Edu*Rhetor

In my research today I compared the Canadian and American versions of the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) instrument for 2010. This is the survey that over 1 million university students across North America are invited to take in their 1st and 4th year. The NSSE survey page calls the Canadian version the “Canadian [...]

Higher education innovation As I complete a book on peer mentoring in undergraduate courses, this theme is quite fresh in my mind and well worth a blog post. At the University of Calgary in 2005 I founded our Faculty of Arts Peer Mentoring program.  I still coordinate it, although others now teach our peer mentors.  [...]

My participation in an interview with Tony Seskus, a journalist at the Calgary Herald newspaper, spurred me to write this blog post on mayoral candidates’ websites a couple of days ago: Website rhetoric of mayoral candidates Now some of the content has appeared in this article – Can mayoral hopefuls emulate Obamamania? By Tony Seskus, Calgary [...]

Many decades ago society started talking about how televised debates were beginning to influence election campaigns.  Now we have new questions about how new media influences them, such as — What makes effective website rhetoric for a mayoral candidate nowadays? The city of Calgary, Alberta, Canada is going to have a municipal election in October [...]

Teaching and studying “Rhetoric” in Canada is different from doing so in the U.S. because of Canadian “rhetorical culture” within which we live and work. Rhetorical study has flourished more in the U.S. because there is less social stigma against using and studying rhetoric in the U.S. Consider one small segment of our rhetorical culture [...]

As a Canadian member of the CSSR (Canadian Society for the Study of Rhetoric) who did not attend this year’s conference (I’m taking a year off all conferences), I appreciated David Beard’s Blogora article for his flattering and interesting analysis of what the conference was like. In his posts on the Blogora of the Rhetoric [...]

Nearing the end of an adventure In a few days my students in Communications Studies 463 will be completing their final websites and collected experiences and reflections. Their thoughts will be presented publicly on campus on April 14th to an audience of approximately 30 people in addition to their class of 27 students and 4 [...]