Welcome!

Hello and thank you for stopping by. This blog is part of a larger project involving New Literacy that the English 503 students at Tækniskólinn in Reykjavík, Iceland have been working on. This semester is the first time that the class has been offered at this school, and my 12 students have very graciously offered themselves as guinea pigs while the actual structure, content and flow of the course is being fine-tuned and honed. This blog, my own, has mostly served as a hub, and while some of the assignments I have given have been posted here, most notices and assignments have been posted on our in-house program, Námsnet. I have also used this blog as an example of what not to do at times, so please be kind and judge my site mildly ; )

Each student was asked to create their own blog, all of which are linked to in the left sidebar of this blog. We have used the blogs as portfolios of a kind; when students research a particular topic, they have been instructed to document the process on their blog, adding links, videos, images and quotes that they happened upon. Over time, the blogs have become more developed, and the students have become much better at utilizing them as 'storage spaces.' We have looked into quite a few topics, as can be seen by reading the students' sites.

Our most recent assignment relating to the blogs was to write a news piece on a current topic, and to design the blogs so that they looked respectable and responsible, so that a reader would feel that the author had sense of authority, and that the article itself was credible.

Our final process with the blogs will be to design them to actually completely fit our personalities, and to give a personalized overview of the course for the next wave of students. This project, then, is a work in process : )

Sky Link

Your short stories and 'graphic novel' pieces have been scanned in and set in a file in our Sky Drive. You can go here to check them out: Sky

Wednesday's Class: Scriptwriting

Hi everyone. Sorry about not sending a tilkynning/email yesterday...I forgot!

Yesterday's assignment was to begin researching filmmaking. You were asked to begin the research on your own and journal what you found on your blog. Thank you to those of you who did the assignment. There were quite a few good links and, as a matter of fact, no two people linked to the same sites! This means we are gathering a very good database of information.

Yesterday, I talked a bit about screenplays and how a writer begins with a story in mind, then writes it down, either as  a novel, a short story, a play, a poem or as a screenplay. In all cases (except maybe for poems) the story can then be put into a visual format: a film or video for the big screen, for tv, or for youtube/vimeo, etc. In the case of novels and short stories, they are turned into screenplays (and usually storyboarded) before being made into film/video.
Today I began by explaining a bit what rhetoric is, and how this ancient Greek concept plays into how the Stanford Study of Writing is being interpreted. The study coordinator, Andrea Lumsford, feels that we are better writers today in many ways, especially because we have a sense of kairos, or context-appropriate emotional content. We write these days to make something happen, to make people feel in some way, and not just to make them think. We want people to do something, to (inter)act, and not just to be passive readers of our words. This, in my opinion, is exactly what a scriptwriter needs to be able to do: make the audience feel. This is done by choosing exactly the right words for their characters' dialogues. In addition, the scriptwriter needs to give the filmmaker just enough descriptive detail to be able to visualize all the physical details (locations, settings, costumes, etc) as well as any audio cues (sound effects, music) in as simple a manner as possible. 

• Today I asked you all to go to this site http://www.kokos.cz/bradkoun/movies/ and find three movie scripts that interested you.
• You are to then try to find the movies on youtube (or google video, etc) and compare scenes from the scripts with scenes in the films.
• If you can't find the movie on youtube, then pick a new movie!
• Please do not just compare the beginnings of the films/scripts...try to find a scene with good set directions and good dialogue.
• Please also see if you can find a storyboard for the movie online. If not, then just google "storyboard" and pick "images" and do a bit of research into one that looks interesting to you.  
• Finally, write up your research process in your blogs. Be sure to:
• Link to the scripts you use
• Link to the videos you wach
• Link to any storyboard sites, and even post a storyboard as an image (identify the source site.)
• Write up a detailed Compare/Contrast review for each of the script/video pairs. How are they the same? How are they different? Which one do you like more? Why?
• This project will need to be completed by Friday, October 1, 2010 at Midnight.

See you all next week! 
   

Short Stories

I googled "short story" and came across the following stuff:  


5 Important Elements of a Short Story

A short story is a short work of fiction. Fiction, as you know, is prose writing about imagined events and characters. Prose writing differs from poetry in that it does not depend on verses, meters or rhymes for its organization and presentation.


Elements Of Short Story (Slide Show)
hard to read text on slides...


SHORT STORY ELEMENTS 

SETTING	PLOT
CONFLICT	CHARACTER
POINT OF VIEW	THEME

Short Story Wikipedia
Short stories tend to be less complex than novels. Usually a short story focuses on one incident, has a single plot, a single setting, a small number of characters, and covers a short period of time. It can be boiled down to "Man goes up tree. Man gets rocks thrown at him. Man goes down tree."

Cliffs Notes Definition of Short Story

"Short stories also lend themselves more to experimentation — that is, using uncommon prose styles or literary devices to tell the story. Such uncommon styles or devices might get tedious, and downright annoying, in a novel, but they may work well in a short story."

Definition of the short story

What are some of the elements that make up a good story?

a) A short story is a piece of prose fiction which can be read at a single sitting.

b) It ought to combine matter-of-fact description with poetic atmosphere.

c) It ought to present a unified impression of temper, tone, colour, and effect.

d) It mostly shows a decisive moment of life (which can entail a fatal blow).

e) There is often little action, hardly any character development, but we get a snapshot of life.

f) Its plot is not very complex (in contrast to the novel), but it creates a unified impression and leaves us with a vivid sensation rather than a number of remembered facts.

g) There is a close connection between the short story and the poem as there is both a unique union of idea and structure.

The short story is a piece of art that tries to give us a specified impression of the world we live in. It aims to produce a single narrative effect with the greatest economy of means and utmost emphasis. 

