youtube conversation (50 points or 5% of total grade)
Each group member will select a YouTube video that serves as an example of a mashup that makes an argument, and stage three or four (depending on the number of students in the group) coordinated discussions on message boards of videos each group member selects. The primary aim is to elevate the level of discourse already present on the message board to include a variety of argumentative strategies beyond mere agreement and/or disagreement. The learning outcome is to gain some practical understanding of basic argumentative strategies employed in written discourse to compare and contrast with visual forms of argumentation you will use when you create your own video mashup.
Each member of your group will need to develop and execute a strategy that involves each member taking on a role and then generating comments appropriate to that role. This means that each member of the group needs to develop a position (as either an "advocate," an "antagonist," or an "interrogator") based on research that diverges from the positions of the other group members.
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The Day After Trinity
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Basic Argumentative Strategies
- Agreeing or disagreeing: however, don't merely say yes or no: develop good reasons your audience is likely to accept or at least entertain.
When agreeing with someone's argument, add to the argument. In some cases, you want to show what is good about the argument so that you can then show what isn't: this is known as the "yeah, but" form of argumentation. Showing how you agree with someone is an excellent strategy to get someone to consider and even value the substance of your disagreement.
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- Definition argument: used when there is little or no clarity concerning what something is or is not, often allowing us to pursue other arguments
- Causal argument: used when knowing the cause of an effect will allow us to impact the effect in some way
- Comparison and/or contrast argument: used when needing to draw from what the audience is familiar with in order to understand what they might not be familiar with. For instance, in "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants," Prensky presents an analogy of growing up in a culture versus immigrating into a culture to explain the qualitative difference between two ways of relating to technology.
- Evaluation argument: used when there is uncertainty concerning the quality of something: Is Google making us stupid (Carr), or smarter (Shirky)
- Rebuttal argument: used when a given viewpoint fails to account for certain anomalies
- Proposal argument: used when a course of future action is required to alter a current situation
How to Proceed
First and foremost, each group member must sign up for YouTube account and then select a video to stage three different conversations.
You will need to strategize how to argue on a message board that in some way corresponds to your topic, which will begin by each student presenting the range of arguments surrounding the video mashup.
The traffic on the message board ought to be frequent, but not so frequent that your comments will get lost in an endless stream of postings. Ideally, you will post to a message board that already has posts.
Assign members of your group (including yourself) roles to perform. Set up a blog post to share a link to the video, detailing what the opposing values are that each person will draw from. These argumentative roles include the being an “advocate,” an “antagonist,” and the “interrogator.”
Regardless of your role, you cannot simply agree or disagree. You need to supply good reasons as well as evidence. Use arguments from definition, from comparison/contrast, and from consequence from chapter three of A Little Argument, available on Dropbox. You will also find different kinds of fallacies in chapter three, either to expose another's argument as specious, or to employ them yourself.
While you are engaged in this process, you will need to continue to advance your research of the topic, identifying and documenting different websites and texts, which you will include in your annotated bibliography.
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How to share your conversation on your website (the "YouTube Conversation"):
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