conceptualizing

Ah, yes. Here it comes. Actually, it has been emerging over the past 24 hours ... that compulsion to clarity, currently manifesting in a sensation rendering itself in, on, and through the (my) body. In other words, I feel the need to get all professor-y and ask us to move our lines of inquiry into some sort of formal alignment. Toward this end, today, we talked about conceptualizing and clarifying other people's work via the routine academic practice of writing a summary. Please continue to revise your Corder summaries, guided by our discussion and the links shared (also, see The UVU Writing Center). But we are not all about essentialisms (Heaven forbid!), so ... at the same time, please work to conceptualize a kind of synthesis of the concepts we have been exploring through the following discussions:

1. The rhetoric of the AZ shooting (representing tragedy)
2. Corder's "Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love"
3. Plato's Phaedrus

Specifically, how do our discussions of these works tell us anything about the nature of truth and knowledge? I am not going to ask for a formal summary of Phaedrus (you're welcome), but I do want you to think about it carefully, and in concert with our other explorations. So, how can you conceptualize these ideas? Perhaps something converges in a moment (recall my Rothko + mannequin @ MoCA event, or the Suzanne Vega moment I had in the car). Can you animate these events in a way that will help us to see how you are seeing the course concepts cohere?

You may choose to simply show up with a link you'd like to embed in the course Prezi. But do more than simply choosing a video or image; construct something out of more than one media asset. I'd like to recommend a lovely imagistic exercise. Try this: Tell a Story in 5 Frames. Be prepared to share next week, either on Monday, 2/7, or Wednesday, 2/9. Consider using PowerPoint or maybe a Picasa or Flickr slideshow. Be willing to share. We may discuss, but prepare something that you can rely upon to do the rhetorical work of explaining these coherent concepts for you.