Tag: manuel’s tavern

Unpacking Manuel’s Reflection

One comment

Once you’ve completed your revisions on the Unpacking Manuel’s assignment, write a reflective blog post of 250-500 words.

Begin your post by stating the controlling idea for your analysis. Then explain how you went about connecting your close reading of the object to your controlling idea. In what ways did you make the revised version stronger than the first draft?

How do you see your work on the Unpacking Manuel’s assignment helping you to achieve the learning outcomes for this course? Link to one or more of the specific learning outcome posts that applied to your work on this assignment, and explain how you met that outcome with your work on this assignment.

Make sure you address the sets of questions above and then also consider some of the questions below and address them in your reflection (you definitely won’t be able to answer all of these, so go through the list and pick some that seem to be most of interest for you and write about them):

  • Were the strategies, skills and procedures you used effective for this assignment?
  • Do you see any patterns in how you approached your work on this assignment? How was your writing on this assignment similar to or different from writing more traditional essays?
  • What have you learned about your strengths and areas in need of improvement?
  • How are you progressing as a learner?
  • How can you apply the skills you used in crafting this analysis to future writing projects, in this class, other classes, or in other arenas? Where can you use these skills again?
  • What are you most proud of about the project?
  • How does the close reading analysis of your one object fit into the larger project of Unpacking Manuel’s, or at least of the readings of the Main North Wall that you and your classmates have produced?

Manuel’s Tavern Revisions

2 comments

Due: 3/5

I’ve met with each of you individually to discuss your Manuel’s Tavern artifact analyses. I’m also in the process of writing up the “needs work/nice work” feedback for each of you and will be sharing those via Google Drive with you soon. You should begin to work on revising your analyses along the lines that we discussed in our conferences and based on my feedback. What that means above all else is to revise the pieces to make certain that everything in it is focused on articulating, explaining, and supporting the controlling idea of your writing, which is to understand what role your individual piece plays in the rhetorical argument of Manuel’s Tavern about the type of space, the type of people, and the type of activities that should go on there.

As you set about your revisions, please keep the first draft you published the way it is now. Make a new page for the revised version of your analysis and just copy everything from your first page and then revise. (Probably the easiest way to copy all the content of the old page is to switch to the “Text” tab in the top right corner of your text editor window, then select everything in the text editor. Then close the page, create a new page, and then, still in the “Text” tab of the new page text editor, paste everything. You can then switch back to the “Visual” tab and edit the text and images that are there.)

You should add the word “Draft” to the title of the first published version of your page, so that we don’t confuse which one is the revised version and which is the draft.

I will be publishing guidelines for a reflection post to complete once you’ve finished your revisions.

Once it’s all finished

Once your entire Manuel’s Tavern project is finished it will include the following parts:

  • A final, revised analysis of the single object that you’ve analyzed. 500-1000 words. Published as a primary page, linked in the menu on your site.
  • The draft version of your object analysis, also published as a page and linked as a subpage on the menu from your site underneath the revised version.
  • The page that you wrote as you completed the first draft of your object analysis, explaining the process you went through as you researched and thought about the object, linked as a subpage on the menu from your site underneath the revised version.
  • The blog post you already published when you completed the first draft of the assignment. (You don’t need to do anything with this post now, it’s already published and does not need to be added to your menu or anything.)
  • A final reflection, published as a post, linking to your revised page.
  • Whatever game-like overview text we produce as a class, which will probably go up on a page on the course site and will link out to the different final artifact pages. I might ask for another reflective piece of writing connecting that overview text with your individual project.

Week Ahead 7

One comment
7 2/23 dys4ia & Depression Quest
2/25 Kentucky Route Zero: Act One
2/26 Podcast Episode 3 due

Warning for the games we’ll be discussing on Tuesday: dys4ia is an autobiographical “playable diary” about 6 months of the author’s life as she undergoes hormone replacement therapy. This game features low-rez pixel nudity and frank discussion of personal issues of sexuality. Depression Quest has the explicit aims “to show other sufferers of depression that they are not alone in their feelings, and to illustrate to people who may not understand the illness the depths of what it can do to people.” dys4ia is a short game. Depression Quest can be short depending on how you play it. Play it long enough that you give it a real shot and feel like you have a pretty clear sense of the lessons it has to impart. Response post assignment.

Play Act One Kentucky Route Zero for Thursday. Take notes on your interactions and choices that you make, as well as your reactions to the interactions you have within the game.

Unpacking Manuel’s Discussion

We’ll spend some time in class on Tuesday, and perhaps also on Thursday, discussing the Manuel’s Tavern assignment some more, specifically how we might pull together all your individual artifact analyses into some sort of a whole. As I’ve been meeting with students individually, I’ve posed the question for them to consider: if we were to make a game — maybe a short, vignette game — set in Manuel’s Tavern against the backdrop of the main north wall that you all have cataloged, what sort of game should that be? What sort of characters are implied by this setting? What kind of narrative should take place in this space, and how would these objects be used in the game in order to structure the character interactions?

1 2