Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Today is our class conference, conducted poster session style

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PREVIOUS EMAIL SENT OUT FROM PAPER SESSION TEAM Jonelle & Lenora
Mar 30 (6 days ago)

Hello, class!

As Directors of Papers, Lenora and I wanted to send out an e-mail in advance of our paper sessions next week outlining the schedule for the day; parameters for paper presentations; and some helpful reminders.

*SCHEDULE & SESSION FORMAT*
The conceit for our paper sessions is that we are each presenting a paper on our fantasy panel - you propose the panel title, your fellow panelists, and the conference/circumstances of your presentation! You can reflect on this idea in your handout (more on that in the next section).

We will each have a "station" where we lay out our papers and handouts. 

During sessions, our classmates will rotate to our stations in 15 min. intellectual speed dates to investigate each other's work.

KK says: NOT NECESSARILY ONE-ON-ONE! LITTLE GRPS ARE GOOD TOO! 

The schedule for class will lay out in the following manner:
3:30-3:45: Set-up of stations
3:45-4: Introduction to the sessions and reminders: orientation
4-4:20: Silent encounter with stations taking notes
4:20-4:50: Session 1
4:50-5:20: Session 2
5:20-5:30: Break
5:30-6:00: Debrief

*PAPER PARAMETERS & EXPECTATIONS*

  • A reminder that your paper should be 10 pages - conference paper length - and engage most of the books/transmedia we have covered in class.
  • Remember - this is an opportunity to both demonstrate your mastery of course materials and engage with a topic you care about. 
  • For the paper sessions, please bring a hard copy of your paper as well as a handout including your professional bio and a description of your fantasy panel.
*REMINDERS*
  • During our debrief, we will discuss our best fits for peer review and then assign two peer reviewers to each project. 
  • There will be a group writing session in the Media Lab on Friday (tomorrow) from 10am-12pm - feel from to join the group for some community while you write!
  •  Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns before Wednesday. 
See you then!
Jonelle & Lenora

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How it looks in Zine-lands



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EMAIL SENT OUT TODAY! time for our collective performances and knowledge creating!

Dear Folks,

If for ANY reason you do not have what you think is a finished, perfect, usual style paper today, you are still on! Come and do a thing!

Bring everything you have to today's session and participate as thoroughly as possible! The interactions today are CRUCIAL and matter so much more than "the paper": a fancy seminar paper really not the point of our practice together at all.

So do what you can to fully be present and to offer yourself and your ideas to the class as a whole. If you must, forget paper-ness and come with collaboration, openness to making knowledge collectively, helping others out with their thinking, and being savvy about how to ask for that from others.

Papers will be up for peer review, and we will decide who shall review what today too. So you will turn a paper into two peer reviewers for evaluation today or this week.

Go for it! Katie

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AS YOU ARRIVE: 
CREATE A PRESENTATION "STATION" POSTER SESSION STYLE: 

Basically everyone creates a little space marked by their paper handout. We do NOT present contents of paper: we emphasize INTERACTION! That's a bit tricky and hard to get ourselves into this as a special practice: I say to folks: tweet at each other! So questions and answers are fine but not at any length! That's hard! we love to be the center of attention rather than actually interacting.

No monologing, yes, tweeting!


Think poster session, only with papers and handouts; think tweeting rather than presenting; think feedback at various ranges of engagement and detail.


In other words, arrange your materials to share visually so that when we walk around and take notes on each others' stuff, we can absorb much of what you are attempting to do just by looking things over.

Just as you would set up a poster graphically, set up your station visually: 
[hints for doing this with a poster here: https://projects.ncsu.edu/project/posters/   ; transfer these suggestions to this situation such as I have done next]

An effective interactive station created poster-session-style is a visual communication experience. 

