Tag: syllabus

Replied to a post by Naida Saavedra @naidasaavedra@hcommons.socialNaida Saavedra @naidasaavedra@hcommons.social (hcommons.social)
Next semester I'll teach a #CreativeWriting class (fiction, in English) for the first time ever! I'm very excited! I'll focus on short stories and flash fiction. Any ideas you may have, texts you usually include, please send them my way! #LatinaProfessor #AcademicMastodon #WritingCommunity
@naidasaavedra, some ideas for perusal:

McPhee’s Draft No. 4 suggests a useful and fun writing exercise, but it’s missing the hidden contextual advice of using older dictionaries like Webster’s 1913 dictionary. 

Encouraging creative writers to keep and maintain a commonplace book is always a fruitful exercise. Most of the “greats” had one (or something close to it), but contemporary examples like Eminem’s may be more relevant/motivating. Blogger and creative writer Austin Kleon has a digital version as an example.  Colleen Kennedy has an excellent and creative class assignment relating to this as well.

Musician and producer Brian Eno and artist Peter Schmidt created a set of 100+ “creativity cards” which they entitled Oblique Strategies that can be useful to introduce to students and have them use over a semester. All the editions’ cards can be found via links here: http://www.rtqe.net/ObliqueStrategies/Edition1-3.html, but there are also websites, apps, and even printable cards. 

And finally, speaking of cards, it can be fun to do experimental creative writing using index cards, a practice used by Vladimir Nabokov, Jean Paul, Arno Schmidt, Michael Ende, and many others. Open Culture has a short piece on Nabokov’s process.

Should you care to mine it for other possible ideas, I’ve got a digital commonplace of my own. Here are some possible places to start:

References

McPhee, John. “Draft No. 4: Replacing the Words in Boxes.” The New Yorker, April 29, 2013. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/29/draft-no-4. 
 
Somers, James. “You’re Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary.” Blog. The Jsomers.Net Blog, May 18, 2014. https://jsomers.net/blog/dictionary.
 
Kennedy, Colleen E. “Creating a Commonplace Book (CPB).” Accessed August 31, 2021. https://www.academia.edu/35101285/Creating_a_Commonplace_Book_CPB_.
 
Eno, Brian, and Peter Schmidt. Oblique Strategies: Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas. 5th ed. 1975. Reprint, self-published, 2001. https://www.enoshop.co.uk/shop/oblique-strategies.

🔖 Student Privacy Syllabus Statement Project

Bookmarked Student Privacy Syllabus Statement Project (pad.riseup.net)
The following document is an in-progress draft of a statement that might be included with a syllabus to help raise student awareness about controversial data collection practices carried out in many of the technologies they use for learning. Though we cannot always change, fully understand, or opt out of these practices, we feel that ignoring their presence contributes to the broader helplessness in confronting the mass exploitation of personal data at large. This is meant to be a template statement that a professor could revise for inclusion in the syllabus, regardless of the subject matter of the course. We recognize that some power dynamics may not allow for such a statement and that each person should decide for themselves if such a statement in their syllabus is possibile considering their context. If anything we feel the idea of such a statement makes for an excellent thought experiment to address questions of the use of problematic collection and use of student data and to develop conversation around these issues. This draft was started by Autumm Caines and Erin Rose Glass and then opened to group comments during their "Architecture of Student Privacy" workshop during the Domains 2019 conference. We are now soliciting further comments in order to create a template for circulation and plan to write up the process for publication.
Hat tip:

👓 A Reading List for Ralph Northam | The Atlantic

Read A Reading List for Ralph Northam by Ibram X. KendiIbram X. Kendi (The Atlantic)
If he won’t step down, the governor will need this anti-racist syllabus.
The sad part is that there needs to be a Ralph Northam story for people to potentially be interested in reading an article like this much less consume some of the reading list he kindly provides. I’ve started Kendi’s book myself and have to say it’s quite enlightening with lots of history that’s not commonly taught in most high school or college curricula.

For those without as much reading time there’s also the excellent Seeing White podcast that folks might appreciate.