Hi everyone. My son woke with a pretty bad hálsbolga today, so I won´t be at school. 

Thank you to those of you who sent me your essays by Friday midnight. I will turn them back to you with some feedback by tomorrow, if all goes as planned. 

Thanks also for the comments and insights on your blogs about the two videos. I´m glad that in most cases at least one, if not both, of the speakers were inspirational.

***************************

Now I´d like everyone to visit each other´s blogs. Please go to my blog English 503 and visit all the links in the left sidebar.

Find the "Follow" button on each blog and click it. You can also add each other´s blogs to your blog list, like I´ve done on my site.

I´d like you to comment on each blog, even if it´s just to say Hi : )

***************************

We are supposed to start on Short Stories and Poems this week. You can probably guess what I´d like you to do.....yep, go ahead and google "Short Stories" (don´t worry about poems yet) and see what comes up.

In my own search I found a Wikipedia entry, a bunch of sites put up by teachers, education sites, plus a few good web sites with tons of short stories. I also found free audio versions of many classic short stories.

One of my favorite authors is F. Scott Fitzgerald (we have the same birthday ; ) so I focused on finding stories by him, and have been listening to audio versions of them as well. I did some research into the stories I read/listened to, and found out some cool things about the author and why he wrote them.

I would like you all to do the same kind of thing and keep a record of your progress in your blog. For example:  

• Describe your actions: how are you going to start out researching short stories? If you begin by googling, what sites do you choose to open, which ones caught your eye on the google search page and why? 

• Link to sites you visit, even if you don´t like them, and write some notes about them. Why do they or don´t they work for you?

• What are short stories? Specifically, what defines them in the world of literature? 

• Find a few short stories, either new or classic, and read them. Write down your opinions of them.  

• Try finding and listening to free audio files of any of the short stories you chose, or even new ones. 

• Try finding film, video or tv versions of short stories and do some research on them: has anyone else written about them? If so, do people feel like the written version and the visual version are similar or different?
•  

Remember, this is an advanced level English class, and you are expected to be able to do research on your own. We were going to do this in class today with the laptops, but I know you are all capable of doing this on your own. Recall the video of Sugata Mitra and the kids in India: he gave them a simple task then left them alone. Your simple task is to research the world of short stories and share your research, in detail, with me and the rest of the class via your blogs. 

And, though I hate to have to raise this topic, please DO NOT STEAL OTHER PEOPLE´S WORDS. Copying and pasting from web pages is perfectly fine, and part of this blog project, but YOU MUST IDENTIFY WHERE THE WORDS COME FROM! Put them in quotes and link to the source. It is VERY EASY for me to check to see if people have just stolen other´s text (ritstuld)  so definitely avoid doing that. 

Also avoid copying large chucks of text (say twenty lines of someone else´s words) then only writing a few lines of your own about it. When you do that, you are basically letting someone else think for you, and just agreeing or disagreeing with them. Find the writer´s KEY STATEMENT, the thing that you have an opinion about, and write your OWN WORDS about it. 

You will all need to raise the bar a bit now, put more energy and effort into how much and what you write about and share on your blogs. Like I said before, this is an advanced level college English course, and I need to give you your símat based on a pretty high standard of effort. You have had a few weeks to practice using your blogs, and now I will need to see both increased quantity and content (that means More and Better :D)

I will be checking your blogs tonight to see whether you have put good effort today into starting this research.

We will continue on this theme tomorrow, if my son´s health allows me to make it to work.  

Best of luck,

Maria 

Hamburger Essay

If I were going to write an essay in the hamburger style, I'd pick a topic and do this:

Peanut Butter

(this is my top bun...)

Peanut butter is a purely American phenomenon that has not gained a lot of appreciation in the world at large. For many cultures, peanut butter is considered a fatty and incomprehensible paste that many people are allergic to, and can even die from. Is it then a worthwhile food substance, or should it be banned altogether? In this essay I will review the pros and cons of peanut butter in our modern world.

The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing
students are cruising through this website right now...it's won awards!

With communicative writing, appearances count a great deal. Communicative writing includes essays, final papers, lab reports, handouts accompanying student presentations, senior theses, and the like. Outside the classroom, communicative writing includes reports, plans, official documents of all sorts, letters of application, and so on. What all these kinds of writing have in common is the great weight they place on appearances. A misspelling in a private journal or response paper is trivial, while a misspelling in an essay undermines trust in the author's effort—and just one typo in a cover letter is usually enough to sink a job application.

School assignments like essays or lab reports give students practice in writing for others according to a strict format and fixed conventions. Especially in the sciences, communicative writing assignments train students to turn personal observations into impersonal prose, avoid value judgments unwelcome in the sciences, and write with economy and precision.

The stringent rules governing communicative writing quite effectively identify those who have not served their apprenticeship in a field. Academic journals, for instance, can often weed out crackpot or poor submissions simply by how they look. In the classroom, teachers can see at a glance whether a student proofread a paper; if she didn't, what message does that send about how much work she put into the whole project? Formal communicative requirements can be an efficient and reasonable way of judging a book by its cover.

Communicative writing, as we've noted, requires you to know a great deal about a particular field's rules and conventions.Nuts and Bolts can help a great deal with general rules for formal writing, especially essays. But if you want more detailed help for particular assignments ask your teacher or another expert, consult a librarian, or surf the web (for example, if you want help with résumés or cover letters you might check out the writing resources at Monster.com).

 (this below is from the designing essay section in the Structure area)

from Nuts and Bolts

First Blog Day

here we go!

In the era of e-mail, teens should learn to write the forgotten essays

Study shows writing about a romantic relationship may help it last longer

The future of reading

Teaching communication and information literacy skills