Course Description

Welcome to the CourseSite for English 3060j – Women Writing in Digital Spaces, Spring 2015. When we’re not meeting face-to-face, this is the main portal through which you will access course materials and information, including important course docs like the syllabus and contract and schedule, as well as daily announcements and assignments and project descriptions. Check back here frequently, as things will change.

So what’s this course all about? This course will explore the ways in which new media and digital geographies both open up new possibilities and create new challenges for women writing in public spaces. We will examine the ways in which women have used digital media to create new kinds of writing, and also the backlash against women speaking in digital spaces through movements such as ‪#‎gamergate‬. We will also look at, and work to remediate, the under-representation of women and LGBTQA persons in online forums such as Wikipedia.

As fulfillment of your junior composition requirement, this course is also focused on helping you become a better writer. In my time teaching writing, I’ve learned that that happens when you begin to understand writing as a tool through which we mediate (influence) our daily social realities (including our identities, thoughts, behaviors, and beliefs). I can help you become more aware of how this works by asking you to pay attention to how writing and writers are always affected by a number of factors, including: different forms of digital and analog media; social communities, both f2f and online; rhetorical goals/purposes (what reader and writer hope to accomplish), the genres being used, and the audiences being addressed and invoked.

To successfully complete this course, students will need ready access to both a computer and the Internet. The Wikipedia project especially is tech-heavy, but we will be engaging with the digital throughout the course.

 

Attitudes for Success

 

Course Info