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Requirements

Paper/Project

Some students expanded their blog posts, their core concept videos, and their class discussion presentations into term paper projects. Some took on altogether different material. It was important for the assignment description to be open-ended. Students could compose traditional or multimodal texts for their projects. What follows are their projects and abstracts. Students presented their abstracts and outlines as their final. Note the variety of media types used to present this work. As you scan through their work, notice too how each is an attempt to do what Socrates is quoted as saying in Plato's Phaedrus:

A man must know the truth about all the particular things of which he speaks or writes, and must be able to define everything separately; then when he has defined them, he must know how to divide them by classes until further division is impossible: and in the same way he must understand the nature of the soul, must find out the class of speech adapted to each nature, and must arrange and adorn his discourse accordingly, offering to the complex soul elaborate and harmonious discourses, and simple talks to the simple soul. Until he has attained to all this, he will not be able to speak by the method of art, so far as speech can be controlled by method, either for purposes of instruction or of persuasion. (p.142)
The Phaedrus is persuasive, as Jeff Rice (2000) explained in his exploration of Robert Coover's ideas about our secondary orality world moving beyond a golden age of text. Rice's "Literary hypertext" is an argument, like Plato's in the Phaedrus, against a new form of technology: writing. Plato was immersed in an ontological shift from oral to literate delivery systems. We are experiencing another shift, from textual literacy to synchronized media delivery, and our teaching needs to prepare students to make sense of how meaning is made using new media in their lives. In order to placeshift connections between the course and their contemporary applications, students, ironically, must first break down core definitions in order to understand the harmonious ways the pieces fit back together. Each paper and project works in this fashion:

In the last few years, a number of texts on the end and future of composition and higher education and educational and technological theory have raised the general consciousness about the need for a different sort of education. Consider Bain (2004); Bok (2005); Newman, Courturier, and Scurry (2004); and Smit (2004), for instance. Some say higher education should be more fiscally responsible, should increase learning outcomes and measurements, and should move the onus of responsibility from the student to the teacher. Perhaps each of these things are true. Re-read the titles of these students' projects. Each sequences a core classical concept with a specific contemporary application. These papers demonstrate ways in which the concepts of the course have shifted from their place as higher education content to real-world praxis. My strategic plan for this course in Classical Rhetoric--moving course content through selection and specificity, applying public purpose, providing important choices, giving focus and coherence, sharing, incoporating dynamism, including some entrepreneurism and re-tooling of artifacts produced, and emphasizing collaboration--is the outline Frank Newman, Lara Couturier, and Jamie Scurry provide in The Future of Higher Education: Rhetoric, Reality, and the Risks of the Market (2004). They share these questions: "How can the university or college move from rhetoric to action? What obstacles, both internal and external, stand in the way? What resources are required to succeed?" (p.208). While there are large, infrastructure questions, courses designed to placeshift the content so important to both teacher and student to make world experience the institution are a start.

 

    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