This assignment asks you to go ahead and start your website. Even though you havent completed all of the elements just yet, right now you are creating a space for each of the required elements when they are ready.
Think of this assignment as a digital version of a portfolio binder with dividers. In the paper-dominant world, you have likely at one time in your life been asked to collect your work into a binder with section dividers for each of the required elements. Your website is the digital version of that binder. You can choose a website or template that reflects your project and your personality, just as you might have taken care to choose a binder for your portfolio for paper assignments.
This website is your final project and will be the culmination of your work this term that reflects your argument and evidence about an issue within contemporary media literacies explored in your proposal.
You will create your website using a platform of your choice (WordPress, Weebly, Wix, or Google Sites, to name some examples). Feel free to choose a template that suits your message, or you can build your own site if you like and are able.
You dont have to be concerned about populating all of the above sections of your website. Instead, your goal at this point is to create a physical/virtual space for your work as you develop and polish it during the remaining weeks of the term. Choices you make now about templates or style can always be amended, so dont be too concerned about getting it exactly right.
Required Reflection Questions and Intentional Design
As you create and refine your website, adding the elements of your research and analysis, you will want to think about why you are making the rhetorical choices you are, given what you now know about how meaning is made through multiple modes and genres. Here you are applying your understanding of literacies and visual rhetorical.
After you have created your website shell, answer the following questions and post them in the assignment text box:
What is the URL to access your site?
How did your understanding of visual choices affect your design decisions?
What choices did you make when balancing the ratios of the following elements of your site: words, font, images, color, and space?
Specifically, what considerations of color and image did you make?
How did font type and size affect your design decisions?
How did the use of positive and negative space affect your design decisions?
What effects of movement did you decide to include and why?
Do the choices you made have the effect you hoped for? How will you know?
Required Elements for the Website
As a reminder, here are the elements that you will need for your project to be complete and for your reader to understand and follow the logic of your thinking.
Navigation tabs, menu, or buttons that tell your reader how to find all that your site includes.
A welcome/home page that introduces your subject and point of view.
An about you page that provides background about you as a thinker, scholar, and professional.
A formal proposal that articulates the problem or issue you are addressing and includes supporting reasons and evidence for a possible solution or solutions.
A minimum of three different genres appropriate to your field that communicate and support your ideas argument, one of which is your final video recording.
A conclusion that addresses the relevance of your project to other people who might be connected or interested in your issue.
A critical, reflective essay that addresses your development of a metalanguage of contemporary media literacies. You will write this essay in Week 7 of the term.
A references page that points your reader to your sources so they can learn more about your issue, should they want to.
