Assignment #4

TED Talk

The IMRAD Essay (and its variation) are often composed by experts (or those learning to be experts) for other experts. We rarely see this format used to communicate with the general public. Instead, research, like the research you did for the IMRAD Essay, often gets presented in a less academic way (e.g., the sources that you use for popular sources in your Literature Review) to make it more accessible to many audiences. As a way to help you understand how to communicate the same information to achieve different purposes with different audiences, you will adapt the content of your IMRAD Essay for the genre of a TED Talk. To do this, you will need to develop an understanding of what the expectations for a TED Talk are and who often watches these videos. In addition to the talk, you will compose a statement about how and why you purposely fulfilled and/or violated certain expectations of a TED Talk.

Instructions-Research

In your collaborative teams, for Activity #6: Genre of a TED Talk, you will work together to determine what the generic expectations of a TED Talk are and who they are often trying to speak to.

Using this information, you will want to review your IMRAD essay paying attention to how you want to compose this talk for your audience. Ask yourself questions like...

• what needs to be presented? (Probably a more detailed version of your IMRAD Essay Discussion to illustrate the point you are trying to make)
• what does my audience not need to see? (Probably your research questions and the process you went through to do your research)
• what do I need to add to the presentation of this IMRAD material that will make the talk interesting and help it make sense to someone who has not read my IMRAD Essay?

You are encouraged to outline what you plan to do and say before you start filming.

Instructions-Filming TED Talk

It is understood that few of you, if any of you, will have access to the type of equipment that TED has to produce its talks. Therefore use the best equipment that you do have access to, such as a webcam or a phone or tablet camera. Try to meet as many of the generic expectations as you can. For those expectations that you are not able to meet, discuss your limitations in the statement and explain the decisions you made in light of those limitations.

You will compose a 5-minute TED Talk loosely based upon the content of your IMRAD Essay. Notice that when you watch a TED Talk it is quite different from an IMRAD essay; therefore, you do not want the TED Talk to simply be a reading or brief summary of your IMRAD Essay. To do this would violate the generic expectations of a Ted Talk.

After you film the video, use a program like WeVideo to edit the video to create as clean of a product as you can. However, you can use any video presentation software that you want to. Then make this video publicly available on the web. You can use WeVideo, YouTube, Google, or another video sharing platform. Whichever application you choose, double check that it is publicly available. Students have failed the class because the URL they have sent the instructor did not connect to their video.

Instructions-Statement

You will be asked to write a 750-1000 statement about the decisions that you have made composing this "text" (i.e., the TED Talk). This statement should include...

• the URL to the uploaded TED Talk
• what you see as the purpose of your TED Talk. What do you want your audience to do after they see this text?
• who the intended audience of your text is. What did you do with your TED Talk that appeals to this audience?
• the ways in which you complied with some generic expectations and violated others. Explain the rationale for these decisions.
• how your TED Talk compares to the TED Talks of your team members in terms of meeting generic expectations. This is an opportunity to reflect on the work you did in relation to other's work. The instructor is more interested in learning about how these other TED Talks made you think about your own processes of composing your TED Talk than seeing you critique your peers' work in light of what you did well.

As you write this statement, you will want to reference specific examples from yours and your peers' TED Talks to support the points that you make.

Criteria

Logistic:

• 5-minute TEDTalk
• 750 - 1000 word, single spaced statement
• On April 23, 2018 submit a completed version of just the video to the "TED Talk Link" document in your team folder.
• On April 26, 2018 submit the Statement on the "Student Work" page for "Assignment #5: TED Talk" in the Google Classroom
• 100 points

In addition to the general evaluation criteria, the instructor will be looking for evidence of...

• an understanding of the problem or issue you have chosen
• an understanding of your audience, as determined by your analysis of other TED Talks
• an understanding of how the purpose of a TED Talk differs from the purpose of an IMRAD
• an appropriate persona for a TED Talk as determined by your analysis of other TED Talks and the texts that you experienced about TED Talks
• an ability to explain the decisions that you made in composing your TED Talk, including the limitations that you experienced trying to meet the genre expectations and how you addressed them
• appropriate use of conventions, including MLA, APA, or an appropriate citation formatting