Introductory Writing Course

My class used Twitter for a few general purposes and then for two specific assignments. For our general goals, we used Twitter to share resources among one another and to familiarize ourselves with various conversations that are important to people in the digital humanities.

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.

Students read Orwell's "Politics and the English Language," discuss it in class, and then demonstrate their understanding of Orwell's chief style points through an activity using CritiqueIt, a tool for collaborative composition and peer review. 

By doubling a class text video with another seemingly unrelated video, students learn about how context (or juxtaposition) can affect a text's meaning. 

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.

My students had been studying communities of their choice all semester. For the last unit, I asked them to contribute their perspective on their communities in two ways: first, in a more traditional editorial-length argument, and then through an interactive, procedural text using Inform7.

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.

A five-minute multimedia presentation showcasing skills developed over the entire semester: summary, analysis, and refutation/rebuttal of a position in a student's chosen controversy.

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

Using the free digital timeline website, Dipity, students can organize and annotate their sources chronologically.  This enables students to visualize the sequence of events and better address how particular texts interact with or talk past each other.

Once students in my literature class achieve a basic skill set in textual analysis, I require them to take the reins of the course by providing the class with a blog post on the upcoming reading and presenting their findings to the class.

In this group project, students design a commenting system or other forum/method for conversation within a website, matching the system to the particular rhetorical goals of the site.  Groups present their systems in a presentation and are required to turn in two documents: a visual representation of the conversatio

This assignment focuses on using a visual thesaurus to illustrate the nuanced relationships among words that the list form of the traditional thesaurus glosses over.

Using samples pulled from the popular website, Texts From Last Night, this exercise introduces students to textual analysis in a fun and (most likely) funny way.