I'm not entering into the Great Book Order Controversy of 2006 here, just providing an FYI:

If you ordered books via the ICaP website's online order form (as numerous emails requested we do), then your book order has been placed with Borders. When your students are asking where to purchase their texts, you'll need to send them there (unless you choose to place another order with a different bookstore and/or encourage online shopping).

"Hotel Rwanda" spurred some very interesting class discussions. Confronted with a subject they knew little about, the students were unable to rely of pre-formed opinions handed down from Ma-and-Pa or Fox News or high school classmates, and instead had to grapple with forming their own ideas. There was real critical thinking going on in my classroom ... I was near-giddy with excitement!

This week, they begin work on their Visual Rhetoric Projects, the structure and content of which they will then justify in Essay #2. As always, assignment sheets will be posted on my child page of "106 Mat

On Wednesday, I will be giving each of my students a grade report, indicating their performance on the five assignments thus far, their participation (whether "excellent" "acceptable" or "needs improvement"), and their absences. Putting these together, I was pleased to discover that the majority of my class is currently earning As and Bs (with one C and two distressing Fs thrown in there).

We then begin a series of linked projects - the Annotated Bibliography, the Visual Rhetoric Project, and Essay #2 - which I have chosen to center around the broad topic of "Africa and Advocacy". Inspired by my students' total lack of background for the game "Darfur Is Dying" during the second week of class, this next unit will begin with a brainstorming exercise that (hopefully) will illuminate the common misperceptions held (and fostered by the media) among people in the U.S. toward Africa (accomplished by asking students to list what things they associate with the word "Europe" versus the word "Africa" and then analyzing these lists).

This week, Mechanical Engineering prof. Dr. French will be speaking to my science-heads about writing in the sciences.

Our discussions this week - and their assignment, due Friday - will focus on rhetorical strategies for developing/presenting identity. The completed assignment sheet will be posted on my child page of "106 Materials".

My assignment design for Essay #1 confused some of my students. They were prepared to write a position paper on a controversial topic when I explained that I was actually asking them to write about source evaluation (strategies, arrangement, etc.). To remedy this confusion, we created a skeleton outline of the essay as a class.

This week, I will continue a discussion of source evaluation and citation. The final draft of Essay #1 is due on Friday, 09.29.06. Also on Friday, we will begin to talk about RUG's Chapter 2, rhetoric as a means of developing personal identity/ethos, and my version of the Portrait Playlist assignment (to be due the following Friday, right before October Break).

I'm currently grading Response Paper #2: Profiles with a Purpose, in which I had my students describe/justify three different Facebook/MySpace/etc. profiles with respect to three distinct audiences. Though there are still plenty of issues that plague their individual responses, overall, I'm witnessing a noticeable improvement in organization (i.e. the presentation is somewhat more logical, more thought-out, this time around).

This week, we begin preparation work for their first 3-5 page essay. (The assignment sheet will be posted under "106 Materials" on my child page.) I asked each of the students to be thinking about a "controversial" issue this weekend: one that is contemporarily relevant for which they do not already claim an impassioned position. (I did declare a few topics off-limits because they are far too broad for the intended assignment, among them: legal abortion, same-sex marriage, capital punishment, the legal drinking age, the "War on Terror", and the Iraq War.)

Forget genocide in Darfur and U.S. Senate reports about the frighteningly dubious nature of Iraq War justifications: seemingly the most life-shattering controversy in my students' lives is the newly-rolled-out "News Feed" feature on Facebook.com. Since they're all willing to talk about it (and it even made the front section of the illustrious JOURNAL AND COURIER on Friday), we've spent some class time discussing issues of online privacy (or the - sometimes voluntarily pursued - lack thereof), primary and secondary audiences, and networking profiles as advocacy tools. On Tuesday (our computer period), I plan to show the class a wide variety of Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster profiles that are used by politicians, rock bands, movie stars, etc.

This may seem like a rather disjointed response to Dennis Baron's article "From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technology": it encompasses talk of chimpanzees, screenwriting software, and Shakespeare. These are, however, a few thoughts that my brain spun off from the text.

First, the chimps. Baron's take on the history of literary technology got this former undergrad anthro minor recalling an interesting tale that still sticks with me. Just two or so years ago, a group of primatologists set up a fleet of video cams in the jungles of West Africa and were able to observe previously undocumented tool usage by chimpanzees. The chimps were fashioning both hammer- and straw-like utensils from sticks and using them to smash and suck ants (their food) from trees and other ant homes. The human observers even noticed chimps saving these sticks for later use and carrying them from place to place as their populations moved about the jungles. These observations blew some theorists in anthropology fields away. It was previously thought that apes (and all other tool-using, non-human creatures) relied only immediately available materials; it was rarely considered that they could form complex, premeditated toolkits and production-and-usage processes.