Subtitle: Information Overload
UW-Milwaukee, fall 2013
Information overload is a contemporary cultural concern with a rich past. This course covers a broad sampling of texts from different time periods and genres to consider how our current confrontation and struggle with digital technologies both is and is not new. We will pay attention to the various forms that information overload takes: a pathological condition, a burden on attention and social bonds, a renaissance of knowledge access and production, and even a non-issue. Most importantly for our purposes, the texts we read and view will help us ask how our understanding of knowledge, literature, and even ourselves evolves alongside technological innovations. |
UW-Milwaukee, spring 2012 (taught entirely online)
This course prepares students for the major in English through the study of English-language literature from around the world. All variants of English Studies depend on reading texts closely, making informed judgments, and expressing those judgments in writing. English studies is about reading carefully and writing about that careful reading. Here, we touch only on some of the vast body of literatures written in English. Other areas of English studies—rhetoric and writing, linguistics, business communication, and film and media studies—require similar foundational skills. This course assumes that vigorous engagement with texts comes from frequent writing about the reading. We will write both informally in dialogue with each other, and formally in four short essays that should make sense to someone outside of our class. |
Writing and Visual Culture Living-Learning Community
UW-Milwaukee, fall 2011
This is an introductory writing course taught in a Living-Learning Community (LLC) format. LLCs are experimental programs designed to ease the transition from high school to college life by placing students in a community of learners and by actively engaging them in the surrounding city and campus life. Our focus for this course (and the LLC) is visual culture, so we will spend time on this blog thinking about what "visual culture" is, how authors use images to reach audiences, and how the concepts of rhetorical analysis can help us become better college writers and citizens.
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UW-Milwaukee, fall 2011 (taught entirely online)
This course introduces you to college-level reading and writing practices through a sequence of writing assignments that integrates critical reading, writing, and reflection. You will develop skills to analyze the way writers address audiences and achieve purposes within specific contexts. This type of analysis--a form of critical interpretation--is called "rhetorical analysis." By paying attention to the strategies that good writers use to persuade their particular audiences, you will learn how to better respond to your own concerns and the concerns of others. You will read and reread texts, participate in discussions, work in groups with classmates, and write multi-draft essays with the final goal of a polished portfolio in mind.
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UW-Milwaukee, spring 2011
Course description: (see above)
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UW-Milwaukee, fall 2010 (two sections)
Course description: (see above)
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Previously, I taught:
- RHET 1302: Rhetoric (fall 2009, spring 2009, fall 2008 at the University of Texas at Dallas)
- English 101: Composition (fall 2007 at Pensacola Junior College)
- English 101: Composition (spring 2006, fall 2005, spring 2005, fall 2004 at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas)
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