• I thought that both the second short essays and the final were pretty good, and I have to say that I personally feel better about this arrangement than what I’ve done in the past.  What I mean is I think that there are more opportunities for success and better chances for students to learn and engage with this stuff with several shorter projects rather than one big one (e.g., a final “seminar” paper).  If you have thoughts on that, I’d be curious to hear what they are.
• Overall, I thought folks handled the final well.  I don’t make any comments on them, mainly because my goal at this stage is the same as yours:  I want to finish.  But if you have any questions or concerns about the grade on your final or the overall grade for the class, please know that I would be happy to talk with you about it in the winter term.  I am always willing to over your grade and try to explain things as best I can.
• Sooner than later, I’ll be taking down the various comments/posts on the English 505 web site, mostly in preparation for the next time I teach the class, which will likely be in 2012 (I think Derek Mueller is scheduled to teach it in the Fall 2011 term).   So, if there are any comments, posts, etc. that you are particularly interested in keeping in some fashion, go and copy them now.

I think that’s about it.

You’ve been a great group to work with, and I hope you thought the class was as interesting as I did.  I’ll be starting on as the writing program coordinator in January, which means I’ll probably be working with many of you on things like offering advice, programs of study, etc.  And of course, I’m also teaching other classes (English 444 in the winter term), directing projects, and generally hanging around.  So for those of you continuing on (I think that’s all of you, right?), I am sure I will see you again in the new year.

• I haven’t heard much from folks about the final, so I’m going to assume that’s going okay.  Accurate, I hope?  In any event, if you do have any questions or concerns about it, by all means, contact me and ask.  That’s why I get paid the big bucks.
• I just finished commenting on the revisions that folks did of the first projects and posted them back to emuonline, so if you did a revision (and you know who you are!), go ahead and look.  Along these lines, I also just opened up the dropbox for the final.  Up next:  audio comments on your second rhetorical analysis essays.  Which leads me to my next and last point:
• You of course have until Friday to hand in your finals (remember!  5 PM Michigan time on December 17!). When you hand in your Final, I will hand back your second rhetorical analysis with my comments– though I should point out I probably won’t be done commenting on these until Thursday evening, so if you hand in the Final early, you might have to wait a bit.

I think that’s it for now.  Resume your hard work!

I think it’s reasonably straight-forward, but of course, if you’ve got questions or want to talk about it at all here, feel free!

A couple of thoughts to get you going:

• As I mentioned at the beginning of the term and as clear in the syllabus, this final is actually worth a fair amount, 30% of the final grade, or the same as the two short rhetorical analysis essays.  So for those of you who have been in some of my previous classes, the stakes of this final are quite a bit higher than they are for courses like English 516.
• It’s a comprehensive final– everything we’ve read and discussed is fair game.
• I haven’t decided this yet, but the format will probably involve four essay questions, one (or two? I’m not sure) longer questions that everyone has to answer, and two (or three) shorter essay questions where there will be a choice of options.
• Regardless, the length of these essay answers will be strictly enforced and the aim is for preciseness in language (e.g., not a lot of “filler” here) with lots of citations/references to readings.  The long essays will probably be capped at 500 words (about 2 typed pages) and the shorter essays will probably capped at 250 words.
• Finally, while I make no promises about using any of your suggestions for test questions or areas of the test, I would say you’re better off making suggestions to me than not.  So suggest away.

What do you all think?  What questions do you have about the process, and what questions might you want to see on the final?

Second, be mindful of the schedule for this peer review:  begin Monday (or early Tuesday), finish Wednesday (or early Thursday), and the final version needs to be posted to the emuonline dropbox for the second rhetorical analysis no later than midnight Friday, December 10. Then what will happen is on Friday (probably before midnight), I will post/make available the final for the course.  The final will be due on Friday, December 17, and when you turn it in, I’ll have the audio comments on the second project available for your enjoyment and reflection.

