Intro to the End of the Semester

What's Going On?

It goes without saying that this semester has been… unprecedented. With that in mind, I’d like to radically rework things from here—with the time we’ve lost and the stress you must be under, there is essentially a zero percent chance that I can simply rework what we were already planning to do into something that can be done within a month or so. So, with that in mind, I’d like to completely shatter the paradigm.

As someone who focuses on assessment, one of the biggest assets to designing a course is establishing a series of specific outcomes. Usually, I use these to determine what the content of our projects needs to be (e.g. measurable tests of the course’s outcomes), and then I plan class readings and activities around how to best prepare you to understand the ideas I want you to engage with.

What Are We Doing?

With that in mind, rather than continuing as we have, I’d like to ask you instead to create a series of posts to an online blog that focus on those outcomes. The outcomes themselves are as follows:

• Develop an awareness of computer games as a unique medium of expression.
• Demonstrate rhetorical and digital awareness by writing multiple papers and reflections that accompany a combination of traditional print-based and digital projects.
• Demonstrate an awareness of how to engage with core principles of rhetoric by creating texts across multiple modes and media.
• Develop a nuanced understanding of how rhetoric functions in digital contexts, with a specific focus on rhetoric in computer games.
• Demonstrate an understanding of procedural rhetoric by performing a rhetorical analysis of a computer game.
• Apply knowledge of procedural rhetoric to a game designed from the ground up— either individually or as part of a team— with a specific rhetorical purpose in mind, and with the fundamental elements of rhetoric discussed at the forefront of this course applied to the game and its supporting materials.
• Those aren’t the most user-friendly things in the world, however, so let’s rephrase those in terms of what I’d like you to do. In short, I want you to create a total of 5 blog posts, written in the style of a blog post, of around 300-500 words.

How Will You Be Assessing This?

My assessment model for these posts will be very straightforward—it will be completion-based, and I will be asking these questions as I go through your posts:

• Does this post contain at least 300-500 words?
• Does this post respond to all questions/elements of the prompt?

• Does this post bring in examples (from the writer’s own experiences, outside sources, and/or games)?

If the answers to those three questions for any post is “yes,” then you will be getting a 100 on it. The grades for project 2, 3, and 4 will all be averaged based on those posts. To help explain this:

• So, if you complete all 5 posts and do them reasonably well? You will earn a 100 on Project 2, 3, and 4. 

• If you complete 4 of the posts and do them reasonably well? You will earn an 80 on Project 2, 3, and 4.

• If you complete a post, but it doesn’t do all the work I’m looking for, you will earn half-credit for it. So, if you do all 5 posts, 4 are thorough but one is only a few sentences with no real depth to it? You would get a 90 on projects 2, 3, and 4 (50% of 1, and 100% of 4).

• If you write just a couple sentences with no real depth for all 5 posts? you’ll get half credit on all of them, and a 50% for projects 2, 3, and 4.

Put simply, if you write the required number of words, with reasonable effort, and discussion with just about any depth, you should be totally fine. My goal here isn’t to make this difficult for you, but rather, to try to give you space to explore the key concepts of this course on your own time, reflect on them, write about them in a way that works for you, and produce something I can attempt to assess.

Like I said, there will be no gradients here; every post will earn and assessment of either a 0, 50, or 100—I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but if you’ve put essentially any effort at all into your posts, you should be able to get a 100 on all of them with no real issues.

My only goal is to see evidence of the course outcomes across your posts, and assuming you do that, you will earn full credit for all remaining projects this semester.