Week 2

Near the end of the week, I’ll usually post a “week ahead” post that aims to just give you a snapshot of what’s coming up so you can stay on track. The welcome to the class post kind of walked you through last week and up to today, when you’ll be publishing your literacy narratives as pages on your WordPress sites (and then publishing a reflective blog post about the writing process). If you’re not going to have the literacy narrative published before tomorrow morning (August 27), please send me an email letting me know when you do expect to have it published.

Once you have published your literacy narrative, sign up for a conference with me at the earliest convenient time for you.

By Sunday, you should publish your first side quest assignment, creating a square avatar image that will replace all those images of Thor’s underpants on the Student Sites page. Follow the link above to the assignment post for full instructions.

If you did not read “Rhetorical Situations” before class yesterday, please do read it this week. In our next synchronous class session, our discussion will focus on two main topics:

• Rhetorical situations, and in particular identifying the rhetorical situation of the game Depression Quest (which you’ll play before class)
• Beginning to develop our working definitions of a game and play.

By class on Tuesday, you’ll have already read a number of different definitions of game presented in two different essays by Jane McGonigal (the one linked above and also the introduction to Superbetter, which will be due next week on Tuesday). You will have also listened to the 99% Invisible podcast linked above analyzing the game Monopoly. We’ll talk about all those texts, paying special attention to what they say about the power and purpose of games and how they define that term. So as you read and listen, take notes about those definitions and think about which ones make the most sense for you.

I hope that’s all clear and the schedule is making sense to you. I’ll post a week ahead post that’s actually looking ahead to next week in a couple of days, but this one is here just to help keep you oriented in the meantime.