5/11

The goal of today’s class will be to understand what the presentation element of the proposal will look like! It turns out that’s super easy to do, so instead of explaining all that myself in a Zoom session, I’ve posted a description below with links to other resources.

Today’s Zoom session will then instead be small group meetings, which I will send out in an email. I will check in on each group TWICE to see how everyone’s doing. In the meantime I will be working on sending out a report of everyone’s grades up to this point.

SEND ME AN EMAIL IF YOUR GROUP HAS ANY QUESTIONS. Also, send me an email if you have any questions about the Portfolio assignment or the final Self-Assessment. All that stuff’s in the stuff I posted last week

Anyway, here’s all you need to know about the Proposal Presentation:

Just to rehash — The Proposal assignment has two elements, a written proposal, and a presentation.

What are the main differences?

The written proposal should be detailed, cohesive, well cited, and presented in a professional-looking digital document. It should be at least ten pages long.

The presentation is more dynamic. It should capture the essence of your project and present it in a saleable fashion. Your whole presentation will only be 20-30 minutes, and you will find it’s not only very difficult, but it’s not very effective to include every detail. Instead, focus on what you can get across most effectively visually and verbally to convince your audience that they should fund your project. (Obviously don’t omit anything that would jeopardize the legitimacy of your project, it still has to seem well researched and viable.)

The main difference is that of media, and you’ll see how in converting from a written medium to a presentation medium, the same information can have different kinds of effects. Learning to understand this, and being able to compose in a multimodal (using different kinds of media) style, is pretty much the whole point of this exercise.

For one, visuals have a different effect. The design of your powerpoint slides will be more immediate than the design of your written document, so make sure it’s engaging. Too many words can be distracting and hard to read. You may have to convert whole blocks of text into things like breakout quotes, bulleted lists, etc. with more of an emphasis on images or even videos. You can always record more explanation than what you have typed on the slides.

Do not just read off of the text of your slides! The narration and type should add different qualities to the presentation. The text on the slides can provide structure and focus, and what you record yourself saying should really be the meat of the presentation. Images, videos, diagrams, should obviously be explained in the narration too.

Anyway, I was under the impression that it was going to be super difficult to explain how to record a presentation on Powerpoint and work on it collaboratively. I was wrong!

It’s super easy to do all this. In fact, it’s designed to be. Here’s the instructions for how to collaborate and record sound on Powerpoint:

Collaborating on Powerpoint

Recording sound on Powerpoint

Here’s some additional readings on strategies for making a good presentation:

Effective use of PowerPoint in Professional and Technical Presentations

Audiovisual Presentations Made Easy(-ier)

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5/6

Today we went over questions about the Proposals. Each group met and discussed dividing up work among group members.

New due dates:

5/11 — Figure out how work is to be divided up among your proposal group members if you haven’t already. Finish necessary reserach

5/18 — Final drafts of everything due. I’ll look over drafts if you send them to me by 5/15 by the latest.

Next class we’ll go over how to make those presentations!

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5/4

There was no Zoom meeting today. Instead, I’ve been working on recording these video tutorials on how to make the Final Portfolio!

Final Portfolio assignment:

Anyway, before you start you’ll need to create an account on CUNY Commons. Here’s how you do that:

Next, you’ll need to create a page:

Here’s how to make sure you have control over who can access your portfolio:

MAKE SURE YOU MAKE ME AN ADMIN!!!! If you make one mistake and your website doesn’t work, this makes it so I can still give you a fair grade, because I can then see why it’s not working and give you SOME credit. Otherwise, if it doesn’t work, it counts the same as if you didn’t do it, since there’s no way for me to know otherwise. Here’s how you make me an admin:

Now, you can finally get started on building your website. Make sure you set up everything as “Pages” and not “Posts”! Here’s how to make a page for each of your assignments:

Next, you’ll need to set up your website so folks can land on your Self-Assessment page when they enter it and be able to navigate through your assignments via a menu at the top:

Now you’re all set to make it look good! Remember you should make sure the design reflects who you are as a writer, as an engineer, and as a person.

