Karl Stolley, PhD Candidate in Rhetoric and Composition, Purdue University
Teaching Portfolio
Teaching Philosophy
...In every course I teach, I stress the importance of situating writing and digital production in historical and theoretical concerns in appropriate fields like rhetoric, technology, and the design arts. Rather than focusing on the traditional split between theory and practice, or theorists and practitioners, students in my class work towards applied theory: through this, they take the first steps towards becoming theoreticians and savvier writers and digital producers...Read More.
Current Courses
Online Design: Web Standards, Findability, and the Semantic Web (Fall 2007)
This course covers very recent advancements in web production in terms of 1) technologies and languages for production and 2) modes of communication in/on/through the emerging "semantic web." The focus of class projects and work in the course is on production (rather than critique/analysis), allowing students to build a number of digital artifacts to add to their professional/graduate portfolios. Students work actively with W3C web standards, combined with rhetorical concerns of effective Web writing and search engine optimization to ensure that the discourse they post to the Web is found and appropriately indexed by search engines. View course site.
Selected Previous Courses
The Rhetoric of Design (Winter 2007)
This graduate seminar addresses the DePaul New Media Studies program's need for a theory-driven multimedia production course. Students are specifically encouraged to interrogate the rhetoric and ethics of production. Class time is structured as a combination of graduate seminar discussion and art studio: by moving fluidly between discussion/ reflection and hands-on work for course projects, students enact the important connections between theory and production. Instruction in new media technologies is guided primarily by students' own interests and needs, which they determine as they move through the course projects. View course site.
Multimedia Writing: Web Standards Edition (Fall 2006)
This course is a signficant revision of my previous Multimedia Writing courses by more consistently and thoroughly following World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards for Web languages. The course's two central concerns are that students develop a sustainable set of Web and digital writing skills that are not tied to any specific software package, while also gaining a better foundation for critiquing and implementing various technologies as warranted by particular rhetorical situations. Course readings focus on the history of the Web and other digital writing environments, the application of Web standards, and experience design; course projects are geared to students' interests and professional development in a variety of fields, from Professional Writing to Computer Graphics Technology. View course site.