For this ungraded assignment, students can work individually or in pairs. The idea is to construct a (roughly) 500-word essay reflection in response to the prompts from one of the three possible digital texts:
- The Podcasts from Serial, Season 3 (episodes 8 and 9)
- The multimedia narrative from the New York Times entitled “Snow Fall” (about an avalanche and rescue)
- The multimedia narrative (housed both at MIT and abroad, in France) entitled “Rebuilding Haiti“), which is an interactive “newsgame” site that invites the reader to react to different pathways/or itineraries.
When I’ve used this exercise, I’ve said that students could think about a “multimedia” kind of response (either simply in Word itself or some other platform). That is, I suggested that their response should have the following elements:
- two embedded hyperlinks to materials on the internet you think are interesting in relation to the subject/ your response to it; (for instance, a link like this about Haiti, or an ACLU fact sheet on the juvenile justice system;
- one or more visual or auditory elements–a photograph, a YouTube video, a song riff; for instance, the YouTube video on Avalanche rescue dogs below
- And, as I’ve said, about 500 words (2 pages double spaced) of reflections from the prompts.
I’ve tried to show you above how these things can enliven/ create different kinds of dimensionality in students’ responses. Again–this is meant to be fun, exploratory!
Click here and you will go back to the “start” page for this assignment.