I’ve taken a variety of offbeat classes at Longwood, from bookmaking to food ethics to literature of the American frontier. Among the unusual courses I’ve found myself enrolled in was an English honors course in the fall of my senior (2019-20) year: “ENGL 210-50: Crafting Your Digital Tattoo.”
Truthfully, I had no idea what I was getting into when I signed up for the course. I had never taken a course with the professor before and found the title more branding than descriptive per se. I knew I needed an honors course and I was looking for one that was not a math course and not at eight in the morning. This course met my parameters and coupled with the fact it presumably had something to do with writing, had me signing up for the course.
It turned out to be a course about writing and digital identity and I enjoyed it immensely. We had three main projects among our other assignments, which brings me to my artifact for this course: my portfolio for the project, which includes an assignment on “Interrogating the Interface,” my “Literacy Narrative,” and an assignment titled “Remixing the Story” as well a reflection on the learning process associated with them.
The first project was to rework a part of Dr. Martin Luther King jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” to a new genre. I chose to use the genre of a FaceBook post. In this project, we explored how utilizing different genres impacts the way that messages can be delivered. Any given genre has constraints and allowances, which impact how the message is conveyed, the audiences it reaches, and how effective it is. Below is my reflection on the project, which includes my original fake FaceBook posted I created in this process.
The second project was to create something that explained a part of our personal journeys as writers. It was fairly opened-ended: some people wrote a specific incident, others talked about their relationship to literacy in general. For me it was about my poor handwriting, something that has haunted me as a writer since kindergarten. To explore this issue, I created a Prezi (similar to a powerpoint) which I presented to the class. There is no video or audio version of what I had to say. Rather, my prezi is linked below and my script which I used for the final in-class run through is attached below. The reflection I wrote at the time is also attached.
https://prezi.com/view/P4mxdzDX6co3hPPtTtmN/
The third project and my personal favorite project was to “remix” a story from the Longwood archives. I chose a scrapbook from a 1915 graduate, Mary Rumbough. I used her two archived scrapbooks, the yearbook from 1915, and catalog and guides to the State Normal School (now Longwood) from that time. I created a stream of “live tweets” from 1915 using a fake tweet generator. Below is my final project, with the tweets followed by footnotes and works cited page. My reflection for that project specifically is posted below that.
Finally, there is my reflection of the course as a whole, which explores what I learned about writing and digital identity in this course. This cumulative reflection is attached below.