This document provides an overview of assignments completed in a digital literacy course and the skills developed. It lists assignments including Twitter stories, IBM poems, Photoshop image editing, and PowerPoint comics. For each assignment, it identifies the key concepts covered, such as constraints and affordances, storytelling, and working with words and images. It explains how the skills from prior assignments, such as editing, visual design, and multimodal storytelling, will apply to a final "Concept in 60" video project integrating words, visuals, music and video editing within time constraints.

1. Taking Stock/Building Skills

2. What did we learn?
When?
Where do we apply it?
What skills we built?
• Digital Literacy
• Digital Citizenship
[Engagement with
Rhizomatic, Prosumer
Culture]
Week 1
Readings: From Wikis to
Socrates; Digital Renaissance
In understanding new media’s
role in facilitating
communication.
Applicable in continuing
classroom discussion through
blog posts and comments.
Critically thinking about your role
in the world of new media which
lets you consume and create
content simultaneously.
•
Week 2
Reading: Backpacks vs
Briefcases
Understanding the rhetoric of
Viral trends.
In developing own content—
think of the structure, your
argument, what context it has,
what tools you are using.
Thinking about the latent
structure in any composition.
Week 2 and 3
Reading: Ted Talk; Share This
Use the terms and language in
analyzing viral trends.
Use the concepts as reference
points while planning
compositions: e.g: how might you
use hypertextuality in your
webtexts? How might you use
constraints (as you had in the
Twitter story assignment) to your
advantage? etc.
Vocabulary to understand,
critique and implement some of
the key features that are special
to digital media.
Digital Rhetoric
Digital Words and Trends:
• Viral
• Affordances
• Constraints
• Hypertextuality
• Interactivity
• Convergence

3. Which assignment?
Related Readings
What did we learn?
What skills we built?
Twitter Story
Key terms reading: esp.
Affordances and Constraint
Basics of storytelling
Evocative power a concise series of
events
Use of symbols/referentiality when
you need to be brief
Brevity in verbal expression
Editing Redundancy
Working with the constraints of a
social network
IBM Poem
Mathematical Muse
Hands-on experience on
generating “algorithm poems”
Using language in unconventional
ways
Visual arrangement of words as
cues to the reader (line breaks,
increasing fonts due to repetition
etc.)
Experimenting with constraints
Image Editing: Photoshop
Multimedia of Texts
•
Image Editing
Working with layers of pictures and
texts
•
•
•
Using complex image editing
tools
Rhetoric of images
Designing that explores the
relationship between words
and pictures in different
generic modes
Visual import of textual fonts,
colors etc.

4. Which assignment?
Related Readings
What did we learn?
PowerPoint Comics
Vocabulary of Comics
•
•
•
What skills we built?
Storytelling: Working with •
words + image together to
tell a story
•
Storyboarding—Planning
a story in a series or
installments: where only a
part of information is
•
revealed in one panel and
the complete story is
developed over multiple
panels
Iconic versus Photo
realistic choices while
sketching characters in
comics
Using PowerPoint to draw
and illustrate figures
Storytelling and
storyboarding using
multiple media (words,
images)
Making choices about
realistic/abstract visual
depictions in graphic
storytelling
Concept in 60—your movie project—will build on the skills you have been acquiring through the other assignments.

5. Twitter Story:
Photoshop Image Editing:
Concept in 60
Storytelling
You edited and changed the look
of existing photographs. Now
you will edit to change and
match the looks of shot and
available video footage. You
learned to use and arrange texts
in images—you will work with
credits and captions that use
similar features in your movies.
IBM Poem:
Words + Visuals + Music
Constraints and Affordances
of video editing platforms.
You had 140 characters as
operative constraint. Now you
have exactly 60 seconds.
PowerPoint Comic:
Enhanced your storytelling skills from
the twitter assignment (which was
only words) to multimodal storytelling
(words +images). Concept in 60 will be
images, words, sound etc. all together.
You learned telling stories over
multiple panels. In Concept in 60 you
will have multiple frames for
storytelling.
You had to follow some available
prompts and see where they
took you. Now you will have
several prompts, e.g. the one
that asks to match sounds and
images from disparate sources
and you will have to see where
they take you.