A case study on audience awareness was included in Week 1, and you were asked to prepare a list of questions. Now invent a project of your own (an original idea) for promotion to a mixed audience.

Outline:

a) a plan for presenting the information (in no more than 150 words).

b) a rationale explaining how awareness of audience and sociocultural considerations influence your choices in packaging the information (again, in no more than 150 words).

Present these two contributions in a single posting to the Discussion Forum as the basis for discussion. Please comment on the contributions of others, making comparisons as they emerge. You will be assessed in terms of the quality of your proposed project, your interaction with others and the use you make of readings and references. Please ensure that you don't exceed a total of 6 discussion messages overall (i.e. about 2 per week, apart from your initial posting).

Design a home page for a community organization. It must be an original idea and design. The home page should provide essential information about the organization and its work, as well as ready access to its newsletter and other resources. Decide what needs to go on the home page, how to project the nature of the site, and how to facilitate users’ search for information.

You should

1. create a mockup of the home page, its layout and contents, using Word or any design or web authoring tool you have access to.
2. provide a rationale of up to 500 words on the design aims and decisions that are realized in the home page.

You are not expected to demonstrate advanced design skills. Your mock-up really amounts to a design brief for a professional technician; it will be assessed according to usability principles, not appearance.

The second discussion focuses on ethical issues in editing and publishing. It is designed to embrace questions such as  selection and withholding of sensitive information, the prepublication review process, ethical issues raised by the content of the publication and its promotion, and the responsibilities of the editor and author.

Your input to the Bulletin Board discussion should consist of an actual scenario which poses ethical questions of these or other kinds, the more complex the better. The scenario should be posted in a description of about 150 words, followed by dot points identifying some of the ethical issues. It would be good not to declare your own position until there has been at least one response to your submission, but you should supply a response to others’ feedback at some point.

As usual, you’re encouraged to respond to the inputs of others, taking up one issue at a time. You will be assessed on the content of your basic input to the discussion, the quality of your interaction with others and the use you make of readings and references. We expect no more than two or three messages per week and ask you to try to respect the word limit.

Your task is to write an essay of around 2000 words on the future of editing in  the 21st century.  To anchor it, you should select one of the texts provided that makes predictions about the future of publishing, and the editor's role within it - or use a text of your own choosing, provided it is at least 10 years old. You should examine to what extent your source text's predictions have turned out to be accurate, and make predictions of your own based on evidence from current trends. Your discussion will look at general issues, but should also choose one or two specific areas of publishing, such as newspapers, magazines, trade books, education, academic publishing etc., as a focus for your comments.