It should help you 
...engage colleagues in conversation
...get your main point(s) across quickly
...effectively solicit substantive feedback
 
An effective station is ...
  • Focused
  • Visual
  • Ordered in some sequence
It communicates quickly, even instantly on multiple levels ...
  • source of information
  • conversation starter
  • advertisement of your work
  • summary of your work
  • It shows, not tells
Checklist: 
  • objective(s) and main point(s) easy to see 
  • label has your feedback desires clearly communicated 
  • visuals
  • narrative organization
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From the Assignments tab: your responsibility for today: 

= Write a ten page paper to share in a class conference, conducted poster session style.


In the middle of the semester we will conduct in one class period two poster session style paper discussions in which you will share your current work with each other after having written a ten page paper. That means that some people will be presenting their work in various parts of the room, all at the same time, while other class members wander around the room, interacting with them as they discuss their projects, using handouts to focus interactions. After we spend time doing this, we will move into collective discussion and engagement all together. This means you create connections between your work and the work of others, and orchestrate a collective conversation.

This is NOT about editorial suggestions for writing itself, but a substantive engagement with the IDEAS of your classmates as put forth in their papers. 

The papers will then be collected as an online book website that we will refer to for the rest of the semester. If non native speakers or others need adjustments here please work with Katie to make them carefully ahead of time.

[image credit: http://raulperez.cikeys.com/why-is-writing-so-difficult/  Pointers here too!]

Notice how you will get some tips too for the final assignment by doing this one! 

Final Assignment:
= create a substantive scholarly research poster, individually, or as a member of a team of up to 3 members.

Posters should synthesize the work you have done in the class, bringing together in some interactive way yours and others’ presentations and research, readings, and papers. They should demonstrate your wide and specific use of course texts. They may play with data analytics in some fashion, they may have creative elements (although they need to do this for a professional context), they will be predominately visual rather than textual. They should include both the RESULTS of your synthetic analyses, and also a way of showing HOW YOU GOT THERE! In the sciences you would show the experimental set up, the results and your methods. How should these elements be transformed for your sort of poster? You should have a fantasy scholarly venue in mind for the poster you, perhaps in a team, come up with. Posters have long been a staple of conferences in the sciences, sometimes in the social sciences, and increasingly today, in the humanities, especially in the digital humanities. Humanities style posters are still in development, and digital humanities posters are often unusually creative, with an eye to data analytics and visualizations. We will discuss these in the class. NO POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS WILL BE ACCEPTED FOR THIS ASSIGNMENT. However Powerpoint is actually often used as a kind of graphics manager to create the single slides that become a poster. There are lots of ideas for all this online, and we will also discuss this as well. We will need a director of posters, who will troll the web for resources, work with poster makers generating ideas, and on the last day of class, coordinate two poster sessions.

NOTICE THIS IS ON THE WAY TO THE CLASS JOURNAL WEBSITE WHICH INCLUDES YOUR PROFESSIONAL PRESENCE ON THE WEB! 

One way to curate your professional presence on the web is to create your own professional website. If you have never made a website, you might start off with a Blogger version. Blogger is what I use for the class website. I use Weebly for my professional website. Both of these are very simple. Or you might like to build a site on Word Press. If you have already begun crafting websites, pick your favorite platform for something new, or enhance what you already have going with projects from our course. A fun site with easy tools for all kinds of web prototyping activities you will find here: http://easyedutools.weebly.com

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Instructions for sending attachments to Katie, handouts, papers, anything:

WHEN SENDING AN ELECTRONIC ATTACHMENT TO KK: not to my katking@umd.edu email, but to my gmail account: katiekin@gmail.com  . NOTE KIN NOT KING! Our system will often throw out or eat attachments, so to make sure I really have it and easy to retrieve down the road, I need it at gmail.

To be able to search for it easily please use this format for the subject header to gmail: yourlastnameonly 621 whatitis.

And name the file the same way. THINK: if Katie were to download this would she be able to tell from the file name what it is and who it is from without opening it, but just from the filename? would that be unique so it doesn’t get mixed up with someone else’s?

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HANDOUT EXAMPLE 
 
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