During class, we will look at the Proposals section of David McMurrey’s Online Technical Writing Textbook (also linked on the syllabus).
For this week’s homework, your team should write a memo from all team members to Prof. Ellis with the subject, “Team Project Outline and Planning.” Begin the memo with a sentence describing its purpose. Then, include an outline for your project report and a paragraph describing who will do what this week (you don’t have to divide up the whole project right now–as discussed in class, you might want to focus on the core proposal section (see photo above) and work outwardly from there). Each team member needs to copy-and-paste the memo into a comment made to this homework post for credit.
If you attend either of the following events and write up at least 250 words about who spoke, what you learned, and what connections you made between the event and your own knowledge, you can earn some extra credit. For your event summary, copy-and-paste it into an email to Prof. Ellis.
Please join us on Thursday, April 27th at 1pm in N227 (Faculty Commons) for the City Tech Community Roundtable - a new seminar series made of short talks that aims to bring together faculty and students to share our scholarly and creative work and learn about what our colleagues across disciplines are doing, and restore and nurture our college's vibrant intellectual community.
Our second event features three awesome speakers:
Dr Javiela Evangelista, who will tell us about "Race and Technology Academic Program",
and a student-faculty team composed by
Jake Postiglione and Dr Giovanni Ossola, speaking about "Smart Physics: A Lab in your Pocket."
As you can see, the topics promise to be of wide interest for faculty and students, and we hope to see many there. Also, you are welcome to bring your lunch, but as usual we will have coffee and the good cookies!
Looking forward to seeing you on Thursday.
The Research Council WG4
BRAIN AWARENESS DAY 2023
An educational Event
Date: April 27 (Thursday)
Time: 11.30 am to 2.30 pm
Venue : Academic Building Lobby
Students from Human Anatomy and Physiology
classes will be teachers for a day.
Students from the Human Anatomy & Physiology classes will be running interactive displays and demonstrations all about the brain and its effect on our behavior. Topics include nature and nurture. Discover if you are a "right" or "left" brain person. Learn how smell, taste, music, and sound affect your behavior and reflexes. Come and learn about PTSD, bipolar and multiple personality disorders, Alzheimer's disease and risk factors. Familiarize yourself with the different types of strokes and phantom limb syndrome. Learn how foods, drinks, and hardcore drugs affect your brain and behavior. Find out about the social, mathematical, and emotional brain and learning, memory integration, and retention. Discover your reptilian, limbic, and intellectual brain. Highlights include learning-memory and behavioral patterns, brain activity, and optical illusion.
Dean Justin Vazquez-Poritz presiding
Organizer: Prof. Niloufar Haque, Department of Biological Sciences
Click on the heading of this blog post title above–“Week 11: Lecture,” scroll down to the comment area, and write at least 250 words in response to this week’s readings. You can summarize the readings, you can relate the readings to your own experience or something else you have read or learned about, etc. Any writing of 250 words or more that are related to the readings are fair game for this weekly assignment at the beginning of class.
Post your comment after 20 minutes even if you don’t reach the 250 word minimum threshold.
Why we are doing this: It helps you organize your thoughts before discussion and it gives you regular writing practice.
Discuss this week’s readings.
Continue the Final Team Project and Form Teams.
Primary deliverables are the collaboratively written report and in-class presentation with slidedeck.
Bonus points for creating a mock up of your website using GitHub or OpenLab/Wordpress (create as a Project).
Review homework and readings for next week. If you are behind on homework assignments or weekly writing assignments, get them done as soon as possible and let Prof. Ellis know what assignments you’ve caught up on via email.
After discussing your team’s possible topics (at least 3) and proposed deliverable (e.g., website, help system, app, white paper, book, etc.), collaboratively write a memo in your Google Drive shared folder. It should follow this format and be at least 250 words:
TO: Prof. Ellis
FROM: Write all team member's full names here
DATE:
SUBJECT: Final Team Project Planning Memo
Write a sentence introducing the purpose of this memo.
Write a discussion of three topics you discussed for the content of your proposed deliverable. Indicate which of the three your team selected.
Write a brief discussion about the proposed deliverable and which type your team selected.
Then, each team member should copy-and-paste the memo into a comment made to this post (so each team member has recorded credit for contributing to the homework assignment).
