Please join members of the Digital Writing & Research Lab for the 2017 Spring Digital Pedagogy Showcase. What: A presentation of digital lesson plans and assignments, designed for writing courses and curricula by members of the Digital Writing & Research Lab. Pizza and beverages will be provided. Where: UNB 4.224 (Asian Cultures Room, Student Union) When: Friday, April 28, 1:30PM – 3:30PM Why: The incorporation of digital materials will strengthen any teaching portfolio, whether you’re applying for a teaching award …
Serial Exposition
Dr. Nathaniel Rivers of Saint Louis University gave a talk on March 22, 2017 in the DWRL. His talk built on Dr. Casey Boyle’s article “Writing and Rhetoric and/as Posthuman Practice” in College English. This video reiterates that talk. Serial Exposition from DWRL on Vimeo.
Bibliography Management
In high school, works cited pages always gave me pause. I would print the specifications of the bibliography style and take great care not to misplace a period or a comma. Invariably, it took me far longer than I expected. When I was in college, I started to use sites like Easybib. But by then, I had a lot more material to review and it wasn’t as simple as producing a works cited page. What I needed was an easier …
Lesson Plan: Digital Reproduction
In 1935 Walter Benjamin wrote, “Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes.” This assignment musses with his assertion by creating a digital, “academic,” work of art. It asks students to produce an audio recording of his article “The Work of …
Lesson Plan: Virtual Reality Apps
Though the public has expressed interest in the commercial possibilities of Virtual Reality (VR) apps, less attention has been paid to VR’s educational value. This lesson plan allows students to explore what VR has to offer in music, art, and science. The question here is, of course, how does VR enhance the study of these diverse subjects? By offering a three dimensional perspective, students may reconceptualize music, art, and science as well as brainstorm how technology may transform education. Students …
Lesson Plan: Perspective API – Rhetorical Metadata, Pathos, and the Future of Internet Moderators
Teaching students how to analyze an argument is no simple task, as rhetorical analysis exists on a spectrum of complexity ranging from the most commonly encountered modes of persuasion, to analytical frameworks that push the definition of “rhetorical action” to its limit and beyond. What this disparity demonstrates is that rhetoric is generative, inventional, it stipulates through rhetorical action its own limits, it defines itself through its own capacities. Moving students from summary to analysis in Unit 2, students are …
Lesson Plan: Infographics – Digital, Visual Stories
Both infographics and data visualization are tools to visually represent data. They make it easier for audiences to grasp difficult concepts by communicating meaning through a visual summary. It is the level of narration where the forms diverge: data visualization will employ algorithms to directly represent vast quantities of data and make interpretation simpler, whereas infographics are constructed by a human to tell a story about the data–to summarize its context, its meaning, and its implications through designed elements. Even …
Lesson Plan: Transforming Data Visualizations
Contemporary rhetorical theory privileges a view of rhetoric as dynamic, where texts circulate both spatially and temporally to myriad effects. For instance, in her influential article “Unframing Models of Public Distribution,” Jenny Rice pushes against a view of rhetoric as contained and static, arguing instead that the “rhetorical situation is part of . . . an ongoing social flux” and that rhetorics “evolve in aparallel ways” (9, 14) as they circulate. Mary Queen, in “Transnational Feminist Rhetorics in a Digital …
Lesson Plan: Visualizing and Analyzing Terministic Screens with Voyant
When instructors teach rhetorical or textual analysis that focuses on how word choice frames arguments and how audiences might interpret texts, it often relies on a singular text with an assignment that asks students to analyze how the author’s choice of words, terms, or metaphors influence its interpretation. Yet this type of analysis is limited because it doesn’t account for how word choice excludes other words, thus affecting a text’s interpretation. As Kenneth Burke reminds us in “Terministic Screens”: “Even …
