The power of rhetoric lies not just in its analytic or productive capacities, but in its emphasis on pedagogy. If we can build effective theories about how to use and construct digital media for the accomplishment of persuasive enterprises, we can also teach those theories and the rhetorical practices derived from those theories. Classical rhetoric, the starting point of my project, is deeply concerned with teaching; from Protagoras’s insistence that the art of persuasion can be taught to Quintilian’s codification of the pedagogy of classical rhetoric, every explication of rhetorical theory has included a pedagogical foundation. This, too, is why rhetoric is best suited for developing a framework of understanding for digital media. Robert Coover (1999) neatly sums up the importance of rhetoric to digital production and pedagogy: Rhetoric, in this Age of the New Sophists, is still the route to power, but the hypertextual link and all the visual and aural media are now part of its grammar. Like composers, artists, and filmmakers before them, writers will learn to battle through the new tool-learning tasks, or to collaborate with other artists, designers, filmmakers, composers, and the tools themselves will become easier to learn and use and will interact more smoothly with other tools. (n.p.) One of the first projects that I worked on as a graduate student at Michigan State University was an article on teaching digital rhetoric that was produced by a collective that we alternately called DigiRhet.org or DigiRhet.net (I favored the latter, but in our first publication, the attribution is listed as the .org variant). The idea for the formation of the group (and much of the content of our first publication) came from the first Digital Rhetoric graduate course at MSU, taught by Dànielle DeVoss. We published “Teaching Digital Rhetoric: Community, Critical Engagement, and Application” in the spring 2006 issue of Pedagogy (the collective subsequently published “Old+Old+Old=New: A Copyright Manifesto for the Digital World” in the summer 2008 “Manifesto” issue of Kairos, but I was not one of the authors on that project). As the title indicates, our approach to teaching digital rhetoric focused on three key elements that we felt were foundational—understanding and developing a sense of community (as it is engaged both online and in the classroom itself ), a focus on critical engagement with the technologies of production and delivery, and a method for developing facility with the applications that support the production of digital texts. Our approach specifically addresses rhetoric as both analytic and heuristic for production; we argued that “digital rhetoricians must explore both theory and technology; critical engagement alone is just as insufficient as a curricular approach as would be practical application without the provision of tools for understanding how technologies work within social and cultural contexts”(249). While I believe that the DigiRhet framework has value, it is not the only approach to teaching digital rhetoric—other approaches range from teaching multimodal composition and web design from a digital rhetoric perspective to focusing on the theories and methods that constitute the field (aligned with the theories and methods I have described in previous chapters). I have chosen three courses that take different approaches to teaching digital rhetoric to show how these differences might play out depending on whether the focus is on the theories that undergird digital rhetoric or engaging in the development of digital texts using digital rhetoric as a methodology. The courses I have chosen are Sarah Arroyo’s graduate Seminar on Digital Rhetoric, taught in spring 2009 at California State University, Long Beach; Byron Hawk’s undergraduate Advanced Writing—Digital Rhetoric course taught in fall 2010 at the University of South Carolina; and my own undergraduate course on Web Authoring and Design, taught in spring 2011 at George Mason University. These are of course not the only approaches to teaching digital rhetoric, and many other examples are available.

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