For folks who were absent, we will find team placements for you next week. To make up this missed assignment, you can take advantage of one of the extra credit opportunities.
And for easier access, the overall project is detailed on the syllabus and below. We will break this down into parts and work on it during future classes, though some time outside of class will be necessary to complete the project.
Final Team Project, 30%
The final team project gives students an opportunity to apply what they have learned about IA by writing and publishing a 2,500-word report online that proposes a complex website or document and includes explanations/reflections about why and what purpose each component of their report serves in terms of IA. The report will be written and published using Google Docs. The report requires at least 10 quoted and cited library-based sources (class readings that were drawn from the library are acceptable to use). Additional sources from external sources are permitted, but these sources need to be contextualized more rigorously than library vetted sources. On the last day of class, each team will email a link to their project to Prof. Ellis and give a short 5-10 minute presentation in class anchored by a slidedeck that provides an overview of their report.
In addition to free access to The New York Times (instructions here), CUNY students also get free access to The Wall Street Journal by following these directions. For extra credit (e.g., to make up for a missed beginning of class writing assignment or a homework assignment), read three articles from The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal that relates to Professional and Technical Writing, your area of specialization, and/or job hunting. Then, write a memo of at least 500 words total that summarizes each of the three articles and includes an APA reference list citation for each of the three articles. Your summary should be in your own words. You may discuss the article in reference to other things that you know from class or the PTW Program in general.
Next week, City Tech is holding its annual Literary Arts Festival. Details are below. If you attend and write at least 250-words about your experience there (include names of speakers, what they talked about, etc.), you can earn some extra credit (you can copy-and-paste what you write into an email to Prof. Ellis).
LMC’s old server rack. Think about the IA that goes into intranets–both web-accessible elements and file storage (folders, naming conventions, etc.).
Beginning of Class Writing
Click on the heading of this blog post title above–“Week 10: Lecture,” scroll down to the comment area, and write at least 250 words in response to this week’s readings. You can summarize the readings, you can relate the readings to your own experience or something else you have read or learned about, etc. Any writing of 250 words or more that are related to the readings are fair game for this weekly assignment at the beginning of class.
Post your comment after 20 minutes even if you don’t reach the 250 word minimum threshold.
Why we are doing this: It helps you organize your thoughts before discussion and it gives you regular writing practice.
Discuss this week’s readings.
Introduce the Final Team Project and Form Teams.
Primary deliverables are the collaboratively written report and in-class presentation with slidedeck.
Bonus points for creating a mock up of your website using GitHub or OpenLab/Wordpress (create as a Project).
Review homework and readings for next week. If you are behind on homework assignments or weekly writing assignments, get them done as soon as possible and let Prof. Ellis know what assignments you’ve caught up on via email.
We are continuing to expand your GitHub-hosted websites to give you more practice with HTML, organizing principles, and linking strategies.
Building on the website that you submitted for the Week 8 Homework, each student should draw out a new sitemap that mirrors the example shown above. The key addition is that the four sub-pages of your site each receives a linked sub-sub-page (includes more details about the topic of a sub-page) which in turn receives a linked sub-sub-sub-page (includes even more details about the topic of the sub-page and the sub-sub-page).
Additionally, you should link these pages according to the lines connecting them. This means that a sub-page should include a link to its sub-sub-page, the sub-sub-page includes links to its sub-page and sub-sub-sub-page, and the sub-sub-sub-page includes a link back to its sub-sub-page. The idea is to allow a visitor to navigate deeper and deeper into the rich content of your website, but also have links that ascend back to the top level of your website’s page hierarchy.
Feel free to include breadcrumbs and customize your website as you see fit. Remember to include IA features that help with the organization of the pages (i.e., how you name your html files) and user navigation elements (e.g., breadcrumbs, headings, etc.).
These new pages do not have to have images embedded, but they may as long as they are made by you. The main content on the new pages may be text-only–again, think of the concept of rich information from our readings, adding details (more depth) to what you wrote higher up the page hierarchy.
To submit this homework after Spring Break before our next class, add a comment to this post that includes your embedded updated sitemap (use img.bb) and a link to your GitHub-hosted website.
