I am not sure if we are supposed to read articles assigned for March 22. Anyway, I read them and I am going to blog about it. I think these articles are interesting. In general, they say many things about contemporary art as well as show how we see the world in the age of Internet and how it differs from what used to be before. I liked the idea of postfigurative era. It seems to be true about adults learning from their children, especially in computers and Internet.
Joseph Janangelo demonstrates how new non-linear electronic and media texts can be persuasive. The analysis of them needs to be more complicated. Joseph Cornell’s piece of art is a unity of textual and visual images, and sound. Actually, if to speak about assignments that go beyond traditional printed essays, they already exist and are pretty common. I see PowerPoint presentation as an example of such persuasive hypertext. Does it mean “hypertexts” have already become the part of rhetoric and the part of our lives? It is so I guess, but I do not think they will replace traditional approach to rhetoric.
Actually, these readings can help in creating assignments. I think it is possible to assign a PowerPoint. One of the topics I chose for course plan is television and media. For example, students can make a presentation to support their opinion on how useful useless educational programs are (maybe, particular programs). Their presentation has to be persuasive and not just informative. I think its a good way to learn how to manage text, pictures and sound altogether and remain persuasive.
Another assignment based on our readings I'm thinking about is using stases (Fahnestock and Secor's article). Mere asking a series of basic questions about texts can help students learn how to read analytically. I would ask students to read a text and write a list of questions about the text. Then I would start a discussion, where we would find out questions that everyone asked, some specific rare questions; students would try answering each other's questions and arue their points of view.
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3 comments:
Irina,
I like your idea about assigning students to do powerpoint presentations. That would seem to be something that could fit pretty easily with a longer paper assignment, too.
In addition to powerpoint, imovie (sp?) is able to incorporate sound (via garageband program) and photos really really easily. I just saw a presentation by some folks from the IT program and they created a move of stills w/ soundtrack in ten minutes. It was amazingly simple and yielded really creative results. I'm thinking about using it in my class. Apparently all campus macs have these programs.
Edward Tufte, author of _The Visual Display of Quantitative Information_ and _Beautiful Evidence_, has a thing against Powerpoint, specifically how people use it to present quantitative information. I'll try to dig up the article.
As a brand new user of Powerpoint, I like it fine, although as with hypertext there's a danger of style over substance (actually I think this was Tufte's problem too- though he was dealing with matters of greater import, like Powerpoint presentations that led to space shuttles exploding).
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