Attendance is expected at all classes barring illness and emergencies. Your participation in group projects and as a peer reviewer will be evaluated by your peers, and I will ask you to provide a self-assessment of your class participation at the end of the semester. Contributing to the weblog is a kind of participation.

Not all academic writing needs to be in the form of a thesis-driven research paper, and not all creative writing needs to be an overflow of emotion reflected upon in tranquility. This assignment asks you to creatively and intellectually engage with arguably one of the most important texts in the history of western civilization–Plato’s Phaedrus. You are invited to do any one of the following projects, a combination of the following projects, or use the following list as a catalyst for thinking about how you want to creatively and intellectually respond to the dialogue.

• modernize Phaedrus as a contemporary dialogue, screen play, short story, or other creative genre
• perform it and film it, using the period and setting of your choice
• respond to it with poetry, art, or other creative means
• develop a web site to supplement the "Phaedrus Kit." Combine appropriate visual and textual elements.

The goal of this assignment is to have you show your understanding of the dialogue, its concepts, and perhaps the history of writing through your ability to make the dialogue relevant to contemporary readers. Use the dialogue (whole or parts) as part of a creative/intellectual reflection on contemporary concerns about reason and passion, truth, and technologies of writing.

Written products might be 3-5 pages of prose/dialogue, a collection of poems (or a long poem), a 3-5 minute video production, or a small collection of web pages. The list of possible projects and project lengths are meant simply as guides or aids–I encourage you to design a project that excites and interests you.

Visual Communication Assignment: Group Mosaic Tiles. 150 pts.

Working in groups of 3-5, provide 3-5 "tiles" for a specific era in the Gutenberg Galaxy Mosaic: manuscript culture, print culture, industrial/mechanical culture, electric culture. Each group should design at least one tile for the general concept of author, a specific author from that era, education, and technological developments relevant to writing in that era.

The goal of this assignment is to help students learn the material of the course, and to introduce visual communication as a learning and teaching tool.

Writing research papers will continue to be the activity most frequently assigned to you in English classes, and you will probably see that you can treat a topic via writing in more detail and with more complexity than you can when you translate ideas into visual elements. This research paper should build on or challenge the work done by Marshall McLuhan in the Gutenberg Galaxy.

• One possible way of approaching your chosen topic is to "collect" the scattered observations about a particular person or concept ("the alphabet," "Shakespeare," "Heidegger,") in order to present a coherent and focused picture of what McLuhan is saying about that thing or person. His vision should be compared and contrasted with the views of at least one other expert on the topic.
• A second approach would be to focus on a writer, educator, philosopher, or concept that gets little or no treatment in McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy (e.g. Christine de Pisan, Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Maria Montessori, Friedrich Nietzsche). With this approach, you could be applying and extending McLuhan’s insights to a new topic, or using your topic to point out some limitations of his work.

I would like you to include two additional elements in this assignment. The first element is a visual supplement to your essay–something your can handout (like a mosaic tile) or show (PowerPoint or web site) when you present your research (week 9). The second element is a one page reflection (letter or memo format) on the differences and similarities in print and visual arguments. 150 pts for the essay, 25 pts for visual aid and 25 pts for the reflective letter or memo.

Close to the midway point in the semester, you will take an online exam based on the content of the first half of the course. The exam will cover both factual information (e.g. when was the printing press invented?), and concepts (e.g. why does it make sense that "rhetoric" would return to education in the electronic era?)