Hey, hello Hao, and Juliana, Chris, Aaron,
Lorenzo, Madeline, everyone else.
Welcome to Unit 2... I'm making this little
video to give you an introduction to
what we will be doing over the next four
weeks. Now, before we get into unit 2
let's rewind and let me say a few things
about unit 1. i'm currently busily
completing grading your papers and those
should all be done no later than
tomorrow, Saturday, and I know that I''ve
gotta catch up on those blogs too and so
you'll slowly start to see all of these
points trickle in.
Alright, congratulations to everybody for
making it this far.
We're just over a fourth of the way
through the course, and I think that
we've all got a pretty strong
understanding of how the course now
operates. Now on to unit 2. In unit 2
we're also going to be dealing with this
concept of critical literacy although
now we're going to look at this concept
far more specifically than we did in
unit 1 unit. In 1 we kind of just were
allowed to analyze anything and we looked
at advertisements, looked at the novel, we
looked at articles and you guys wrote
these papers and you had some freedom
in terms of how you guys wrote the
papers, etc. Now in unit 2 we're going to
specify critical literacy and academic
writing, and so now we're going to think
about the sorts of moves and strategies
that people use when they're building
fleshed-out academic arguments. And so to
get into this unit I'm gonna ask you
guys to do a couple of readings this
week. The first reading is going to take
us back to the novel and I'm only going
to ask you to read about 20 pages or so...
and you guys are going to be
concentrating on a conversation between
Montag and Faber and in that
conversation they're going to talk a lot
about the role of books in the culture,
and I want us to think about this role
of books because this is going to inform
how we start to think about academic
conversations. I'm also going to ask that
you guys do a short reading called
Hidden Intellectualism and the cool
thing about this reading is that this
reading is really getting us to
understand that we can talk
intellectually about things that may not
seem to be that intellectual and for us
this is cool because in the second
assignment you are going to
actually be able to write on the topic
of your choice.
It could be a
hobby or interest or a current event
that you're interested in; the
possibilities are endless, but you guys
get to decide and the point is that you
have to just make sure that you're able
to talk about it in an academic /
sophisticated way.  And so we'll get into
the details of that in the blog this
week. I'm gonna ask that you guys respond
to the conversation that's
happening in Hidden Intellectualism and
ask that you address some of the points
that are made in Fahrenheit 451. Now I
also want to briefly touch on the
responses that you guys gave me in terms
of some of the things we can modify in the
course, and now I want to add one little
thing to what we've been doing. I want to
highlight something that may interest
you
each week. Now you'll see at the bottom
of the page I'm going to have an extra
credit section and one possibility for
extra credit will be the discussion
board and I've started that although
people haven't taken me up on it too
much thus far, so I'll try to give you
subjects to discuss that are interesting
to you and that connect to the skills for
that given week and then also I'm going
to create a little grammar extra credit
Some people are asking about looking at
grammar and I've mentioned a lot of
grammar issues in your papers and so you
can read the the grammar section in the
extra credit to get more details. I
will give people the possibility of
thinking about their own grammar
grammatical issues that they're working
on and have the chance to get some extra
credit for working on those very issues
So take a look.
Welcome to unit 2-- I look forward to
it. Take care.
