Assignment Author
CWRL Assignment DatabasePedagogical Goals of the Assignment
Description: This is a web research and short writing assignment (3-4 pages) designed for an E314J Lit and Film class or literary contests and contexts. While reading Pride and Prejudice, we examine fan web sites devoted to Jane Austen and her work. I then ask the students to peruse these sites and works of fan fiction that utilize characters from Pride and Prejudice, and to consider how those sites influence their perceptions and interpretations of Austen and Pride and Prejudice. Students research examples of fan sites and fan fiction, formulate a thesis, and then prove that thesis by using evidence from Pride and Prejudice and the selected web site.

Assignment Author
CWRL Assignment DatabasePedagogical Goals of the Assignment
Throughout the semester, my class has considered how letters in anthologies are “packaged” and “framed.” I have challenged my students to go beyond thinking of letter writing as a private act or one that strictly involves pen and paper. Now that many letters are archived online and many more will be scanned and transcribed, technology provides an ideal way for looking at the many different ways to archive material.
I have consistently found that students produce lively and creative work when they design their own project assignments. After a semester of discussing writers and readers in relation to letter writing, I gave my students a final assignment that would not only examine the relationship between readers and writers but would also challenge them to look at communication in their own lives.

Assignment Author
CWRL Assignment DatabasePedagogical Goals of the Assignment
Skill
Students will be introduced to principles of ecocomposition vis-à-vis an exercise in evaluating visual rhetoric and web site design. Most rhetoric textbooks cover both of the latter two skills. (I use Faigley and Selzer’s text Good Reasons, which devotes a chapter each to Visual Design (Chapter 12) and Web Site Design (Chapter 13).)
Rationale
The assignment aims to i) encourage students to think about the differences between digital spaces and physical (so-called real) spaces or the advantages and disadvantages associated with each; ii) give students the opportunity to think about digital environments in the larger context of a local, physical environment that these digital spaces represent or stand in for or are supported by, iii) encourage students to learn more about and make use of a campus site or institution or organization that they wouldn’t otherwise know about or visit.

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
Andrew JonesPedagogical Goals of the Assignment
This assignment is used to introduce students to the concept of context, as well as provide practice performing contextual analysis.

Pedagogical Goals of the Assignment
The main purpose is to try and break down the pro/con binarism by demonstrating the diversity of opinions even within a group of fairly similar authors (in this case, musicians). As described, the lesson is formulated for use with a course using Lessig's Free Culture, but it could be adapted to any topic. The key is finding a group of texts whose authors are fairly similar but hold widely dissimilar positions on one issue.