You’ve heard me talk about the Excellence in Communication Certificate (ECC) a couple of times now in class.  As the semester ends, we’re encouraging interested RCL students to sign up for the program now.  If you’re a Paterno Fellow Aspirant, or if you plan on having a major or minor in the College of the Liberal Arts I strongly encourage you to sign up.

You’re more than welcome to put me down as your preference for ECC adviser–I’d love to stay connected with you for the rest of your time at Penn State!  But if you feel like you’d rather get some feedback from someone else, I completely understand.  (And I won’t be checking up on who is assigned to other advisers, so no need to worry about any awkwardness should you choose to go elsewhere.)

So what does “signing up” mean?  Essentially, it simply means you’ll be assigned an adviser to walk you through the process, and will receive occasional emails–perhaps once a semester–updating you on changes to the program.  You’ll also have the opportunity to meet with your ECC adviser to discuss your work at any point until submission.  (Submission is usually second semester junior year or first semester senior year.)  Other than access to an adviser, the benefit of registering now is that you’ll stay updated on the program, which can help keep it on your radar.

So I encourage you to read more about the ECC program, or to sign up at the link below:

Sign up here!

You know by know that when it comes to grades, I’m delightfully anachronistic.  (Or frustrating, depending on your perspective.)  Bottom line, I don’t use ANGEL for grades, because while it does points well, it doesn’t do letter grades well.  So here are some options:

Option 1: Calculate a weighted average

I spoke last semester about how to calculate your grade manually, and the same sort of method–breaking things into 5% chunks to get a weighted average–works well with the assignments this semester, too.  (Earning a B on your TIB essay (15% of final grade) would be three chunks of 3.0, and an A- on your in-class deliberation analysis (10% of final grade) would be two chunks of 3.67.  Add up all the scores 3+3+3+3.67+3.67+… and divide by the total number of chunks.)  You have scores back for ten chunks so far, and could probably accurately estimate your grades for participation, blog completion, and blog quality–bringing you to fifteen total chunks.

Option 2: Estimate grades via a spreadsheet

Too much arithmetic for you?  You can also play around with the spreadsheet I use, although it’ll require you to estimate all of your remaining grades for it to work; feel free to take a look.  Some explanation: you’ll need to enter letter grades on the left side, and find your score all the way to the right.  Note that grades need to be entered exactly as referenced in C39 to C56.  So “C/C+” is correct, but “C+/C” is not, and “B” is correct, but “B ” is not (extra space).

Let me know if you have any questions.

Some of you wanted to check out last year’s ePortfolios, so I thought I’d post the link here:

http://sites.psu.edu/rcl1213/student-blogs/

You can click on P+P next to each person’s name, and their most recent post should have a link to the portfolio.  FYI: They are of varying degrees of awesomeness, but most are really quite good.

It’s not a pretty post, but here are all the projects we covered in class today:

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/04/06/artists-install-massive-poster-of-childs-face-in-pakistan-field-to-shame-drone-operators/

I’ve posted this before, but this PDF from Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL) is probably the most succinct and helpful document on the MLA, APA, and Chicago citation styles.  The discussion of online sources starts on page 4, and the examples of in-text citation start on page 7.  Even glancing through to note what gets prioritized should give you a better sense of the main differences between these styles, and the rhetorical goals they’re trying to achieve.  (Note that some styles, for instance, don’t require URLs of web resources.)

Sure, you could use EasyBib, or BibMe, or CitationMachine, but let me encourage you to try to actually understand what’s going on with citations, rather than relying on something else to guess as to what’s most relevant.  (Think of it as actually learning how to get somewhere, vs blindly following GPS.)  These resources sometimes return odd (wrong) results, too, so it’s worth knowing how to double-check.

If you’re ever stuck with something unusual, just typing it into a search engine should help you out.  Try “MLA interview” or “Chicago citation pamphlet” to see how easy it is to track down oddball sources.