Daily Message Sept. 9

Good Morning,

No mail, discussion posts, or anything else for me today! Should I feel lonely? Excluded? Or should I feel like people are finally getting a little comfortable with the course? I'll take the latter! :)

After the disruption of the holiday, things seems to be settling into a routine, which means I can cut back a bit on the daily message volume. You can look for posts from me on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I won't post anything new on Tuesdays or Thursdays unless problems crop up.

Status settings in gradebook
Speaking of problems, I have received over the last 24 hours, quite a bit of concerned commentary about those items in the gradebook related to Module 1 with status listings (Complete, Not Complete, Non-Participant.) If you have Not Complete or Non-Participant status on anything, it means that as of Tuesday morning you had missed a posting of some sort for the Introductions or you had not posted anything at all (drafts or response) to your peer group. I'll revisit these status settings next week when I grade Module 1. These status settings are not intended to provoke undue concern about grades, but they are a sign that I take participation in the "ungraded" portions of this class seriously. They give me a baseline for estimating your level of class participation at the end of the semester.

Deadline extension for optional instructor review
They also help me assess where the class is as a whole in terms of making progress on a module. As of now, our class as a whole is slightly behind schedule with Module 1; a number of people are still awaiting feedback from their peer groups. Consequently, I'm going to adjust our deadlines for this project slightly. The final revised documents are still due next Wednesday, but if you need a little more time to revise your draft for the optional instructor review, you can get it to me up until 6 p.m. on Saturday, and I will get feedback to you by 8 a.m. Monday.

Some issues with the exercises
I want to say a word about doing the exercises. As I work my way through your first exercise (I'll post the scores tomorrow), I find myself being a bit lenient. That is my first reaction in these situations because maybe I haven’t made my expectations for a proper answer clear. So here it is: a proper answer needs to answer the question explicitly while using the concepts and the language from the textbook. The only way that I can tell that you have read the material and understand the concepts is if you refer to the textbook or use the language employed by the textbook. You can’t give an answer based on just what you think and just from your perspective. You must go deeper than that. So in the future, you can be sure that I will be much tougher evaluating your exercises.

Discussions: What's the dealy-o?
Remember that for Module 2, you don't have a project to complete, but you do have to participate in a discussion with your group partners. For now, I've left everyone in the same groups they were in for peer response. If you believe you have been irretrievably let down by your partners during the Module 1 peer review and you wish to be assigned to a new group, please let me know. Everyone will have a chance to sign up for a new group when we get to Module 4. Everything I said about the caliber of the responses for exercises in the previous section also applies to these formal class discussions. You should complete your discussions by Sunday night.

Some notes on Chapter 2
I also want to make a few points about Chapter 2. In my mind, perception is the real key to understanding this chapter. Similar to perception is the term perspective. These two terms in conjunction can tell you much of what you need to know about constructing documents effectively. How do people see a document? What is their perspective for understanding? The better you understand these two terms and how they guide a reader through a document, the more successful that you will be as a writer.

Finally, building on the point I made in the previous paragraph, be sure that in your next exercise that you use the language of the chapter, like Gestalt Principles, figure-ground contrast, grouping, patterns, etc. Work hard on incorporating the skills that Kostelnick and Roberts describe in the section on Gestalt into your own writerly repertoire.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please let me know.

Have a great day!

Dr. S.