Last semester I decided to have students participate in in-class debates instead of having final presentations and it was fantastic. I know of a few other teachers doing this and reporting that this works really well. This is especially true when the variety of possible topics is limited (resulting in mind-numbingly tedious presentation days) and when time is limited (presentations often take three or four classes and debates can be done in two).

For their first paper this semester, each student located an article to summarize in the Opposing Viewpoints database on the library website. I was pleased with the assignment because while the quality and type of articles varied widely, they were all of a similar length and presented similar challenges. I did not receive 20 identical papers, but students did not have to figure out for themselves how to choose an article suited to the assignment.

My students this semester have so far seemed bright and engaged--quite easy to teach and get along with. And, after my agonizing first assignment last semester, I deliberately kept my instructions short and simple, not even giving length or format requirements. Still, the average student has failed to follow the paper assignment directions on 3 separate counts.

People at Iowa State University (one is now at U of Arkansas, Little Rock) have been doing awesome things in writing-across-the-curriculum and communication-across-the-curriculum using simulations and case studies. They've been developing some interesting techno-pedagogies, including a content/course management system that allows instructors to simulate "real" work-world/professional situations. Students take up particular roles and immerse themselves in these simulation-situations, which drive their research and drive them to produce specific kinds of writing.

Check it:
http://144.167.28.49/

I made the following handout for my students as they were preparing to revise their first papers. The handout provides a summary of early revision research, and describes the way in which inexperienced and experienced writers revise. I thought it would be helpful for my students to have an idea of what a successful revision process would look like, and I think that focusing on actual research in this way is a good way to make the point that I'm looking for more than surface revision without seeming too preachy.

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).

I'm currently reading Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition (2004) by Wysocki, Johnson-Eilola, Selfe, and Sirc.

It's an interesting book for anyone who teaches composition because each chapter offers possible assignments that fit various theoretical discussions.

Considering the way we're teaching first-year writing (RHE 306) at UT, one assignment in particular jumped out at me. It's called "Mapping Readings," and it fits really nicely with what we do in the first unit of RHE 306. For those not familiar, the first unit is about "mapping" a controversy. This means figuring out the territory that you as a student/scholar are about to enter into. Who's arguing? Why? What's at stake for these different people/groups? Wysocki's mapping assignment actually has students create a map "using any materials." She lays out the goals of the assignment:

Recently, I attended a workshop on imitation exercises hosted by UT Professors Jorie Woods and Lisa Moore. Dr. Woods shared some imitation exercises used by rhetoricians such as Cicero and Erasmus and then explained how they could be used in contemporary classrooms. I am working on getting an electronic copy of her worksheet to post here.

I just stumbled across a bizarre little video entitled Gimme the Mermaid. It involves a mermaid, a seriously aggressive lawyer, and human figures with cat heads. If you're doing Lessig, like visual rhetoric, and want an ambitious paper prompt, you could ask students to do a rhetorical analysis of it. It's so delightfully bizarre ... it's just begging for explication.

I should also add that it was featured on illegal-art.org.

It's that time again. Classes start on Tues, so what better time than now to try to reshape a syllabus? My experiment having students contribute to and actually write individual Wikipedia entries last semester rasied a lot of interesting issues for me and them. As an instructor, I became very interested in the issues surrounding intellectual property, intellectual collaboration, and how the former informs the latter, especially as students think about their work. A few of them were frustrated by the fact that publishing their work to Wikipedia meant that to a certain extent they were no longer the "author" in the way they conceived of it, and also many of them had their work taken down or worse yet not published to begin with, for a variety of reasons. I'm not repeating the assignment (though it was by far the most popular) for these and other reasons, but it get me thinking seriously about intellectual property issues.