4/29

Today’s was dedicated to small group work. I sent emails out to each group individually asking them to:

• Contact your group members (I will send out an email to each group so all of you have each other’s email addresses.)
• Brainstorm 5-10 ideas your group could propose to this imaginary group of investors/representatives for grant organizations/government funding board/etc.. 3-5 could be things you know a lot about, and 3-5 could be things you’d like to learn more about. Send these ideas to your group and CC me. They can be the same ideas you sent me, too. If someone in your group sends an idea you like, feel free to include it in one of your 5-10 ideas too.
• Also, send out your Technical Description draft to your group members and make sure everyone sends you theirs. If you are missing people’s technical descriptions, email me, and I’ll forward them to you.
• Write each of your group members a 200-400 word peer review. If you have any group members who are kind of behind and don’t have drafts yet, you might have to write only 2-3 people peer reviews. If that’s the case, take the extra time you would have spent on the members without drafts, and use it to give extra feedback to the ones who do. It’s kind of a bummer, but folks who are pretty behind and don’t have drafts will likely not get peer reviews, which is incentive to make sure you send a draft in!

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4/27

Hey guys!

If you missed class on 4/27, make sure to reach out to your group members ASAP to catch up! I sent out an individual email to each group last week, so if you didn’t get that LET ME KNOW!

Just in case, the groups are as follows:

Fadi, Muhammad R, Trung, Kazi, Huihong

Jack, Hansen, Gary, Barry, Saar

Cristopher, Ki, Adam, Mohamed M, Peter

Muhaiminul, Eva, Jiayi, Reeaz, Ikraa

Sumon, Jenifer, Baba, Amir, Islam

Anyway, what I’d like each group to have for class on 4/29 is:

• A single idea that group will be doing for the proposal
• Some research from each of the group members that helped refine the idea. This is what we will be discussing in our Zoom meeting. I suggested some areas to look into for each group in our last Zoom session, and I posted videos and links on the course website on research strategies (see under the 4/15 entry), so if you are having trouble finding any information or if you are having trouble just knowing where to look, let me know so I can help you individually.
• A team name! This is pretty important

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4/22

So, for Monday, what I’d like everyone to do:

• Contact your group members (I will send out an email to each group so all of you have each other’s email addresses.)
• Brainstorm 5-10 ideas your group could propose to this imaginary group of investors/representatives for grant organizations/government funding board/etc.. 3-5 could be things you know a lot about, and 3-5 could be things you’d like to learn more about. Send these ideas to your group and CC me. They can be the same ideas you sent me, too. If someone in your group sends an idea you like, feel free to include it in one of your 5-10 ideas too.
• Also, send out your Technical Description draft to your group members and make sure everyone sends you theirs. If you are missing people’s technical descriptions, email me, and I’ll forward them to you.
• Write each of your group members a 200-400 word peer review. If you have any group members who are kind of behind and don’t have drafts yet, you might have to write only 2-3 people peer reviews. If that’s the case, take the extra time you would have spent on the members without drafts, and use it to give extra feedback to the ones who do. It’s kind of a bummer, but folks who are pretty behind and don’t have drafts will likely not get peer reviews, which is incentive to make sure you send a draft in!

Ideally, I’d like everyone to also respond to their group members, and let them know which ideas they think are cool, so we can approach a collection of 3-5 solid ideas each group is deciding on. Let’s see where we are by Tuesday, though.
I chose the groups loosely based on majors, and also on the ideas folks sent me for what they wanted to do. They are as follows:
Fadi, Muhammad R, Trung, Kazi, Huihong
Jack, Hansen, Gary, Barry, Saar
Cristopher, Ki, Adam, Mohamed M, Peter
Muhaiminul, Eva, Jiayi, Reeaz, Ikraa
Sumon, Jenifer, Baba, Amir, Islam, Sam

4/20

What we will be doing today: Peer review of Technical Descriptions.

