Technology in the Classroom
MOO | Margery Kempe Context | Feminist History | Visual Rhetoric
MOO for The Book of Margery Kempe
A MOO is a virtual "space" that allows to students to interact with one another and with an environment (in this case, a Great Hall) that allows them to explore at will while learning. For the purposes of my class, this MOO allowed students to conduct a class conversation in a different mode--one in which it was, due to the time lag inherent in chat programs, difficult for the more extroverted students to dominate the discussion and possible for quieter to students to participate under the cloak of anonymity. It also displaced me from my role of arbiter, facilitating interactions between the students. And not incidentally, the creation of a virtual medieval space allowed my students to forge a stronger imaginative bond with Margery Kempe's very challenging text.
Margery Kempe--Tradition & Context Presentation
This presentation is a manifestation of my belief in the importance of cultural history for the study of literature. An understanding of the politics, religion, economic conditions, and conditions of daily life is crucial for making a text present and comprehensible for students. This presentation, which is rather dense with information, was the basis of a class presentation, but was also meant to serve as a resource to students outside of class.
Student-Generated
Website on Feminist History
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This website was designed by my Introduction to the Rhetoric of Anglo-American Feminism class as their final project. They designed the layout, which I then adapted to HTML, and wrote the content. This project taught several lessons pertinent to my course: it created a space for the open discussion of feminist issues; it allowed my students to see that the result of their research was an expertise that allowed them to intervene in public discussions of important subjects; and it allowed for a debate over the significance of visual rhetoric in which they had a personal stake.
"Visual Arguments and the Internet"
presentation
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I created this website to help my students start thinking about the elements of visual rhetoric--color, typeface, images, and composition--that they evaluated in their rhetorical analysis papers and that they would later use for their final web-building project. It gives them basic concepts that are useful in design and analysis, while also demonstrating that the strategies of rhetorical analysis are applicable to all texts--written or otherwise--that our culture produces.