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

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):

Matt Barton points us to another instance of teachers getting "YouTube'd." This is something every teacher should probably be aware of.

I only caught about a half hour or so, but the Bill Moyers special "Buying the War" seems like it would be of great use in a rhetoric class. It's essentially an analysis of media coverage during the run up to the war in Iraq. What this means is that focus throughout (or at least what I saw) is on evidence, argumentation, credibility, tone and the like. While much of it is a critique of current journalistic practices, there's a whole lot going on that could be brought into the classroom.

Online Journals and the Writing Classroom

This semester, I decided to try Web Biographies as an instructional aid. When I did, I noticed a marked improvement in my students' quantity—and quality—of writing. Over the years, (as graduate student, and now faculty) I've found that students want new ways to write, and to share what they've written.

Recently, my Nature and Human Values students (it's a course that's unique to the Colorado School of Mines) have been creating online journals for their own writing, and responses to the semester's reading list. The assignment is similar to the traditional paper based reader-response journals that I've asked students to write in the past.