1) Risk-taking
Part of any learning process involves taking risks. Through the use of the Learning Record and the inventio processes of building a Mystory, this class will provide an environment that enables and rewards risk-taking. Part of your task in this class is to take risks in an attempt to build your Mystory and help build new ways of reading and writing (what Ulmer calls electracy).
2) Developing inventio processes
Throughout this class, you will be asked to compile a lot of information that may or may not be related. This is a process that the Greek and Roman rhetoricians have called inventio, and it will allow you to put seemingly disconnected ideas together in new and interesting ways. It will be your task to develop ways of gathering this information, sorting through it, and using it to make new meanings.
3) Developing revision processes
All writing is revision, and we will be focusing on continuous revision throughout this semester. You will compose nearly all of your work in a Wiki, and this will allow you to track the various revisions of your work (through the "history" link for each page). While writers find different ways to revise their work, no one creates substantive writing without significant revision. Another of your tasks for this semester will
be to develop processes of revision that work for you.
4) Multimedia Writing
In this class, writing will involve something much more than words on a page. We will be composing online, and this means that hyperlinks, images, video, and audio are all part of the writing equation. These different media are not merely supplements to your writing, they are part of the text that you create. You should consider an image to be a part of your text, not an "add-on" to the words you've written. Hyperlinks are not merely different ways of finding information, they are a new medium with which you can experiment. You will be tasked with using varying media to write in this class as you create the different parts of your Mystory.
