Rhetorical Situation

Purpose/aim: What do you want the audience to do after reading/consuming the text? Don’t just give the verb of the action (ie. persuade, educate, call to action, entertain, inform, shock, etc.), instead, discuss the specific argument or type of entertainment or action to complete.

• I want my audience to change the policy on the Degree Completion Plan for the 2nd and 3rd semester courses of English. Currently, these courses are taught in large-lecture format.
• One course consists of classes of  250 students who meet with one professor on Tuesdays but “break out” into classes of 25 students with another professor on Thursdays.
• The other course has one professor meeting with the same students multiple times during the week but the class has 114 students and a “helper/grader” professor, often an adjunct.

Audience (intended, secondary, & tertiary): Things you might discuss about the audience include: age, experiences/beliefs (especially in relation to the purpose and/or topic), gender, occupation, location, socio-economics, parents and peers, education, culture, etc. Be sure to discuss what are the expectations of the audience based on these details.

• My target audience are the administrators of our school:  the Dean of the College of General Studies, the Dean of Undergraduate Studies, the Vice Provost, the Provost, and the President of the university.
• This group consists of businessmen and academicians. One of their largest considerations is the financial impact, but retention is also very important. I’ll have to do a lot of number-crunching to speak their language.
• In order to reach this target audience, I will have to use an “intermediary” audience of the students themselves. I will gather information from them through surveys, video interviews, grades, etc.

Subject/topic: What is the exact, focused, topic being conveyed and/or argument being made. Most of the time you will cover this while discussing the purpose/aim.

• We want the administrators to endorse a return to the “small classroom” ideology for the English 102 and 200-level classes because it will build a sense of community in our students and encourage them to return the following semester. Such smaller settings also inhibit students from “falling through the cracks” and not getting the help/attention that they need in order to succeed.

Technologies

Tech/app: Which technological application will you be using for the project?

• I’ll need a surveying tool such as Survey Monkey or Qualtrics, but this part of the project will probably be used next semester, not to fulfill the requirements of this class
• To ensure that I create a multi-media project, I’ll be using textual quotes, sound bites, and video integration
• I’ve worked with Camtasia and Jing previously, so I plan to use that software
• Our school has digital cameras that I can check out for recording student interviews

While discussing which application, be sure to address:

Previous experience: Do you have previous experience with this application? If so, how will you be learning something new during this project (for example, if you’ve already worked with Photoshop before, what new aspects/strategies/tools within Photoshop will you be learning and using for this project)?

• I have only used Camtasia and Jing to add audio to PowerPoint presentations. I have not incorporated or juxtaposed video segments or photographs into a presentation.

Access: Where/how/why do you have access to this application?

• If our school does not a license for this program, I’ll purchase it myself. My husband and I have been throwing around the idea of making this purchase for over a year, and now would be a good time to “just do it.”

Learning: Where/how will you learn about this application? Where are the places you might go for help during the project? Be specific, don’t just say “YouTube” or “the help page,” provide links to specific videos and/or the help page.

• The TechSmith Camtasia Studio Guides (http://www.techsmith.com/tutorial-cs8-user-guides.html) offers a gold mine of information. This site has a wide variety of videos from basic instructions to more technical and advanced topics (with words I’ve never heard of like SCORM).

Considerations

What are you excited about this project? Why?

• This is practical stuff that allows me to “play” and be creative. I’m excited that I have an excuse to finally purchase the full version of Camtasia; both my husband and I can use it for our respective subjects and we can reach our students with more quality support material.

What are you concerned or worried about? Why?

• I am most concerned with the amount of time a project like this will take on top of the reading, note-taking, wrestling with difficult theories, blog-learning, and meeting time this class already consumes. The rest of life (“more than full-time” job plus family/social time) combined with the requirements of this class results in poor sleeping and eating habits not to mention a decrease in the amount of time I spend doing physical activities. I could easily spend 30 hours just watching the instructional videos until I feel more comfortable with the software. I suppose my challenge will be to figure out only those aspects of the software that I will probably use, and start there.

What 2-3 theoretical concepts (do you think) inform this project? Why? How?

• Delivery as Performance   David Weinberger (2005) reminds us that a “medium is something through which a message travels from A to B” (qtd. in Brooke 182). While I want my message to come across – and I’ll be using various levels of media to convey that message – I want the overall medium to have a level of quality that speaks to seriousness. Our marketing department and our Department of Digital Media and Communication Arts all produce high-quality products which my audience has grown accustomed to viewing. While I won’t be able to produce something with quite that much finesse, I do hope that my project sheds light on the capabilities of the lowly Freshman Composition professors and how seriously we take our responsibilities to our students.
• In order to have my audience understand the implications of my proposal on student retention, I need to focus on the theory of networking, mostly in the social aspect. While I will not be providing networking opportunities for my audience to connect with each other or with the students as individuals (or even with the media I use), I do hope that the end result is a network of emotion as I draw on “relationality” (Gane and Beer 2008) between my audience and the students they hear from.