Narrative Assignment

Step One: tell a story

due to the wiki on Tuesday October 9 by midnight, EST

remix 3 peer narratives by October 16, midnight EST

One way to direct attention is to tell a story. Narrative is simply the organization of information in space and time. For example, the little musical gnome "here's a story of a man named Brady....." sets the stage and determines a starting point: the story of the Brady Bunch begins when two single parents unite forces. The Brady Bunch jingle just one example of the useful "once upon a time" catch phrase, which uses chronology as a way of organizing information: first this happened, then that other thing. Of course, on a more serious note, it takes work to sort these things out, because in professional writing contexts, many things are happening at once. Producing, analyzing and revising narratives yields and organizes important and transformative information about who we are, where we are, and where we'd like to go, so narrative is becoming the lingua franca of most projects--projects are really stories, the organization of people, tools, and resources in space and time. In medicine, Kathryn Montgomery Hunter tells us, cases are organized and communicated in narrative form; cases bring together information from diverse technical idiom and convey this information through plots as "the patient's story is encapsulated and retold in the physician's account of the process of disease in this one individual" (Doctor's Stories: the Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge, p. 51). Basically, try and think about narrative as a potent site of self experimentation, as well as a means of expression, persuasion and information management.

This assignment asks you to use narrative as a way to introduce, categorize, and review a body of literature, introduce characters, plot specific examples, clarify definitions, and articulate an analysis of a distributed learning context for a specific audience of readers.

The TV Tropes Wiki shows how basic elements of story telling get used over and over again, and if you drop your favorite show into their search engine, you can get a concrete sense of what a "trope" is. And then, of course, you can blog about this. Yes, and, what's more, emboldened, you will select some of these narrative patterns and and adapt them to a story you want to tell, or to convey any information that you want a specific listener or reader to understand or keep with them for a while.

Alright, let's do this:

To get started on your narrative assignment, just blog, blog, blog, and then select from the blogging you and your classmates have done so far, the first bit of writing we did for this class. Tell us a story about how you were first introduced to some of the ideas, events, issues, or people discussed on your blog, or a classmate's blog. Or, tell us about any project or learning experience in your past, an effort currently underway. You could even share a vision and imagine how a plan you have in mind might unfold. Sequence your information as a story with a plot.

Format: according to the standards deemed appropriate by your audience or discipline, in wiki, with links, images, and sounds.

1200

now, go to

step two:

The Remix

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