Class Syllabus

Global Cultures & Communications Syllabus

Welcome to your English Composition class! We will be meeting in the Miller Center

and enjoy access to the world-wide web during class time in Room 206. When using

internet resources, please remain critical about what you find. 

We will conduct the class with a handbook that I recommend to have: The Bedford Handbook, 7th edition, Bedford/St. Martin's, Boston and New York, 2006-2009 (available used for a few dollars). You can buy the softcover  0-312-59504-2 version or the hard cover 0-312-59505-0.
The book is not mandatory. It is just for your own review and study.

You will have to invest in paper for printing, and other

resources you may need, including a dedicated USB memory stick for your work.

You are expected to maintain all files for this course on your home computer or

husky space and also on that memory stick. 

You will create your own blog on blogger by google. It is free. All members of class will be asked to read and review writing samples. Everything you do for class goes into the blog. We are saving trees. Assignments are always due at noon of the day we meet.

The course objectives

Reading, writing, and critical reasoning based on different text types and situations related to Global Cultures & Communications. We will explore the creative as well as analytical side of writing, discourse, and structure together. You will write short and longer papers and learn to edit your writing, improve your arguments, and become more effective communicators using blogs. You will be reviewing your peers blog entries regularly and discover what works and where problems exist. All the while you will learn about other countries and cultures and explore the otherness of non-US speech, text, discourse and argument.

The semester will be structured as follows:

Part I: Five meetings August-September we will cover LEO and writing topics from the

University of Ottawa Writing Center.

Part II Preparing for interviews with international students, conducting interviews,

and writing interview and country reports. This will cover October until mid November.

Part III You personal Final Project. This could be an additional interview, a comparison

of several interviews, a research paper, or anything else we agreed on. The day of finals

is December 18 for section 28. Your final project is due that day in your blog.

begin clip:

8/6/12	-	Tuition and fees due
8/27/12	-	Day and Evening Classes begin
9/3/12	-	Labor Day; No classes, Offices closed
9/3/12	-	Last day to drop without a "W" and 100% reduction of charges
9/4/12	-	Last day to add classes without departmental permission
9/10/12	-	Last day to exchange full term classes in AS 118
9/28/12	-	Undergraduate graduation application deadline for Fall semester
10/11 - 10/12/12	-	Fall Semester Break; No classes
10/22/12	-	Second half of semester classes begin
11/12/12	-	Veterans Day; No classes, Offices closed
11/13/12	-	Registration for Spring semester 2013 begins by earned credit priority
11/21/12	-	Deadline for dropping courses with a grade of “W”
11/22 - 11/23/12	-	Thanksgiving Break
12/14/12	-	Last day of classes
12/17 - 12/21/12	-	Final Examinations
12/21/12	-	Tuition/Fees due for Spring Semester 2013
12/22/12	-	University Commencement

end clip from http://www.stcloudstate.edu/registrar/default.asp

When publishing your writing on your blog:

-- Several drafts are needed until a paper or presentation reads well .

-- Writing and researching improves as you allow others to critique your

work, and make suggestions for your benefit.

-- If in doubt about a sentence, paragraph, or page of your text and its role for

the entire paper, just cut it out.

-- Less is usually more, if less was edited and revised intelligently.

-- Any text element in your paper that is not your own writing and expression,

needs to be referenced as the work or idea of others.

-- Use of technology cannot make up for lack of reflection and poor writing design.

-- You can only write about what you know; resist writing about things

you do not understand. 

Journal or Blog

You are expected to keep a blog. Whenever you freewrite, list, research, or keep records of books and urls used, use your journal. The journal is supposed to show evidence of how you went about tasks, which books and homepages you used, etc. Every time you search for a topic (e.g. www.google.com)

I require you to record the urls used and the date you visited that page. Use a word-processing program or an editor simultaneously with the browser to keep records. Print the pages after you saved it to your personal disk, USB storage card, or Husky account and paste it into your journal. If you forget or loose your journal you cannot work effectively in class that day. Immediately buy a new journal and reconstruct what was lost in the first one. A person without a correctly kept journal/blog cannot achieve better than a B – even if everything else is A+.

Grades will be based on:

Completeness and appearance of blog 30%

Post assignments, interviews 50%

Class participation, presentations 20%

Best paper (or post or interview) in class gives you a 10% bonus for the final grade. Missing a meeting without talking with me ahead of time costs you 5% on the final grade. Missing more than 25% of total class time, by department policy, forces me to fail you in this class.

More details of the syllabus are posted in the margin of this blog as our work progresses.