ENGL 2005 Curriculum Plotting: Activity Ideas

Activity 1: Fact-check your drunk uncle // Limitations of AI

Activity 1.1: AI summary comparisons: What biases do you detect?

Activity 2: Explore recent scholarship in PTW

Activity 3: Systems thinking // Project management

Activity 4: Track changes // "Real" revision

Activity 5: One good graphic // Information design 

Activity 6: "Plain English" // Shrunken White Elephants //  Technical conventions // Editing

Activity 7: Interviews // Synthesis // Presentations

Activity 8: Case study // Ethics // Rhetoric // Tone

For activities above, also see this exploration/extention chat with ChatGPT, created with very little guidance to ChatGPT in advance. Impressive how much it generally "gets right" in my telegraphing ideas above. It gets the "plain English" one entirely wrong but is in the ballpark otherwise.

"Explain it to me like I'm 5" analysis (credit Ally Ingraham, indirect inspiration). Pick a complex topic from your field and either break it down yourself OR have AI break it down for a much less-knowledgeable audience. Then use comment feature in Word or Google Docs to explain WHY the simplified version is appropriate for that audience. (Audience awareness used as a driver to help communicators understand structures and techniques for moving from compressed technical information to more expansive explanation.)

Documentation scenario (credit Emily Gardner, indirect inspiration). Create a scenario in which one group of students "acts out" a ethical dilemma and reaches a conclusion (dentist dispute, for example). One group documents. A third group has to interpret the documentation (maybe without having seen/heard the original dispute?) to determine what legal or ethical action should be taken. Note: Rich Liebig could provide scenario details

The "challenging students" policy -> from text to flowchart. Convert student handbook/university regulations into a document that could be used by instructors to help them navigate the specific processes. Idenitfy opportunities for policy revision through this effort.

The department bylaws --> from text to flowchart. Same as above, for electing new administrative chairs.


Chapter from We are Government about the guy who manages the national cemeteries -- as way to set up "technical" writing as systematic processes -- spreadsheets and such

NCSU's big student report.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What "Ordinary Men" teaches about conditioning for mass murder

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland is a book about a Hamburg-based police force's involvement in the mass killing of Jews during WWII. It is, in part, a historian's effort to understand how relatively "ordinary men" (conscripted into the war effort relatively late in the overall timeline) became willing participants in execution. "Willing" is perhaps not the right word, and in fact many did not participate on account of deep ideological values -- but the interviews on which the book is based do point to the variety of justifications and manipulations that made it possible for these ordinary men to become killers. Here's what I've learned so far: Collapse the distance between "police" and "military." Make killing legal. Create conditions of economic uncertainty. Create promotion ladders (or, alternately, threats against career promotion for non-participants) Make opportunities for "con...
Read more

What's in a name

This blog isn't about the European weatherfish , or about Japanese torpedos at Pearl Harbor , or about mythical creatures in How to Train your Dragon , or about a hovering autonomous submarine , or about a shipwreck tour based in Mystic, CT , or about a series of Australian crime novels , or a swim club in Naugatuck . Apparently other people also think that thunderfish  makes for a pretty cool name. Through a book club I belong to, I earned the moniker "Dr. Dick" while I was completing my PhD. Some of the guys in the club worried that the degree would go to my head and turn me into a elitist jerk, or even more of one. Fairly quickly "Thunder" was added to that name (because "thunder" is always a hilarious intensifier), and somehow it's stuck. To that group and nobody else, I am Dr. Thunder Dick. I like the name--or, at least, I like having a nickname. I was a serious kid, not the kind to want a nickname like Dr. Thunder Dick. Too crude, too flippan...
Read more

What I think I know about writing (pt I)

"there are no general recipes or designs that can be applied to all contexts, but certain principles and experiences that must be adjusted to the predominant theoretical and pedagogical traditions, to the profiles of instructors and students, and to the institutional resources and to the curricular spaces available." -- Federico Navarro, "Think Globally, Act Locally: How to Design an Academic Writing Course for Students Entering University," p. 112 (https://doi.org/10.37514/INT-B.2025.2739.2.04) as Rose and Martin (2012) point out, if students are not taught to read and write independently, educational institutions will only reproduce the underlying social and cultural inequalities of their students. (Navarro, p. 119) Writing encourages a slowing of thinking. That slowing down is good when it allows for inspection and growth. To the extent that a process approach encourages inspection, it is good for writers' development. A process approach that produces change ...
Read more