Friday, March 28, 2003

 
Healy & Fowler --- wonderful, wonderful idea here. i bow to you.

Participation. Matthew---i like your "on-call" idea a lot. i had an awful time first quarter getting them to particpate so the second day of winter quarter, everyone signed up to lead class discussion one day (betty's idea!). it was SO MUCH better, i can't even begin to explain. the only reason why i am going to have them sign up, instead of calling on them randomly, is because when they sign up, they end up being paired with another person (students who aren't necessarily friends have to work together to prepare discussion) and because they came up with really creative, well-prepared discussions. they made up games to lead discussions, etc. if it was obvious someone didn't read, the leaders usually (were annoyed because they had spent time to prepare the discussion & so) made fun of the nonreaders. it seemed that the threat of being chastised generally encouraged everyone to read. was wonderful. another thing that i started doing halfway through the quarter was i stood in the corner and made notes like i was writing down who was speaking, although it was just for show. two or three of the silent kids started talking. and yet another fun thing: pop quizzes!
posted by Kelly 6:10 PM

Monday, March 24, 2003

 
oh yeah, also: The reading for that day is from Kalle Lasn's book Culture Jam. The chapter called "The Cult You're In." I have copies of it and discussion questions if anyone is interested. They read it with O'Neil's Language of Advertising and really preffered the Lasn chapter--more accessible and interesting to them, and they are more actively targeted as the audience.
posted by betsy 4:16 PM

 
Activity. Public Discourse. Summary/Analysis lesson plan. I usually do this on the first day of this unit, on the same day that I hand out the prompt (which was to analyze an ad, but now I think that I am going to change that after hearing from flynnie about the high risk of plagiarism). I print off spoof ads (8 for 8 groups of 3) from the Adbusters website and pair each one up with the "real" ad that Adbusters is doing the spoof on and have each group do a summary and analysis of each one. I tell them to pin down the message and audience, analyze all the different "texts" that are at work (body language, font, black/white & color, etc..) and identify different emotional and logical fallacies at work. They really like this excercise--make sure to do one as a group first on the overhead, and put guidelines for summary and analysis on the board for them to refer to. When they are done (about 20 minutes) we come back together and they share their findings and then we push the analysis further as a group to point to what values and morals they ads and spoofs are playing on. Takes about an hour+fifteen for introduction, activity, and discussion. Another way that I have done this lesson is to pass the spoof ads around the classroom while they are doing their daily writing excercise and tell them to write their responses to them right on the ad. Then I collect them and the comments are (first of all) anonymous, which usually inpires more honesty, and secondly provides A LOT of material for class discussion on perceptions in advertising.
posted by betsy 4:11 PM

Sunday, March 23, 2003

 
great idea, healy and fowler!

fowler: no shit dude, i use waking life for the same reason! i show it on the first day of academic discourse too, and it is so helpful. great minds think alike, eh?
posted by betsy 3:12 PM