Click on the heading of this blog post title above–“Week 9: Lecture,” scroll down to the comment area, and write at least 250 words in response to this week’s readings. You can summarize the readings, you can relate the readings to your own experience or something else you have read or learned about, etc. Any writing of 250 words or more that are related to the readings are fair game for this weekly assignment at the beginning of class.
Post your comment after 20 minutes even if you don’t reach the 250 word minimum threshold.
Why we are doing this: It helps you organize your thoughts before discussion and it gives you regular writing practice.
Discuss this week’s readings.
Continue with GitHub and HTML.
See here for an example of what we’re aiming for in this exercise.
Create account at github.com–make sure you think hard about your username–it should be professional and reflect positively on you.
Follow these directions to create web space for HTML pages on GitHub Pages.
As we discussed in class today, Week 8 Homework is the continuation of what we had planned to do in Week 7. Last week, you submitted your sitemap, which is the organizational IA for your site. This week, you should submit a wireframe (or wireframes) for the user interface IA for your site and provide a link to your website that you host on GitHub. Break things down and take care of your wireframe first. That’s your design guide for what goes where on your HTML pages of your website. Then, begin expanding on the two pages that we built together in class so that you index.html plus four more html files that all link to each other and home/index.html. I’m providing images of the examples that we discussed in class below as well as the original assignment with links to HTML guides (also, remember Google is your friend for HTML help!). And one last thing, please remember that when you make a change to your html files on GitHub and click Commit, it takes a few minutes before the change appears on your website (also, holding down Shift + click Refresh will force most browsers to flush the cache and load a fresh version of your website).
To submit your homework, do these two things in a single comment made to this post: 1) upload your wireframe (draw by hand and take a photo, or use a drawing program) as an image to img.bb and paste link, and 2) copy-and-paste a link to your website on GitHub.com. We’ll discuss these next week and build on your work.
SitemapWireframe for index.html (all of your wireframes may be the same!)Wireframe for subpage (again, you may design a wireframe that applies to all of your pages)
Following this week’s hands-on exercise with setting up GitHub Pages and building a couple of rudimentary HTML pages, you will have a chance to build your own HTML-based website on GitHub Pages.
While you’ve had some experience with drawing sitemaps of other websites, this assignment will help you see how websites are designed and implemented by beginning with a sitemap and then building that sitemap out on GitHub Pages.
Begin by designing your sitemap for a website about something that interests you–a hobby, your studies, your work, etc. It should have a homepage and at least 4 sub-pages. One of the sub-pages should include an image of your sitemap (it can be on your “About” page or a dedicated sitemap page). The sitemap below is just an example with different file names given for the subpages–your sitemap should reflect your pages and filenames.
After you’re satisfied with your sitemap, take a photo/scan it for use in your site.
Then, begin building your pages and adding content into them. Your website should combine images and writing. All of the images should be your own, and all of the writing should be your own, too. Use my model website as a guide–we’re more interested in the IA aspects of your site than how much content you put into it.
On each page, remember to include breadcrumbs and a menu that links all of the pages together.
Refer back to the Week 7: Lecture post for important links to support your work on GitHub Pages.
To submit your homework, copy-and-paste a link to your website (e.g., https://dynamicsubspace.github.io) into a comment made to this post before our next class.
Next week, we will do some work in class related to your websites and build on these concepts in terms of organizing more complicated sets of information.
Try imagining your information architecture problem within your mind’s eye–cyberspace, the consensual hallucination.
Beginning of Class Writing
Click on the heading of this blog post title above–“Week 8: Lecture,” scroll down to the comment area, and write at least 250 words in response to this week’s readings. You can summarize the readings, you can relate the readings to your own experience or something else you have read or learned about, etc. Any writing of 250 words or more that are related to the readings are fair game for this weekly assignment at the beginning of class.
Post your comment after 20 minutes even if you don’t reach the 250 word minimum threshold.
Why we are doing this: It helps you organize your thoughts before discussion and it gives you regular writing practice.
Discuss this week’s readings.
Continue with GitHub and HTML.
See here for an example of what we’re aiming for in this exercise.
Create account at github.com–make sure you think hard about your username–it should be professional and reflect positively on you.
Follow these directions to create web space for HTML pages on GitHub Pages.
