What is one assignment you will include in your syllabus assignment that uses collaboration and/or technology and/or other things Yancey, Selfe, Breuch, Bruffee, or Shaughnessey have discussed?

As I reflect on the topic of technology and collaboration in the classroom, I am drawn to thoughts of my junior year of high school. I took AP English, which I suppose is the closest thing that I’ve taken to the English 1301 classes that our students are taking. We had an excellent teacher, one I still remember as having an impact on my later decision to study Englsih. For that class, we were assigned the infamous Movie Project.

This was a collaborative project. We were put into groups of eight, and then given four options of classic movies to adopt into the present day. This involved writing a new screenplay, as well as filming, acting, and editing all ourselves (my group did an adaptation of Macbeth).

It was an extremely stressful project, as perhaps you can imagine. However, I must admit that I did learn a lot more than I would have by working on a simple essay. How many people can say they put together a fifty minute movie when they were seventeen years old?

Thinking about my own syllabus, I can’t justify putting my freshmen through the trauma of being put in a group with seven people they probably don’t know. I like the idea of making a project involving a video, however. The Texas Tech Library has video cameras that are available for students to check out for forty-eight hours at a time, so access to technology shouldn’t be a problem even for students that might possibly not have video cameras on their phones.

Since in undergraduate classes it’s common not to really know your fellow classmates, I think I would assign them to groups of four and set them about the task of making a short film. I think it would be interesting to give them a specific time frame that their movie must fit within, maybe either exactly three or exactly four minutes (give or take five seconds). Like with the photo essays we’ve been discussing, I think that giving specific parameters will encourage students to be intentional in their choices about what to include or exclude.

As far as prompts, I wouldn’t be too specific. I think that simply telling a story will be the main point of the assignment. Does it have a beginning, a middle, and an end? By the end of the video is something concrete different than it was at the beginning? Is the tension, climax, character development? Granted, that’s a lot to expect from a short video, but that’s the art of it.

Alternatively, I might give students the option of making their video persuasive, rather than creative, in which case I would evaluate whether or not they were able to effectively present and defend their argument within the time constraints.

Regardless of the prompt followed, I would require each student to appear in the video, even if just for a few seconds. I would also require each student to write up a brief statement, maybe 250 words, explaining the part that they played in bringing the project to completion. In that way I would assure fairness of grading and prevent any students from profiting by slacking off while others did the work.