Resource Author
Laura Smith

Assignment Author
CWRL Assignment DatabasePedagogical Goals of the Assignment
RATIONALE:
This assignment is a good one for the following reasons:
• It fosters collaboration.
• It provides students with an opportunity to learn about usability by both analyzing usability problems and by providing solutions in their re-design.
• It provides students with an opportunity to develop a skill that they could use in their profession (95% of all large scale web design is now web re-design).
• It asks students to consider the relationship between graphics and content on a web page.
• It challenges student’s critical thinking skills.
• It provides a clear reason for learning HTML code instead of relying on Dreamweaver.

Assignment Author
Stephanie Odom-RobertsonPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
For students to apply the rhetorical analysis skills they have been applying to verbal texts to visual ones.

Attribution
Visual Rhetoric WorkgroupPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
The goals of this assignment are 1) to introduce them to the difficult issue of causality and images, 2) to get them to think in abstract terms first, i.e., to argue an issue in general terms, before they apply those terms to more specific situations and test their validity, and 3) to help them decide for themselves how much evidence is “enough” for a given type of paper and what level of abstraction they need to employ in a given argumentative situation.

Attribution
Visual Rhetoric WorkgroupPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
This assignment has several goals: a) to give the students the opportunity to realize that successful arguments about rhetorical effect can be quite complex and require much research, b) to give them a chance to revise and incorporate some of their own writing into longer pieces of text with different goals, c) to help them realize that no description or comparison is “neutral;” all descriptions/comparisons have a particular rhetorical goal and audience, and their language and selection of elements is important.

Attribution
Visual Rhetoric WorkgroupPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
This project is designed to introduce students to Microsoft’s PowerPoint software and give them practice in using it by producing an organized presentation to be given in class.

Attribution
Visual Rhetoric WorkgroupPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
This project is designed to introduce students to the OmniGraffle software and give them practice in producing mind-maps, visual representations of their own ideas that will help them “see” the connections between various topics.
Becoming familiar with OmniGraffle and mapping connections between various topoi.