Kairos

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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

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.