Karl Stolley karlstolley

COM201: Digital Writing

Syllabus by Prof. Karl Stolley, IIT Department of Humanities

Course Description

A course in the rhetorical theory and applied practice of digital writing. Topics include word-processor alternatives, social media for professional development, multimedia writing, and collaboration & project management.

Major Readings

Aristotle, On Rhetoric
Lidwell, William, Kritina Holden, & Jill Butler, Universal Principles of Design 2nd ed.
Ong, Walter J., Orality & Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word and The Presence of the Word (selections)

Abstract

This workshop will teach participants to program in JavaScript. No previous experience in programming is necessary. The workshop will introduce the basic conceptual foundations shared by contemporary programming languages and cover both functional and object-oriented styles of programming. Over the course of the workshop, participants will begin to write their own library of higher-order JavaScript functions for use in the browser and server-side in Node.js. These libraries will be developed and reused over several simple but useful projects. More than just a how-to, the workshop advances and embodies the argument that programming can become an integral part of writing courses and entire curricula, and that even the humble Web browser can be a powerful teaching, learning, and communication tool.

Proposal

This day-long workshop (or two half-day workshops) will teach participants to program, using JavaScript. The workshop will introduce the basics of data types, control structures, and functio

Should be pretty easy to set up:

Install the twitter gem with gem install twitter (you may have to do sudo gem install twitter).
Look at the comments in sn-to-id.rb for where you'll go to set up an app with Twitter (the URLs they ask for don't matter, in this case). Put in all of the keys, tokens, and secrets.
On line 23, you'll paste in your list of usernames. You are limited to 100 usernames for each time you run the script. And I think you're limited to running the script 60 times an hour. Check the docs on the latter point tho. This is fairly permissive; as long as you have usernames separated by commas, you'll be golden (it doesn't matter if there's a space or not after the commas).
Create a text file (like above) called my_users.csv in the same directory as the sn-to-id.rb file; put username,id as its first line. Every time you run the sn-to-id.rb script, your new batch of usernames/ids will be appended to the file. NOTE: the script is not smart enough to filter out dupl

In Search of Troublesome Digital Writing: A Meditation on Difficulty

Scaffolding the pursuit of digital writing is a whole galaxy of software tools that automate away difficulty. WYWISYGs. One-click installers. Hosted applications. In a computing culture of "There's an app for that," digital writers are attuned to obvious difficulties that software can simply solve. Point. Click. Done.

Abstracted away from technological concerns, difficulty presents itself in many different forms as part of education and learning generally and writing instruction more specifically. Some difficulties are written into the challenges of a course or curriculum; others are deferred to more advanced study, or simply ignored. Whether the product of conscious effort or not, the structure and content of courses and entire curricula form complex orbits around different points of difficulty.

Institutional structures such as course numbering, sequences, and prerequisites are familiar approaches to managing those orbits. But technol

	// http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/forecast/daily?q=Fake%20Town,%20AZ&units=imperial&cnt=5&callback=forecast
	// (Call for 'Fake Town, AZ' -- there is of course no such town)

	{
	"message": "",
	"cod": "404"
	}

	<!DOCTYPE html>
	<html lang="en">
	<head>
	<meta charset="utf-8" />
	<title></title>
	<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
	<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1" />
	</head>
	<body>

	source 'http://rubygems.org'

	gem 'jekyll-haml' # See https://github.com/samvincent/jekyll-haml
	gem 'bootstrap-sass' # See https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap-sass