Okay, more about this peer review after the “continued” part.

First, here are the groups:

Group 1: Graham P.,  Adam H., Lauren G., Emily V.

Group 2: Ashlee W., Brian S., Rebecca M.

Group 3: Jeffrey P., Mia M., Kayla B., Nicole J.

I’ll send each group an email message so they have each others’ email addresses (if you didn’t already).

Now, as far as the logistics of this goes: we (meaning myself, Ashlee, Adam, Mia, and Kayla) talked about this at The Corner the other night, and the suggestion/consensus was to leave this part of things up to each writer.  If you want to post your essay to Google docs like we did last time, do so and share that link with the folks in your groups, that’s fine.  It has the advantage of being a single document that everyone can comment on together.  But if you’d prefer just to share an old-fashioned Word file or a PDF, you can email that to each other too and then each person can make comments on it.  In other words, it’s the writer’s choice as to the format of the draft.

I also think the writer should try to get the ball rolling on her or his peer review by trying to point the review into a direction of some sort– for example, what are you most concerned about with this draft?  What part do you like the best and/or like the least?  What sort of feedback are you looking for?

My main advice for all of you– besides this long post about the first short projects– is think theory first, framework second.  The goal of these assignments is for you to demonstrate some mastery of the understanding of the theory, which means I am less interested in the example you are working with (e.g., the BP oil spill, Facebook, manuals, cell phones, etc., etc.) and more interested in the theories you’re working with (rhetorical situation, the nonhuman, visual rhetoric, Paradis, etc.).  So make sure that is front and center in your work here.

• Friday, December 3 at midnight (or so) your revisions on the first project are due. I’m sure by the time you’re reading this, you know that.  Be sure to have them posted!  Hand them in to the emuonline web site
• Saturday, December 4 at 5 pm at The Corner, we’ll meet (informally, unofficially) at The Corner to talk about the second short writing project and the final, and of course anything else that comes up.  See you then!
• On Monday of next week, we’ll begin peer review on these second projects– I’ll set up groups by some time on Sunday at the latest.
• By Wednesday of next week, you need to wrap up your peer review on the second project.  Also, by about this date, be sure to let me know what grade for participation you have earned for the second part of the term!
• Friday, December 10, your second short rhetorical analysis is due! You need to post the revised and final  version of your second rhetorical analysis to emuonline by this date.
• Also on Friday, December 10, I will post the final for your to start contemplating an writing.
• Friday, December 17, is the “end of time” for the course, meaning that’s when the final is due, and it’s also the last day you can possibly turn in anything else for the class.

Second, I wanted to let you all know that I will be catching up very soon on various class related things.  I’ve fallen behind in my own readings/participation here both because of a crushing number of meetings with students and colleagues, and also because today was the every semester “Celebration of Student Writing.”  This is for our English 121 program (aka “freshman comp”).  I put together a short video that my students shot and I edited that I thought I’d share here.

In any event, only six of you have voted, so for the rest of you:  please do vote, even if it means none of the times work for you (so I at least know for sure that there are some folks who aren’t going to make it under any circumstances).

First, a little background material:

• You’ve already read a bit of Arnheim.  If you were in English 444 or a variety of other tech writing classes before this one, there’s a pretty good chance that you were exposed to the Robin Williams concept of C.R.A.P.  But if not, take a look at this short blog entry “How C.R.A.P. is Your Site Design?” that explains this.
• And then there’s this stuff about Kant, of all people!  I’m not going to pretend to explain this any better than Wysocki does here, nor am I going to pretend that I completely understand what she’s getting at. But I will say this:

One of the reasons why this is important is because Kant’s ideas of characterizing both “the beautiful” and “the sublime” and also the supposedly objective way he does this is arguably one of the assumptions behind a lot of critical thought and philosophy on aesthetics in the western world for the last 150 years or so. A very simplistic short-hand here:  beauty is feminine, sublime is masculine; flowers are beautiful, mountains are sublime; birds are beautiful; tigers are sublime.  The sublime has an edge to it– potentially dangerous.  And in Kant’s way of thinking of these things, the sublime is better.  Mind you, Wysocki is critiquing this assumption…

There are a couple of basic summaries you might want to look at to help you make sense of this part of the essay. There’s this summary from (of all places!) Spark Notes, and our old friend wikipedia.

