reflective cover letters for this portfolio do not critically explain (for the most part...there are exceptions) why the personas influenced your document choices. In effect, this last assignment (the reflective cover letter) made the persona--both the research assignment and the User Document guidelines--useless because few of you actually explained how the personas, which are your assumed audience, guided your revisions. Another situation in several letters mentioned the user and the purpose, but they didn't provide specifics, just vague generalizations that didn't correspond to particular revisions. This lack of reflection in the cover letters solidifies that more effort needs to be made on my part to get students to reflect--think about their own thinking. Metacognition is the word, and both the undergraduate and graduates need to work on this. It's more important to be able to define or even defend why you made a choice than to simply make something pretty without understand how it's communicating its message. As for grades, because I got little help or guidance on how to read your portfolios, I decided to grade your reflections. The better the reflection, meaning how well the class showed how their choices were guided by audience and purpose, the better I was able to assess growth. When there is little or no critical reflection, I can only rely on what I fell adequate, good, or excellent documents are. That means I don't have the context for an individual document's purpose. Remember, your grade is not just the portfolio: It is based on all of your work. Your portfolio grade and persona research (and Bibliographic Essay for 5181) are 40% of your grade, but there's 60% beyond that. I decided not to factor in your reflective cover letters as graded assignments, but they do influence how I grade your final portfolios. If you are unhappy with your final grade, consider ALL of your assignments before e-mailing me and asking "why did I get" a certain grade. No one single grade can lower (or, alternatively, raise) your grade. Your grade is based on several assignments. As for the number on your portfolio, the 4181 class's portfolios are out of 30, and the 5181 class's portfolios are out of 24. If your grades seems really low, please review the late work policy. Finally, Moodle does not calculate your final grade appropriately because both 5181 and 4181 are combined, and the two classes have different requirements. Additionally, Moodle doesn't allow me the flexibility to have different types of scores. If there's a percentage or total on Moodle, it doesn't reflect your final grade. In 4-5 min, highlight the theories that guided your creation and re-vision of your portfolio documents. Basically, you're telling us what choices you made overall in order to communicate effectively for your particular purpose and your particular users (personas). This isn't a speech where you go over every change; in fact, you can do a good job just explaining how your final documents convey the message you think is conveyed. It is your job to select the appropriate examples and not go over (or under) time. In case there was some confusion, the 5181 students are doing a 4-5 minute presentation on 4/18, and on 5/02 everyone will be doing 4-5 minute presentations. I will score your presentation on a scale of 1 to 5 based of the following criteria:
Although it may seem like too much extra work, you should practice your oral presentations in order to gauge how long your part will take. You can't possibly convey all the choices you made as a technical writer--one who conveys technical information regardless of title--in the time you have. Therefore, you must choose your points wisely. Whether you’re finished talking or not, I’ll cut you off if you go longer than your time limit (4-5 min). I will stop you mid sentence if need be. Again, preparation is crucial. I can’t stress enough how important it is to be prepared for all oral presentations. |
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