More on Twine

After my last post on building an entire course around the creation of interactive digital texts, Jason Enia asked if I had additional materials to share. Here they are:

The first-year seminars, of which this course is but one example, are part of my university’s recently-revised general education curriculum.  The following learning outcomes are specified for the seminars:

• Utilize the liberal arts skills to analyze and evaluate significant texts and investigate mathematical and scientific processes.
• Speak about significant issues in a cogent, analytical, and persuasive manner.
• Write about significant issues in a cogent, analytical, and persuasive manner.

At the end of the semester, I am expected to assess students’ work on the course’s final Twine text against these learning outcomes with this rubric. I don’t use this rubric for grading. Instead, as I mention in my previous post, student teams grade each other’s work using a different rubric that I’ve designed specifically for this type of assignment.

My syllabus contains these passages:

Course Description

In a disaster, who lives, who dies, and why? This course examines the life and death decision making of individuals who have survived hurricanes, earthquakes, civil war, and genocide. With story-boarding and free software, you will learn how to design digital interactive stories on this subject that evolve according to the decisions made by the reader. The texts that you read and create will allow you to explore ethically complex decision making in high-risk, worst-case environments—the same kinds of situations faced by humanitarian aid workers, diplomats, military personnel, and, all too frequently, ordinary individuals.

Course Objectives

• Practice recognizing and creating thesis statements.
• Analyze arguments.
• Create and communicate persuasive, evidence-based narratives orally and in writing.
• Reflect on different cultures by examining biographical depictions of historical events.
• Evaluate the work of oneself and others.

I ensure that students steadily read the book associated with each Twine with frequent but brief writing assignments.

That is basically everything — anything else specific to the Twine process is described in my last post.