At Jim Brown's suggestion, I'm posting a link here to an assignment that he and Rodney helped me develop for my RHE 309K class. The assignment uses MySpace as the forum for the students' first submission of their second essay. For the present unit of my class on counterculture rhetoric, we're reading a book that critiques countercultures. I wanted an assignment that would require students to evaluate the book's argument. To add another level to the assignment, I am requiring students to take on the persona of one person associated with a counterculture. As we're reading the book, each student will create and maintain a MySpace page as that person (e.g., Abbie Hoffman, David Horowitz, Jello Biafra, etc.). They will do everything that people do on MySpace to express their personalities (and, as a non-MySpace user, I'll be learning very quickly about how that is done, and I'll keep a page myself as Norman Mailer), and they will also be blogging responses to the book on their pages. Their first submission will consist of these daily responses and the page as a whole, plus a short write-up explaining their intentions behind the page. For the second submission they'll take the ideas generated through this MySpace assignment and "translate" them into traditional essay form (5-7 pages).

Here is the assignment. It's very new territory for me, but I think it has a good chance of succeeding. I'll try to post updates as the project progresses.