Digital Essay

Save

The documents for this digital essay were created for a first year composition course, ENGL101.05 “Bot or Not: Technology, Identity, Autonomy.” The course was taught in the fall of 2015 by Emily Sherwood, Assistant Director of Digital Pedagogy & Scholarship and Faculty Teaching Associate in English at Bucknell University.

The digital essay assignment was based on Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” in which she argues that we are all cyborgs. The students did an in class-writing exercise drawing on Haraway’s work where they articulated why they are cyborgs. This writing was revised and became the basis of the script for their digital essay.

Project Description: Create a 2 minute Digital Essay on how your identity is shaped by a variety of technologies, organic and inorganic materials, and networks. How is your identity an amalgamation of your experiences and influences up to this point?

Course: ENGL101.05 BOT OR NOT: TECHNOLOGY, IDENTITY, AUTONOMY
Instructor: Professor Emily Sherwood
Project: 2 minute digital essay
Students: 15
Semester: Fall 2015
Duration of Assignment: 6 weeks
Technology: iShowU, Whisper Room Audio Booth, FCPX
Class Blog: https://multimodalstorytelling.blogs.bucknell.edu
Syllabus: ENGL101.05 Syllabus
Digital Essay and Rubric

Learning Goals:

develop your ability to think critically about multi-modal work by understanding how image and sound help impact our experience.
strengthen your written/spoken argument through visual and audio media.
to understand how others use such stimuli in order to impact your experience and understanding.

Skills Learned:

critical thinking
digital literacy
time management
group collaboration
editing
multimodal storytelling

ENGL101.05 BOT OR NOT: TECHNOLOGY, IDENTITY, AUTONOMY Scaffolded Semester Calendar

10/14:Introduction to Digital Essay

10/16:Image Workshop

10/21:Audio Booth Workshop / Text to Script Workshop (meet in the Digital Scholarship Center, Bertrand 123, the first door on left when you walk in the library)

10/26: No class: work on Digital Essay Narration

10/28:Edited Narration DraftDue/ Peer Review Workshop

10/30: Storyboard Workshop (bring collected images with you to class)

11/4: Final Cut Workshop (meet in the Video Lab, Bertrand 018)

11/13:Draft of Digital Essay Due/ Peer Review Workshop

11/20:Final Digital Essay Due

Student Feedback:

“When my professor first assigned a digital essay, I was apprehensive: I had never done anything like it before, I had no experience with Final Cut Pro, and I can’t stand listening to recordings of my voice. Then I started working on my essay. Once I had a script I liked, I had fun recording in the audio booth and editing in Final Cut. I ended up being really happy with my final product and I’m glad I was exposed to the resources Bucknell has for developing multi-modal work!” –Elizabeth Montesano, Bucknell 2019 (Engineering)

The assignment, assessment, and peer review sheets on this page are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.