Assignment 2: Transmedia Story Proposal

Hi Everyone,

Here are the details for assignment 2.

In this assignment, you will write a proposal for your transmedia storytelling plan which summarizes your strategy for composing a series of transmedia stories. You should answer the following questions in your proposal:

• What type of stories are you going to tell?
• In which genre will you be writing?
• Why are you choosing these particular types of story to compose?
• What is the purpose of your stories?
• Who are the intended audiences for your stories?
• What is the method of focalisation you will employ?
• How will your story be temporally arranged?
• How will this story be shaped by media through each subsequent pass? In other words, what types of media will you add to each revision, and how will these media redefine the rhetorical effects[1] of your stories? You won’t have enough room to address this in detail, but you may want to point out just a few anticipated effects.
• Will your method of focalisation or temporal arrangement change after each pass?
• What types of stories will you be producing for Pass 2 through Pass 4? Will you be continuing the same story throughout, or devising new stories for each pass? Each approach has its benefits and disadvantages, so consider your strategy carefully.
• What do you anticipate the challenges will be in this project? How are you planning to deal with them?

Your proposal grade will count as one of the six short assignments for this course. Your proposal should be in the neighborhood of 350 to 500 words in length, and should be both posted to your student blog and uploaded using the WebCT Submit Assignment mechanism.

Proposal Grading Rubric (Out of Ten Points):

__ / 5 Completeness (includes all required elements and meets length requirements)
__ / 3 Quality of Proposal (engaging, thoughtful, and creative)
__ / 2 Mechanics and Grammar (well-written with no spelling errors; syntactically correct)

[1] See the “Other Useful Sites” section of our course blog for a link to Paul Newall’s introductory essay on rhetoric.

Here is a copy of the full Transmedia Story Assignment (PDF). You’ll likely want to reference this document as you prepare your proposal (and this assignment description is also included in that PDF file).

As always, let me know if you have any questions! Assignment 2 is due to your personal blog and to be uploaded to WebCT on 5/27 by 11:55PM.

Linking your Blog

Hi Everyone,

There are still a few questions about linking your blog to the course Wiki, so I’m adding some detailed instructions here. If you managed to do it on your own, fantastic! Pat yourself on the back and have a mocha. If not, read on, and don’t despair — once you figure out the Wiki, it’s a piece of cake.

First, you should realize that you are NOT linking your blog to the main transmedia blog (where you are currently reading this message). This blog is set up so that only I can post and link directly to it (though I encourage you to comment as much as you like on both this blog and the blogs of your classmates). I am, however, manually adding links to the student blogs in batches as they are added to our course Wiki. The Wiki is editable by the entire course community, so all of our shared documents and course modules will be housed there. We’ll use this blog for announcements and assignments and your student blogs will be used for your writing assignments. So, if you don’t see a link to your blog on the transmedia hub blog, that just means I haven’t added it yet. It should be linked within 48 hours of you posting the link to the Wiki, though.

Now, step by step instructions for adding a link to your blog from our course Wiki (which I ask you to do in assignment one):

1. Copy the URL of your student blog from the address bar of your browser with your main blog page loaded.
2. Find the blog password from my email of 5/11. Write down the password as you’ll need it to edit the Wiki.
3. Visit our course Wiki at http://transmedia.pbwiki.com/.
4. Log in to the Wiki if you are not already logged in.
5. Click on the “sidebar” link on the right hand side of the screen to display the Wiki sidebar
6. Click on the “edit” link at the bottom of the sidebar to bring up the GUI editing interface
7. Position your cursor after the last item in the bulleted list of links. Hit ENTER to advance to a new line.
8. Use the link tool to add a link to your blog. Choose “URL” as link type.
9. Paste the URL you copied in step 1 into the URL field of the GUI pop-up window. Provide a descriptive name for your blog that matches the format used by other students (or, you can choose to use an alias).

That’s it! Now you get a mocha, too. Let me know if you have any questions about this process.