Cover of Writing Online: Rhetoric for the Digital Age by George Pullman

Writing Online: Rhetoric for the Digital Age by George Pullman

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This website is not a digital version of the book; however it demonstrates the differences between digital and paper-based communications practices. It also offers you code you can copy, paste, and ponder. What’s here will get you started thinking like a digital rhetor.

Net Smart: How to Thrive Online by Howard Rheingold

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Domain & hosting

For this class you’ll be creating websites and publishing your work online. As such, you’ll need your own domain and server space to host your sites.

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Aula

We are using Aula as our backchannel to communicate and collaborate with each other. To join our class, simply go to https://app.aula.education/, select “Join a class” and use this class key when registering: 8h6agl

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Tableau

Tableau is specialized data visualization software for exploring and analyzing relational databases and data cubes. I’ve arranged a license key for each of you to use Tableau for free throughout the semester. More details to follow soon.

Lynda.com

Lynda.com is a commercial educational service that makes video tutorials available on a wide range of business, software, technology, and creative skills. Emory uses a portion of your student fees to secure full access to the range of Lynda tutorials for all of the students at this university. This is a really valuable resource. I will assign some specific Lynda tutorials as part of this class, but I also strongly encourage you to check out the course offerings there and to take additional tutorials as you can.

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Other stuff

I will sometimes assign you readings that are electronically available through course reserves. I will also sometimes point you toward readings that are available online — you might want to print those out and bring hard copies to class but you don’t need to (unless for some reason I specifically tell you otherwise).

There will likely be other web-based services that I’ll ask you to sign up for. There will also likely be assignments that I’ll ask you to perform but give you the choice of tools to use, and you might find that the best thing is to install an application or to sign up for some service on the web. You might end up using a free trial period for some product and playing with it during the course, and then making a decision about whether you want to pay for it and keep it or not.

This is not the sort of class where we will work our way chapter by chapter through a textbook. It’s designed to be nonlinear, multimodal, a little chaotic, and sometimes unpredictable. Keep an eye out as we work through the semester for the serendipitous discovery of a new way of thinking or of a new tool that will be valuable for you.