In-class Exercise

In this assignment, students learn about the importance of protecting their information and image online, and in turn, take measures to delete themselves from the myraid places where they are visible/vulnerable.

This assignment is purposefully simple because its serves as a diagnostic for students' levels of functional digital literacy in programs like Photoshop and Jing. It also serves to familiarize some students with these programs, and with the processes necessary for maintaining their class blogs.

This is a short assignment using the free text visualization software, Wordle, to help students find keywords for researching their chosen topics.

Students work on transcribing an Emily Dickenson poem from manuscript form into print. Their transcriptions are then compared with each other and with several printed editions of the same poem and used to discuss editorial decisions.

In this assignment, my students used a game-authoring platform called ARIS (Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling) to create augmented reality games based on scenes or passages from novels studied in our course.

In this assignment, students use the free online program Storify to track the life of a meme by combining elements pulled from social and news media sources. 

Students engage with and revise each other's texts using a wiki platform. Allows students to consider the various ways of composing a summary of a single text.

Students consider an ostentacious example of political rhetoric, then consider the other side's analysis of said rhetoric.

For an entire class period, groups of students are tasked with evaluating a short video. Each group is assigned a video and a category of evaluation that they will use to evaluate their assigned video. They will work together to come up with criteria, evidence, and an evaluative claim for their video.

This assignment requires students to think about how the enthymeme might function in practical argument—specifically, in convincing a group of out-of-town visitors to Austin to try one of the local restaurants.

For one class, student groups analyze the use of “utopian” themes in a 1937 Ford Motor Company commercial, then compare this to specific elements of Huxley’s dystopian satire.

This activity asks students to practice rhetorical analysis with reference to Ian Bogost's understanding of "procedural rhetoric." This mode of rhetoric focuses on the ways that procedures, processes, logics, and rules can be expressive and persuasive.

As a conclusion to an online research workshop, students explore the rhetoric of 18th-19th century crime broadsides from the Harvard Law School Library's online collection of crime broadsides.

This user-friendly activity has students do some informal free-writing in response to an educational film, then reflect on their writing using "word cloud" freeware.

This assignment uses Voyeur to analyze word frequencies and word distribution in student writing to help students see the paper’s thesis and how the argument progresses without reading the paper.

RHE 306 group work: Students write short manuals outlining how to use databases (LexisNexis, Infotrac Newsstand, Academic One File, Opposing Viewpoints, Google/Wikipedia).

In this classroom activity, a scholar/expert whose work is on your syllabus visits the classroom via Skype or another conferencing tool.

Even though we use enthymemes in our everyday speech, teaching the concept presents difficulties. By making enthymemes in the interactive fiction design system Inform7, students develop a deep understanding of implied reasoning.