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Multimodal

Words in Motion: Kairos and Kinetic Typography

Kinetic Typography

Kinetic typography is an animation technique that allows writers to mix text and motion. Students will take part of a speech or a piece of dialogue and animate it, carefully considering how they might visually enforce and/or subvert the text's underlying themes.

Using Prezi for Outlining Papers

Students will synthesize their own rhetorical analysis with background research on their selected controversies using the visual-spatial format mimicked by Prezi's software.

Video Remixing with Jon Stewart

Official Portrait of Mitch McConnell

The assignment introduces students to some very basic video editing techniques (cutting clips, detaching audio, inserting new audio) and gets them thinking about how the visual and sound channel in a video composition play together to create rhetorical effect. It's also fun as hell.

Facilitating Multimedia Composition

YouTube Video page for the Disability POP Culture channel; it shows the images and lengths of eight videos. We also see the titles for the four videos in the first row; they are titled "Obesity in America," "Voices in Me" by Jamie Smith, "Changing Lives Through the Power of Sports," "Rethinking Personality Disorder and Labels," 3:26; an image of Sarah Palin sitting on a couch gesturing for a video 2:37 minutes long, an image of a blind character on "Pretty Little Liars" for a video 6:02 minutes long; more

This lesson helped students begin composing their final rhetoric assignment: a Multimedia Argument Project (MAP). I encouraged students to work with each other during the planning process and to collaborate with one another as they developed their digital literacy skills.

Practicing Visual Invention

Kitten sleeping on a book with TL; DR written at the bottom

This in-class assignment asks students to construct a visual version of a written or spoken argument. By asking students to first translate an existing argument into a visual form, the assignment eases students into processes of visual invention to prepare them for a more substantive multimodal composition. 

Reading Text in Context

This in-class exercise encourages students to explore context for texts they are analyzing (rather than receiving such context from direct instruction) and then use visualization software in order to present their findings to their classmates.

Teaching Context with Album Covers

Image of the Talking Heads album cover for "Remain in the Light"

This lesson plan uses album covers and music to help students (1) utilize vocabulary and (2) consider the importance of context in rhetorical analysis.

Compiling Context with Digitized Periodicals

The National Era - 1 April 1852

Students examine and manipulate digitized page images in order to consider the presentation of serialized texts. “Compiling Context” is a versatile introduction to periodical print culture suitable for literature and rhetoric courses. 

Shifting Focus from Content to Medium

an illustration of a tv with "the message" written on the screen.

Using various records of the Hindenburg disaster, this assignment encourages students to engage with medium over content, especially in terms of literary studies.  

Student Digital Activism as Rhetorical Advocacy/Analysis

Social media logos juxtaposed with solidarity fists

This assignment challenges students to become digital activists/advocates for a cause of their choosing, and aids them in developing a portfolio of work in the service of that cause.

Writing Images as a Means to Writing with Images

Students work in the visual medium to explore dimensions of associative image logic they can use in their persuasive written compositions. Ideally, the outcome will be a guiding image which helps arrange and focus their composition.

Podcast/Paper: Having Students Do the Same Assignment in 2 Media

I have my students complete their first major assignment in two forms: (1) An individual 3-page paper and (2) a 5-6 minute group podcast. In both, they describe a text and situate it in historical context.

Agonistic Debate on a Course Blog

Students break up into two groups to engage in agonistic debate regarding an issue in an assigned reading in the course.

Creating Visual Models of Rhetorical Concepts with Adobe Illustrator

I’ve often found that writing about rhetorical concepts and theories only takes students so far. This assignment allows students to create concrete visual representations of concepts and theories in order to approach and think through them in a different manner.

Color-coding Revision - Visualizing the Process

students use crayons to visually distinguish between elements of their papers

Following a detailed set of instructions, students use crayons (or other multi-colored writing utensils) to visually distinguish between certain elements of their papers. The result is a colorful paper that visually demarcates areas of text that may require revision.

Mapping a Controversy Using Dipity Timelines

Students map the sources from a controversy they have researched

In this lesson, students created Dipity timelines that allow them to integrate multi-media content into a temporal-sequential order.  Taking the sources from their first essay, students reflect on the benefits of the multimedia/chronological presentation.

Translating an Essay Into an Infographic

Students create infographic focusing on the interrelation of ideas

For this assignment students use Photoshop to create a visual depiction or information graphic (infographic) of an essay. This infographic will focus on the interrelation and visual communication of ideas rather than statistics (as in traditional/popular infographics). 

Google Mapping Travel Narratives: Lolita

Students use Google mapping software to track the characters' journey jo

This assignment asks students to engage in an uncommon form of literary analysis, where the goal is to determine the significance of location and travel in the novel. The entire class collaborates in creating a Google map of all of the places that Humbert Humbert travels to in Lolita.

Mapping Memorials: Research and Public Advocacy on Campus

Chavez statue on UT Austin campus

Through this assignment, students learn to close-read (critique) monuments on campus and consider the rhetorical nature of memory.

Editing Poetry: Manuscript to Printed Page

Manuscripts offer an opportunity to discuss editorial decisions.

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.

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