The old way of writing, at least in terms of U.S. schooling, was ALL text. The new way often looks like ALL image. What I want to do as a teacher is join the two, so that students learn to make genuinely multimedia compositions, ones in which they can practice the full intellectual and expressive […]
Here’s a short movie, exported from Keynote, about teaching writing with maps. My goal was to collect examples of the kinds of maps that my students might create or use in their own writing about place. Let me know what you think! (There’s no audio on this one; as a couple of you have already […]
In April, I took several day-long bicycle trips from a cabin in Laurel Springs, North Carolina, both north and south on the Blue Ridge Parkway. The furthest I went south was to the Northwest Trading Post in Glendale Springs, NC, on April 13, 2013. The cabin is about 0.8 mile from the Parkway (milepost 246), […]
The skies were bright blue and the sun blazing, but there was a steady breeze off the water – at times you almost felt you needed a sweater. We walked on the boardwalk in Asbury Park and Ocean Grove, lay on the sand until someone told us we needed a pass, drank coffee in an […]
Yesterday we toured the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan. The crowds were immense – with endless, snaking lines, a constant babel of tongues, and the uncomfortable press of flesh while we waited to enter. And yet once inside, the crowds suddenly thinned, and you found yourself among trees and water and marble, with space to […]
One of my goals this summer is to redesign English 350 for fall 2013. The course is Intermediate Expository Writing, subtitled Rhetorics of Place. It’s taken mainly by junior and senior English majors at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. I want to better incorporate multimedia and digital composing in the course projects and thus better […]
I’ve been working on a multi-media essay about urban biking for the Summer Immersive Course in Multimedia Composing at the Plangere Culture Lab at Rutgers University. Here’s the latest version of the essay (be sure your sound is on so you can hear the voice-over narration in the middle): The purpose of this project, and […]
City of Rhetoric 