Two things, the first, a proposed agenda item and the second, a reading material suggestion:
1. What about library research? I see that there are library sessions scheduled in the sample syllabi, but I'm curious to know how we can frame these sessions so that they can go beyond the how-to lesson (which no one seems to get anyway), but also as a means of understanding how online catalogues and databases are organized, and possibly applying that to how we might categorize our body of work for the consumption of others. This opens up to the questions of how things seldom fit neatly into single categories, why something is assigned to one category and not another etc.—think also about how we categorize/split ourselves with the multiple email addresses we have for personal/school/work and multiple online personas on blogger/facebook/Blackboard (okay, I'm free associating at this point). Another point to be driven home with library research is that despite the vastness of the Internet, a Google search won't turn up everything (there is, of course, Scholar and Book Google—even so, the question of full accessibility remains)—even in a seemingly democratizing cyberworld, the Academy continues to exist as a gated community...
2. Assuming that we still have the option of using print text (albeit scanned and uploaded onto a digital platform), another possible reading assignment: Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, which was written as a guide to the genre, has some pretty neat sections explaining visual rhetoric—I'm thinking specifically of "The Vocabulary of Comics" chapter, which explains sign/signifier/signified without the terrifying jargon, which would go well with Jesse's celebrity icon lesson plan.
FYI, the first chapter of Understanding Comics, which discusses the juxtaposition of text and image, is excerpted in Seeing and Writing 3—a great way to approach the comparison/contrast essay.
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I like both of these suggestions, and both were issues the last time I taught (non-cyber) comp.
The library session was not particularly helpful, as my students were researching contemporary popular iconography, something for which plain old Google might actually have been more useful. (I'm partially to blame, since I required them to use particular kinds of sources, which severely limited their options if they were researching, say, Reaggeton.) I'm not sure how the library session might be modified for a course like this, where theoretically we'll be covering some of these research issues in class.
I also did a unit - in tandem with the students' research projects - where we looked at popular iconography as a class and examined critical arguments about a particular icon. I had students vote on the subject, and we ended up with Batman. While some students really liked this and responded well, others seemed to check out; I got the impression they felt like we were doing "kid stuff" (maybe it was the 8am class time, though). Using scanned or copied black and white versions of the original color comics also caused problems (can we scan color on those fancy new copy machines?). That said, the McCloud piece could be a good way to get them to think about kinds of meaning latent in all kinds of visual rhetoric. I wonder if there's something like it available online already.
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