Arts Study Seminar : Course Description

Individual in Society

Academic Discourse and Digital Literacy

Course Description: In this class we will begin by exploring resources and techniques for critical reading, academic research and writing across university disciplines.  Janet Giltrow’s text,  Academic Writing , will introduce us to a community of scholarly writing and guide us through the strategies and methods necessary for joining this community. Developing the skills required to engage in a scholalry conversation and write a research paper involves not only learning new and practical techniques for critical thinking, reading, researching and writing, it is equally essential that you learn about academic culture. To this end, in our first semester we will be creating an academic conference; our research for this conference will be  concerned with 'digital literacy.'  Our conference organizers will include a documentry team who will produce a short DVD on the results of our research. You can take a look at last year's conference here: i-lit Conference Day 1.

In the second term we will continue to work in small research groups. Each group will propose, design and complete research projects that focus more centrally on exploring our theme: 'Individual in Society.'  For these projects we will rely on guidance from our text, writing in a Visual Age.  This is a writing intensive course concerned with a wide range of scholalry composition skills. You will have the opportunity to explore and practice the writing styles and rhetorical techniques of academic discourse, you will also develop your skills with digital literacy and composition  -- and perhaps most significantly, you will have the chance to explore and experiment with techniques for schorlarly collaboration.

Required Texts:

• Janet Giltrow with Daniel Burgoyne, Richard Gooding, Marlene Sawatsky, Academic Writing: An Introduction. Broadview Press, 2005.

• Lee Odell and Susan M Katz, Writing in a Visual Age. Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2006.

Assignments:

• Assignment 1 - Your Google Journal

• In Class Summary: 15 %
• Quiz: 5 %
• Conference Assignment :25 %
• Research Paper : 25 %
• Final Exam:  30 %

Please Note:

You are responsible for reading the university guidelines concerning plagerism. We will also talk about this issue in class.

Late assignments will cost you 5% of your grade per day.

There is an $5.00 Wiki Website course fee for this course.