Week Ahead: 3

	1/28		Sketch 1: Avatar
3	1/30	Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, ch 1 (library reserves link)
	2/1	Understanding Rhetoric, issue 1 “Why Rhetoric?”	Literacy Narrative
	2/4		Sketch 2: Visual Note Taking

By sometime Sunday night, create your square avatar image for sketch 1, insert it into a post and publish it. If you’d given me the URL for your course site with a comment here as of Saturday morning, then your site is currently set to syndicate here (which means that within a few minutes after you publish your post, it should automagically republish there). As y’all publish your avatars, I’ll update the list of student sites.

You should also begin working on your literacy narratives, which should be published before we meet as a class on Thursday (there will be opportunities for revision).

Come to class on Tuesday having read the first chapter of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. There are now a number of scholars, critics, and writers doing work on comics, but for a long time it was just McCloud creating books like this one. We’ll spend some time in class debating McCloud’s definitions. Also on Tuesday, we’ll discuss the literacy narratives a bit and, now that syndication is working, we’ll go over how pages and posts work and how syndication functions for you to “turn in” your projects. And we’ll spend a few minutes on Creative Commons licensing.

On Thursday, we’ll spend a lot of class working with the literacy narratives you will have published by then. We’ll also discuss “Why Rhetoric?” and, if there’s time, take a look at a couple of brief examples of graphic novel memoirs in advance of starting Maus.

Then over the weekend, you’ll transform one set of notes from one of your classes this week into visual notes for your second sketch assignment.