Week 9!
So we’re almost there…
As we head into the last couple of weeks of the quarter, I wanted to give you some time to think about your final projects, and also to think about how nonhuman things have rhetorical influences – if not rhetorical lives – of their own.
This week’s group tasks
Talk about the Final Project and your “Presentations”
As it explains on the schedule, by Sunday, you should have your final project presentations in your individual Google Drive folders. These should be a 5 minute (or so) video in which you explain your central argument, use a couple of visual aids to help, talk about how far along you are, talk about what questions you still have, etc. (You can use Zoom to do all of this. Just start a new meeting and hit record and you can “share screen” in that, and it will record everything for you and save the video recording to your device. It’s actually what I did to put my videos together the first quarter of online teaching… so it’s not perfect, but it works.)
Use the discussion this week to help one another with that process and get some feedback and advice about it all.
Talk about the Material
As you cover the material this week, try to keep in the back of your mind how the concepts discussed might affect the place/definition of rhetoric and what we have to keep in mind as we are communicating with others in virtual environments. For instance, Quintilian’s definition of rhetoric as “a good man speaking well” is definitely complicated by some of these ideas… And, again, here are some possible topics for you all to discuss in your groups:
Possible Topics for Reading Discussion
- ChatGPT is careful never to pass the Turing test, but with some modification it certainly could. What do interactions with ChatGPT say about the nature of language and what qualifies as human communication? Where is “meaning” in these interactions?
- I’ve included two different articles exploring instances of dogs learning how to use a soundboard to communicate with their humans. The most recent one (Bunny) actually was inspired by the earlier one (Stella). I recommend you check out both Bunny and Stella’s experiences (though be warned — they can be addictive… because dogs). After reading through them… do you think this is rhetoric? Why or why not? What is at stake in this discussion? That is, why does it matter if the dogs are using rhetoric or not?
- As AI is constantly developing, what is important for us to consider when it comes to ethical considerations? How does rhetoric play a role in all of this? More specifically, what is at stake if we are actually arguing with artificial intelligence when communicating in online spaces?
