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Requirements

Lead Class Discussion

Often, complex material is best learned through its teaching. The saying "you have to teach it in order to learn it" is very much the case with classical rhetoric. Core concepts need to be applied in these commonplaces at a distance. My students self-selected specific readings to lead. Most created PowerPoint Presentations that were pushed through the MOO, and as Don Langham (1994) wrote in "The Common Place MOO: Orality and Literacy in Virtual Reality," the combination of synchronous chat with pushing a variety of media types through MOO is indeed an example of electracy and a "forerunner of technology that [provides] the sort of structured environment needed for the 'common place' of civilized society." Here are my sophists' discussion-leading presentations:

Introducing a streaming server into the infrastructure of a course offered at a distance, for the students' composing and presentation use as well as the teacher's use, both "rupture[s] and create[s] possibilities" (DeVoss, Cushman, & Grabill, 2005, p. 36). Because of the technology as well as because of the emphasis of the course and learning environment, the compositions that students produced were more declarative in nature than traditional graduate student presentations. As Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Ellen Cushman, and Jeff Grabill (2005) pointed out in a recent issue of College Composition and Communication, "Infrastructural issues have an impact, literally, on the space of the writing classroom and what happens there, and they do so in ways both visible and invisible. [...] [N]ew-media teachers and students need to be able to account for the complex interrelationships of material, technical, discursive, institutional, and cultural systems" (pp. 36-37). The new place created by electracy and the embedded application of classical core concept videos as student-led discussions are impacted by technological infrastructure. And, similar to kairos--saying the right thing in the right amount at the right times--DeVoss, Cushman, and Grabill pointed out, infrastructures can be thought of as the when rather than the where. The metaphysical commonplace is placeshifting, and the importance is less based on place in the modern sense than it is situation in the classical sense.

Kairos is an ethical and an aesthetic concept in Plato. The aesthetics are based upon principles of harmony, symmetry, and meature. The ethics are based on aesthetics, justice, and truth. Phillip Sipiora and James Baumlin (2002) related Doro Levi's ideas about kairos this way: "Justice requires that citizens establish, within themselves, a harmony mirroring (and supporting) just relations within the state; thus, individuals must connect together the many conflicting elements of which they are made into a state of health or inner harmony" (p.5). Kairos, as we see in Against the Sophists, is perhaps the most important characteristic of effective rhetorical discourse. Teachers who create assignments that fail to consider the right time or give room for appropriate adjustment to any rhetorical situation fail their students. Carolyn Eriksen Hill (2002) called this type of teaching "pythagorean pedagogy."

 

    andragogy
      -noun
      the study of the teaching of adult learners

    datagogy
      -noun
      the study of the use of data to administer and teach in holistic and systemic ways

    post-process pedagogy
      -noun
      the theory that writing is more of an activity than a body of knowledge. Writing is public; writing is interpretive; and writing is situated

    Slingbox
      -noun
      a device that enables consumers to watch their cable, satellite, or digital video programming through any Internet-connected device