4/15

What we will be doing today: Going over the Proposal Assignment in more detail

What is due today: SEND ME FIVE TOPICS YOU MIGHT WANNA DUE FOR THE PROPOSAL

Due 4/20:

• YOUR TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION DRAFT! Check the Assignments page for the page about that. MAKE SURE TO LEAVE ME FEEDBACK QUESTIONS TO ANSWER!
• Email me a 250-500 word reflection on how your semester has gone so far. This is meant to help you have document marking where you are at around the halfway-through-part of the semester. At the end, you will be writing a final self-reflective essay where you talk about your progress achieving all the learning goals through this class, so this reflection will come in handy later when you do that. I’ll explain it more in our Zoom session. In this reflection due Monday, you might want to consider some of the course learning outcomes from the syllabus:
  • acknowledge your and others’; range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility
  • enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment
  • negotiate your own writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre,medium, and rhetorical situation
  • develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes
  • engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond
  • formulate and articulate a stance through and in your writing
  • practice using various library resources, online databases, and the internet to locate sourcesappropriate to your writing projects
  • strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)

4/13

Welcome!

Good evening gang! This is the first asynchronous lecture I’m posting. It will comprise video explanations, text instructions, and links to readings and assignment sheets.

Today during our Zoom class, I will show everyone how to navigate this page, answer questions, check in, and make sure everyone understands expectations.

We’re going to learn some research techniques today that will be useful mostly for the next assignment, the Proposal, but will also probably be useful for this current assignment, the Technical Description. So, what I’m going to do is introduce the Proposal assignment, so you know why I’m explaining all the research techniques in the way I do. Then I’ll show you some videos on research techniques

What you will have to do for 4/15:

Check out the Proposal assignment here

Read this introduction of what a proposal is here, and read this detailed explanation from David McMurry right here. That second link, from David McMurry is really critical. I’ve largely based this assignment on his scholarship, and this page is really helpful. It’s got examples of proposals, and an excellent breakdown of everything you need to understand about them.

Watch all the videos posted on this page,

And finally: Send me, over email, a list of five topics you might be interested in exploring for this assignment.

ALSO: DEADLINE FOR LAB ANALYSIS IS WEDNESDAY AS WELL IF YOU HAVEN’T SENT IT ALREADY

What is a proposal?

I will explain this in our Zoom class today in detail and post the recording on this website, but in short, think of it as a pitch to a board of investors for some sort of innovation or improvement your group could develop if it gets the funding.

My group? Yes! This will be a group project! I am still figuring out how that will work, but I’ve been reading about some good strategies.

I will base the groups around similar tropisms for topic ideas, which is why the homework for next class is to do some brainstorming. Think about something you wish would work differently or better for you, for your school, your city, your state, your country, this whole world, etc. In the past, people have proposed designs for electronic aircrafts, walls on subway platforms with automatic doors so people don’t all on the tracks, a national database for doctors to access patients medical records, a solar array on the roof of Marshak. Hey, if you want inspiration, look outside: what could make the world better given how suddenly different every thing is now?

I’d then recommend you explore a couple of your ideas by seeing what information you can find online using the search tools and techniques I introduce. See what similar things people have developed, and think about how you could improve. See what topics have what kind of information about them. Then send me your list by 4/15!

How do I do the research?

I will walk you through a whole bunch of tools and strategies in a series of videos I will post below:

First video, an introduction to research and the CCNY library website: library.ccny.cuny.edu

Next, searching techniques for library databases that are important to use, because the search itself doesn’t work as well as google. Here’s a link to the database I used, Academic Search Complete (remember, you’ll have to log in through the library website).

Now that you know how to search, here’s how to use a similar resource to look even deeper, and find even more:

The EBSCOhost options I mention in the video are:

• Academic Search Complete
• Applied Science and Technology Source
• Business Source Complete
• Communication & Mass Media Complete
• General Science Full Text
• GreenFILE
• MEDLINE complete
• APA PsychArticles
• APA PsychInfo
• Readers Guide Full Text

Finally, here’s a couple more tools to use, NexisUNI (for news articles), and Science.gov, for government reports.

Alrighty! So, watch all this stuff, try out some of the databases with some ideas for what you could do for your proposal, and send me 5 ideas!