. Assignment description and learning objectives
digital media and communication. Hopefully, one or
more themes have sparked your imagination and made you want to know more. Your job
is to transfer this joy of learning and sense of wonder to a student in a future COMM 309.
For the final activity in this class, you will use Tumblr to set up a blog, customize it, and
post your first entry in the form of a 500-word letter to a future student in this class. Your
post will have specific design and content requirements, detailed in the Assignment
Requirements section.
At the end of this assignment, you should be able to:
1. Explain terms and ideas learned in this class to a peer;
2. Apply a term or idea to your own life;
3. Know how to create a blog entry;
4. Develop your creativity and multimedia literacy by illustrating text with visual
material.
II. Multimedia tools
An important aspect of becoming
multimedia literate is experimenting with
online tools. Like any experimentation,
some frustration is inevitable. Give
yourself enough time to poke around, press
various buttons, and see what they do!
For this assignment, you will be using the platform Tumblr to set up a personal blog. You
will also need to take one original photo illustrating some aspect of your blog post, be
able to link a word or sentence to webpages outside the blog post (this is called in-text
hyperlinking), and tag your post.
Your blog entry will have the following multimedia elements:
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• 3 in-text hyperlinks;
• one original photo;
• 3 tags related to the content.
To set up your blog:
(a) Go to tumblr.com. Create an account (remember that all free platforms engage in
some level of data collection and data sharing, so the email you provide is likely
to get spammed.) The link to the Tumblr help is here:
https://tumblr.zendesk.com/hc/en-us
(b) Explore the available visual themes and customize your blog. Feel free to change
the blog’s appearance to suit your taste. Customizing your blog will involve some
degree of experimentation with the blog interface—give yourself enough time to
“mess around.” Remember that your blog is public and represents who you are, so
be both creative and mindful in setting it up. Make sure the blog is well organized
and easy to navigate. Consult https://tumblr.zendesk.com/hc/enus/categories/203334767-Posting
to learn how to post.
(c) Post your letter in the form of a blog entry. Give it an appropriate title.
To link words or text fragments to an external link, select the fragment you want to link,
click the link icon, then type or paste the link address as described here. Your
hyperlinked text will have a different appearance than the surrounding text just like in the
photo capture below. Please do not copy/paste a hyperlink directly into your blog
entry!
To tag your posts:
https://tumblr.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/205841167-Tags
III. Assignment requirements
The point of this assignment is to communicate to a future student in this class what is
important to learn and why by explaining and exemplifying one of the terms or ideas
studied in this class that gave you a new perspective on your digital media habits.
Usually, these terms/ideas are located at the end of a study guide. However, feel free to
use any term or idea that captured your imagination.
Your entry should answer three major questions: (1) What does the term/idea/theory
mean? (2) How does it apply to my own life? (3) What is the relevance of the
term/idea/theory beyond my own life?
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a. Your post follows the format of a letter. Your audience is a future student of this
online class. Because this is a letter, follow the writing conventions of a letter. Make
the letter persuasive and relevant to someone just like you. You do not need to
include a bibliography.
b. Your letter will have approximately 500 words.
c. You need to research the term or idea beyond what we did in class. You need to find
at least three important and trustworthy sources freely available online that
would explain that term. You will link a word, expression or sentence from your text
to those sources as described in the Assignment Setup section.
d. Your term, idea or theory will also be illustrated by an original photo (that is, a photo
that you took, not something that you found online) that will have an explanatory
caption.
For example: Are you concerned about the loss of social capital? Then perhaps you might
consider taking a picture of how we interact more with our devices than with each other.
Make sure you explain how the photo is relevant to the discussion. Caption the photo in
an informative way.
e.
