Friday, October 21, 2016

Machine Made of Words (Assignment Instructions)

If you're a teacher and you liked the "Machine Made of Words" idea that I've discussed over the last few days, feel free to use (or adapt) the following instructions I gave to my students:


As we move toward the second half of the semester, we’re going to get away from discussing texts that I’ve chosen and start looking at texts that you’ve found. These texts can include articles that you’ve stumbled upon, interesting passages from books, or even videos that you find particularly intriguing or worthy of discussion. The only thing I ask is that you refrain from bringing politics or religion into the mix. I make this request because the purpose of this exercise is not to incite debate but to practice synthesis—that is, to take seemingly different and arguably incompatible pieces of information and to use them to support a single idea.

With any luck, one benefit of this exercise will be that you work on what Pagan Kennedy might refer to as your “string gathering” skills. In other words, you’ll get better at keeping an eye on the news and other sources of information in order to stay informed around the world around you while simultaneously thinking about how all of that information fits together. One way to do this might be to follow a variety of news sources on Twitter (e.g., Reuters News Agency, NPR, New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, Rolling Stone, or any other publications you might find interesting) and watch out for anything that grabs your attention. Alternately, you might check the headlines of a single publication like the New York Times or listen to local NPR affiliate WHYY (90.9 FM) daily to learn about what’s going on in the world and share it with the class.

However you choose to gather your string, keep looking for information that makes you stop and think, “Wow… That’s really interesting!” When that happens, save the link (or scan the information if it’s in print) so that you can share it with the class when your turn comes around. Though I’m assigning students with specific weeks and deadlines for sharing their links and articles, my advice is to start gathering your string now so that you don’t have to scramble to find something at the last minute to share with the class; it’s better to give yourself a few possibilities to choose from rather than forcing yourself to go with the first and only thing you find.

So, in a nutshell, what you’re going to do is send me a link to (or scanned copy of) something interesting by the Friday associated with your name below. I will then forward all of the information to the rest of the class, and everyone in the class will read the texts over the weekend so that we can work on synthesizing that information over the course of the following week. 

(The schedule appeared here; for each week, I listed five students who had to send me links to articles. The results of this assignment can be found in my post "Building a Machine Made of Words.")

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