• Week 4 Assignments

  • Each week, I will ask you to do four things:
  • 1/  Post an entry in your Learning Journal.  Entries in your Learning Journal (LJ) will most often be focused on Free Writing or Structured Free Writing, which is Free Writing in response to a specific topic, prompt, or question.  I will give you a weekly LJ assignment.  Please post entries in your LJ HERE.  This is a private journal that only you and your instructor can access.
  • 2/ Complete one or more Group Assignments (GA), which will require that you contribute either a BLOG POST and/or to our course Discussion Board.  These posts and discussions will be read by our entire class.
  • 3/ Complete one to two Reading and Writing Assignments (RWA), which, unless otherwise specified, you will submit as a separate entry/entries in your Learning Journal HERE.
  • 4/ Check in at least THREE separate times a week and respond at least ONCE to contributions by other student blog posts on the Home page of our course Web site AND to forums on the course Discussion Board

   

  • WEEK 4 ASSIGNMENTS:  DUE DATE:  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 24  at 5PM.
  •  During our fourth week, we will continue our reading and thinking about personal essays and begin some smaller group work.
  • LEARNING JOURNAL 4
    
  • Please spend 5 to 7 minutes free writing about where you are from.  If you need some help getting started with this structured free writing assignment, you might want to consider the following:  There is an apohorism by the French poet Rene Char that begins “In my country, we say thank you.”  In your neighborhood, town, city, region, or country, is there something that one does or does not do?  What are the characteristics of the place where you are from?  What makes it unique?  What does it look like, smell like, sound like, feel like, or taste like?

GROUP ASSIGNMENTS

• Group Assignment 9:  PLEASE READ RWA5 BEFORE READING THIS GROUP ASSIGNMENT.  I have placed each of you in one of the following four groups (see below).  Working with your group members, I’d like you to COLLABORATIVELY draft two paragraphs:   in the first paragraph, I’d like you to explain what you–as a group–liked and disliked about the Bunn essay (see RWA5 for an explanation of what the Bunn essay is), and in the second paragraph, I’d like you–as a group–to report on which personal essays were chosen by the various members of your group and why each member chose the essay he/she selected.  IF YOU ARE NOT ABLE TO COMPLETE THIS ASSIGNMENT BY MONDAY SEPT. 24, THAT IS FINE!  BUT PLEASE GET STARTED WITH THIS ASSIGNMENT ASAP.

To get you started with this assignment, I have e-mailed a Google Document to all of the members of each group.  Please complete this assignment by working together via this Google Document.  I know this may seem very confusing.  Do your best.  If you are having any problems or questions, please e-mail me.

Group Assignment 10:  Reflecting on the Unphotographable Moments.  Please read through the many great unphotographable posts that your classmates have made.  After reading them, I’d like you to reflect on and write about what it is that some of these posts share.  Is there some common thread that seems to make these moments unphotographable?  If so, what is it?  Please post one paragraph on our OpenLab blog in which you consider the shared and differing characteristics of the various moments that people have recorded.

• READING AND WRITING ASSIGNMENTS
• Reading and Writing Assignment 5

Please read Mike Bunn’s essay “How To Read Like a Writer,” which you will find here.  After you have read it, in one to three paragraphs, explain what you learned from it, citing particular quotes from the essay in your discussion.  Then, in two to three paragraphs please discuss some specific examples from the personal essay that you chose to read last week to show how or what “reading like a writer” means to you.   If you are interested in reading more about PARAGRAPHS, please take a look at the handout “What Is a Paragraph,” which you will find here, and/or read about paragraphs on the Purdue OWL Web site here.