Invention Mobs

Project I: Invention Mobs

The goal of an invention mob is to put a creative idea into action that brings people together. The project must be collaborative in nature, incorporating not only the ideas and contributions of the group members, but of strangers in the community as well.

Objectives

Demonstrate rhetorical awareness of audience and purpose in your appeals for community participation.
Demonstrate ability to design and implement a large-scale creative project.
Develop process-oriented skills in your attention to (re)vision and self-documentation.
Demonstrate facility with multimodal forms of communication.
Learn to work effectively and creatively with co-collaborators.

Process & Production

As a group, engage in the following activities. [The examples in brackets refer to Ze Frank’s Chillout song.]

  1. Identify a social issue on campus that you want to address. Share your concept with 2-3 other people, and as a group, devise an idea for confronting the issue. This idea should consist of a creative artifact, such as a song, skit, or story. [For example, Laura appeals to Ze Frank to write a song to help her through her anxiety.]
  2. Invite an audience to contribute a simple element to your artifact, such as a voice recording, drawing, or photograph. [For example, Ze Frank invites people to contribute to the chorus of his song.]
  3. Synthesize these contributions into a single creative artifact. This artifact should represent a possible solution to your problem, while at the same time representing the collective voices of strangers. [For example, Ze Frank edits together the chorus of voices into the “Chillout” song.]
  4. Document the creative and collaborative processes that emerge and produce a multimodal narrative to accompany your creative artifact. [For example, Ze Frank produces a narrative of his emails and recordings that precedes the final composition of his song.]
As individuals, write a reflective essay on the invention mob activity: 1500 words. This essay genre is also known as a Statement of Goals and Choices (SOGC, Jody Shipka). These are some additional questions to consider as you write your essay:

  1. Describe your goals for this project. What, specifically, is this piece trying to accomplish–above and beyond satisfying the minimum requirements outlined in the task description? In other words, what work does, or might, this piece do? For whom? In what contexts?
  2. What specific rhetorical, material, methodological, and technological choices did you make in service of accomplishing the goal(s) articulated above? Catalog, as well, choices that you might not have consciously made, those that were made for you when you opted to work with certain genres, materials, and technologies.
  3. Why did you end up pursuing this plan as opposed to the others you came up with? How did the various choices listed above allow you to accomplish things that other sets or combinations of choices would not have?
  4. What writing skills did you use during the course of this project? What can you do better now than you could do before? How has your thinking about writing changed or grown during the course of this project?
  5. Detail all the actors, human and non-human, that played a role in helping you to accomplish this task.

(Source: Adapted from Jody Shipka by Laura Guill

Outcomes
During this activity, you will have worked collaboratively with teammates to put rhetoric into action in the community. As a group, you will submit a final creative product that showcases the individual contributions to your work. In your reflective essay, you will demonstrate awareness of specific elements in rhetoric and composition.

Assessment
Your group will be evaluated on how well you perform in the following areas: project vision, audience appeals, product presentation, and process awareness. Your individual essay will be evaluated based on its demonstration of rhetorical awareness.

Student Examples:

 

For a sample narrative, see the blog kept by the What’s Your Food crew.