If you’re anything like me, you may be hesitant to set up a new platform for teaching and writing in your classroom. Or, even if you’re convinced that blogging in a rhetoric or literature classroom is a great idea, you may avoid doing so because you’ve never run a blog, been a blogger, or fear the possible breakdowns of working online in an unknown digital space and losing student work.

*The final unit of my RHE 309K: Rhetoric of Animal Rights course features an oral presentation based around a multimedia advocacy project that each student must design. As the major part of the evaluation, I create and use online polls (using tools such as SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics) that the students complete in real time after every presentation. Each poll asks four trait-centered questions, followed by a holistic evaluation, allowing for a variety of data combinations to see how students respond to each other’s work.

My classroom tends to feature a lot of group and class discussion. This semester's first novel was Salmon Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, a 576-page tome full of complex allusions to recent Indian politics, the foundation of Islam, and the Western literary canon. The second book is Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, a slim 216-page novel dealing with Jim Crow era America. Unexpectly, I'm finding that Rushdie, not Morrison, most encourages classroom discussion.

This semester, I'm teaching 'Rhetoric of Hacking', an intermediate writing/composition class. The course title is something of a vexed topic; it was chosen to comply with the usual pattern of writing course names at UT, but it started off as 'Hacking Rhetoric', a name designed to imply that we would not just be discussing rhetoric about hacking, but also hacking rhetoric itself, transforming our own work and that of other people.

Last spring I participated in a seminar through the Center for Teaching and Learning, and one of the biweekly sessions was on effective classroom organization. I resolved to try the Jigsaw Classroom model for my Fall 2013 class.