viz.

We at Viz. were extremely gratified to learn today that we tied with the always excellent ProfHacker, the pedagogy and technology blog at the Chronicle of Higher Education, to win the Kairos 2010 John Lovas Memorial Weblog Award.  It has been an exciting and productive year at Viz., and the editors are especially grateful to our wonderful team of blogger contributors for the 2009-2010 year; much of the credit for this award goes to them.  Their diverse and engaging work on visual rhetoric surveyed everything from Roland Barthes's work on photography to the karotic appeals of the TV musical Glee, in ways that were both theoretically incisive but also quite useful for instructors in visual rhetoric.

This year's bloggers were, in alphabetical order (with links to their work on Viz.):

Emily Bloom

Andi Gustavson 

Frederick Heard

Eileen McGinnis

Rachel Schneider

Laura Smith

We are looking forward to another great year, to a continuous and lively discussion on the blog, and to the development of new, useful materials for teaching visual rhetoric.  As always, thanks for reading.

Cheers,

The Viz. Editors, Noel Radley and Tim Turner

Currents in Electronic Literacy (ISSN 1524-6493) solicits article-length submissions related to the theme below. Submissions are due by Friday, January 15, 2010.

Spring 2010 issue: "Gaming-Across-the-Curriculum: Playing as a Way of Learning"

"Good game design," writes James Paul Gee in "Learning and Games," "has a lot to teach us about good learning, and contemporary learning theory has something to teach us about how to design even better and deeper games." The burgeoning field of pedagogical gaming has inspired emergent journals (GameStudies; Games and Culture), new institutions (e.g., the Game Studies Research Center at the IT University of Copenhagen), and interdisciplinary approaches. This issue of /Currents/ features guest editors Jan Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes of Clemson University's Gaming Across the Curriculum (GAC) program, which examines current and potential uses of gaming within the academy. The issue will incorporate games created by students and faculty, best practices of the use of computer games in teaching, articles that theorize play and pedagogy, innovative approaches to cross-disciplinary collaboration using computer games, frameworks of GAC white papers, and so forth.

A new page has been posted to the Assignments section of Viz., a Guide to Teaching Visual Rhetoric that provides a brief overview of the theory and practice of visual rhetoric and offers some ideas for incorporating instruction in visual rhetoric into composition classrooms, as well as a number of resources.  The intoductory guide is designed to complement the sample assignments and theory pages.  If you are interested in including visual rhetoric into your classroom but aren't sure how, we hope this page will provide you with a useful resource for getting started.

As part of our continuing effort to update and improve viz. content, the Bibliography page has now been updated. As always, readers are encouraged to contact the editors with suggestions.

Thanks to the hard work and creativity of instructors in the Computer Writing and Research Lab here at UT, we at viz. have been able to expand and update the assignments section of our site with a number of new classroom activities oriented around visual rhetoric and culture. If you are looking for new ways to include multimedia, visual, and digital environments in the classroom, or for ways to encourage students to produce multimedia projects of their own, please take a look at the new offerings. First-timers and veterans alike will find a number of great projects.

In the coming weeks, we hope to add a few more assignments to the pages, and to that end, we encourage assignment submissions by viz. readers. Have a successful assignment or classroom activity on visual rhetoric and culture that you'd like to share with the world? Please use the contact page to get in touch with our editors. Pending review, your assignment would be posted, with attribution, for other viz. readers to adopt and adapt for their own classes.

We would also be interested in hearing about successful tweaks to existing viz. assignments, many of which are designed as templates for implementation in more specific classroom contexts. For example, our friends over at www.auburnmedia.com found a way to tweak the Comparison and Rhetorical Analysis assignment by pairing it with a video about the developing world called "The Other Side of the Coin is Rusting."

We at viz. are happy to announce the launch of our "views" section, in which we will post interviews with prominent scholars in the field. Our initial post is an interview with Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, the authors of No Caption Needed. Check back for additional content in the coming weeks.

Are you a regular reader of viz. who would like to contribute your own content to the site? Vis. is currently seeking contributor/bloggers with an interest in visual rhetoric and culture, pedagogy, information and/or graphic design, the visual arts, or other subjects relevant to viz.

If you are interested in contributing blog entries or other content, including articles on theory, reviews, or assignments, please check out our contact page to get in touch with our editors.

viz. is currently undergoing an upgrade to Drupal 6, so the site might act a bit wonky over the next few days. Right now the tags for blog posts aren’t working, and the bibliography is down. Please bear with us as we upgrade.

We are proud to announce that viz. received the 2007 Mastery of Electronic Media in Education (MEME) from the Computer Writing and Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. Check out the announcement on the CWRL’s website.