I caught Bill Moyers the other night and the program was all about analyzing the sorts of arguments are being made by campaign ads. It could be a nice was to talk about visual rhetoric, rhetoric and multimedia (sound and images) and different types of arguments. Link below:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/02292008/profile.html

Saturday morning on NPR's On The Media Brooke Gladstone interviewed Sam Berlow of The Font Bureau Inc. Berlow talked about what the logos used by presidential candidates say about them. This was a really nice piece that might be useful in teaching rhetoric. Here's the link to the podcast and transcript:
http://onthemedia.org/transcripts/2008/02/22/05

Voicethread (thanks to Earth Wide Moth for the link) is an unbelievable way to annotate images with text and sound. This would be a very cool assignment. Check out this example to see how it works (click the play button to hear audio, click the images in the toolbar to navigate to other images):

In the spring, I am helping to pilot a visual rhetoric textbook for the 2nd semester of the First-year Comp sequence. In the past, this course has focused on formal argument via the Toulmin Model and the Rhetorical Triangle. I'd like to maintain as much as I can of the rhetorical focus while bringing visuals into the mix--not as contingent to the verbal, but in synergy; and not purely as objects of analysis, but also as possible inventive/expressive strategies. If anyone has attempted/accomplished this in hir own classes, I'd love to hear how that worked for both teacher and student writers.

Over the course of this semester, a few students have sent me YouTube links - or mentioned them to me - that they feel are relevant to the class topic (in this case, globalization) and class discussions. It certainly seems like a teaching moment. So far, I've been responding individually, but wonder if anyone out there has had similar experiences and if they've been able to take these clips that the students are finding and use them instructively in the classroom.

I’ve posted an annotated list of visual resources that RHE 306k instructors can use in teaching The Devil’s Highway over at viz.

My students often making sweeping statements about "red states" and "blue states" which don't bear any resemblance to reality. The "red vs. blue" maps that the media trot out after each presidential election may be useful representations of how the Electoral College has voted, but they're useless for anything else, and contribute to grossly simplified views of how people vote. So I decided to go look for a "purple" map.

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