Now, with that out of the way…

Beyond all that, I actually think this article is both a tour-de-force of a critique and it is also remarkably clearly written– at least relative to a lot of the stuff we’ve been reading lately.  At the end of the day, to be highly reductive about it all, I think what Wysocki is saying here is that when we apply overly formal (and formulaic) accounts to understand the visual (and aesthetics), we risk ignoring the very real subjects and people in those visual images.  We potentially change a mostly nude woman into an object in the name of design.

Now, this reading is very much in line with what Hawisher/Sullivan and Selfe were saying in their articles, and to me, Wysocki’s argument problematizes a second reading of the Arnheim and Barthes articles.  For example, it’s kind of interesting to me, after reading Wysocki’s piece, how neither Arnheim nor Barthes discuss images in any detail that involve “people.”  I suppose that’s because it’s a lot easier to objectify real objects like a bag of pasta or abstract objects like a logo.  But it does raise questions about how Barthes’ and Arnheim’s rhetorics for understanding the visual work (or not) when people are involved.

Selfe begins by pointing to some images of the “expanding global village” and how it is clear that the narrative in these images is one of “smart Americans” helping out the rest of the world; the third full paragraph on page 295 puts this in considerably less charitable terms.  The other people in this “global village” are exotic foreigners, while “Americans… go almost un-represented in terms of images.  Instead, Americans are the canny and sophisticated minds behind the text, behind the image, behind the technology” (298).  It’s a powerful and forceful claim, but I think she’s got a point.

The second narrative about “land of opportunity” and “land of difference” plays as much into the appeal of nostalgia as much as anything else (pathos, perhaps?)  I had to laugh at the reference to the short-lived Microsoft operating system Bob:  no ad campaign could save that!  In any event, as Selfe points out on page 304, these ads and their narratives are “mighty white,” which I think is another aspect of “the visual” that is obviously important in the study of rhetoric and which is also (seemingly) negated as a result of technology.

The third narrative about “the un-gendered utopia” and “the same old gendered stuff” ties back to what Hawisher and Sullivan were talking about in terms of the assumption that technology would flatten/erase gender differences (BTW, that didn’t happen).  I’ll let Selfe’s analysis of the ads speak for themselves.

On the one hand, I think she has a point when she says on the bottom of page 316 and then over to 321:  “It takes energy and careful thinking to create a landscape in which women can participate in roles other than those of seductress, beauty, or mother; and in which men don’t have to be bikes or abusers or rabid techno geeks or violent sex maniacs.”  She’s pointing through an analysis of the way the visuals are working here (through the lens of gender studies) that technology doesn’t change gender roles, at least not automatically.  I agree with that, and it probably wouldn’t be too hard to look through a current WIRED magazine to find similarly gendered technology ads.

On the other hand, I think that things have improved a bit over the last decade or so (also easy enough to find in the current WIRED magazine), and that example of the woman “going to college by staying home” on page 308 is a real double-edged sword, and one that I’ve thought about a lot over the years I’ve been teaching online.  It is true that a lot of my online students– particularly at the undergraduate level– are women with small kids, often single moms.  So what Selfe says here is true regarding the gendered state of online education and how that is represented in the ad.  But there’s a certain “reality” to that situation that is beyond an ad or a depiction:  for a lot of these women, if the online classes and degree programs didn’t exist, then they wouldn’t be able to complete their studies.  I guess what I am saying is I don’t disagree with Selfe here; I just want to add another layer of complexity to it.