Remediation

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.

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. 

Like many things, visual rhetoric is often best learnt by doing. This lesson plan introduces students to video editing using Popcorn Maker, a web-based tool for mashing up online texts.

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

Images on book covers, blurbs or reviews on dust jackets, and publishers’ summaries all provide constructed argumentation about the text within that is designed to provoke an emotional and analytic response.

Designed to facilitate a deeper level of peer review and collaborative learning, this assignment asks students to deliver oral presentations of each others' work and offer constructive commentary on their peer's paper.

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.

This assignment asks students to map out logos with the aid of visualized arguments and, ultimately, to create and explain their own vizualization of a textual argument that helps highlight the elements of logos within that textual argument.

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.

Using the multimedia curation program, Storify, students compose a short writing assignment analyzing an "author's" ethos based on his or her Twitter feed.  This demonstrates the ways in which ethos is cultivated over time and in a variety of different ways.

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.

Students often conceptualize poems as monolithic objects from the past.  This lesson plan helps encourage them to visualize and conceptualize the content and influence of a poem in different registers.

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.

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). 

During the workshop-style lesson, students will learn about the literary and rhetorical aspects of selection and juxtaposition. This assignment introduces students to ways of finding public domain music and audio clips of literary and rhetorical value.

Using procedural, verbal, visual and aural rhetoric, students work in teams on a multimedia presentation that outlines a video game prototype and the ways it makes arguments.

Students conduct oral history interviews, write papers narrating the interviews, and then work in groups to create a multi-segment “radio show."

The infosphere assignment calls on students to identify online sources of information they regularly take in and to create a representative structure for this information. Students must build their own unique infospheres and organize them as they see fit.

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 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.